ORACLE DISCOVERER DECOMMISSIONING IN PRACTICE

Eric McDonald. June 2019

Oracle Discoverer Decommissioning in Practice

— Let’s make this session as interactive as possible, so please ask questions during the

session

Some starter questions

— What stage are you at with Oracle decommissioning?

— It’s a problem, what do we do about it?

— We’re in the planning stage

— It’s in progress

— How many of you are looking at decommissioning in the next 12 months?

— What are your expectations of this session – what would you like to know?

— What’s your role – management / technical / other?

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Oracle Discoverer Decommissioning in Practice

Introduction

— Baillie Gifford

— My Role

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Baillie Gifford

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Baillie Gifford

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Baillie Gifford

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Oracle Discoverer Decommissioning in Practice

The Challenge

— Oracle Support for Discoverer expiring

— Upgrading to Windows 10

Our Starting Point

— Using Discoverer 6i client / server on Windows 7

— Existing base of around 100 users across 14 teams

— Approx. 400 workbooks

— Discoverer supporting key business processes

— Business Teams need to be able to do self-service reporting

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Oracle Discoverer Decommissioning in Practice

Our Environment

— Oracle 12c DB only - native Oracle logins (no EBS)

— Access managed by Oracle Roles

— EUL Business Areas – 10 out of 40 active

— EUL Fields – approx. 1,500 of 3,000 active

— Mainly using Oracle views and some tables as the interface

— Our data was mainly list-based

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Oracle Discoverer Decommissioning in Practice

Our Options

— Rebuild everything – estimated to take 24 months

— Try and get Discoverer working on Windows 10

— Upgrade to Oracle’s latest reporting option

Challenges

— Most reporting tools want to use some form of data cube

e.g. Tableau, Microsoft, Oracle

— We needed to maintain business as usual

— We needed to decommission in less than 12 months

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Oracle Discoverer Decommissioning in Practice

Splash BI

— Offered similar self-service functionality to Discoverer

— Familiar to Discoverer users

— …but, more user-friendly experience

— Excel add-in or browser-based

— Discoverer migration utility a key feature in reducing project time

— Migrates both workbooks and EUL

— Straightforward way of building list based reports, cross-tabs, and “just getting data into

Excel” !

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Demo

Oracle Discoverer Decommissioning in Practice

How we managed the project

— Migrated by Business Team

— Business Analysis

— Migration

— UAT

— Sign-Off

— Identified high-risk areas early

— Project duration 6 months

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Oracle Discoverer Decommissioning in Practice

What worked well?

— Similarity to Discoverer helped training

process

— 90+% of workbooks migrated easily

— Business Analysis identified people who no

longer needed the data or workbooks

— Very few post-migration support issues

— Splash BI Support Team issue resolution

What caused issues?

— Server setup required new Linux skills

— Missing joins as we only migrated some

fields

— Custom DB functions in Discoverer

— Age of existing Discoverer environment

meant some workbooks could not be

exported

— Business Team availability for UAT

— Removing our existing Discoverer

infrastructure

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Oracle Discoverer Decommissioning in Practice

Things to Remember

— Sit down with the business teams and work out what they need

— Have a clear plan agreed with the business teams

— Make sure communication is clear and timely

— Make sure the infrastructure is in place early

— Plan the new system architecture carefully

— Test and retest migrations and roll-out scenarios before business teams have access

— Make sure you have buy-in from business teams – do demos!

— Make sure training is in place before, during, and after migration

— Make sure that support handover is planned

— Talk to the business teams at every stage

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Questions?