OAS, OBIEE, and OAC: What’s Changed and What Hasn’t

by Becky Wagner

Oracle Analytics Server, or OAS, was released January 31, 2020, and with it came a lot of questions from active OBIEE users. One question that’s been posed repeatedly is “What’s the difference between OBIEE and OAS (and where does OAC fall)?” So to answer that, in this article we’re taking a look at what sets OAS apart from both OBIEE and OAC.

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Overview of OAS

OAS is a robust on-prem analytics server with top-of-the-line features like ad hoc analysis and interactive reporting, a fully-functional mobile application, and interactive dashboards. It also includes the following programs:

• Oracle Analytics: Publisher
• Oracle Analytics Server Enterprise Edition
• Oracle Analytics Administrator
• Oracle Analytics Interactive Dashboards
• Oracle Analytics Delivers
• Oracle Analytics Answers

Developed to help users facilitate their (eventual) transitions to the cloud, OAS includes modern, AI-powered, self-service analytics capabilities for data preparation, visualization, enterprise reporting, augmented analysis, and natural language processing and search. OAS maintains heritage systems until users are ready to shift to the cloud.

OAS vs. OBIEE

OAS was developed to replace OBIEE 12c, and current and active OBIEE users can easily make the switch to OAS because they’re automatically licensed to do so. This decreases friction during the transition between the two products.

But even though OAS is OBIEE’s replacement, that doesn’t mean that they share all of the same features. There are some key differences between OAS and OBIEE that are worth understanding before you make the upgrade.

For instance, the Scorecard and Strategy Management feature from OBIEE is de-supported in OAS, meaning that Oracle no longer fixes bugs related to that feature and could remove the feature entirely.

There’s also a whole host of OBIEE features that Oracle has categorized as deprecated, which means that they won’t be enhanced in the future but will be supported for the full life of the OAS 5.5.x release. These features could also be de-supported in any upcoming major release.

Deprecated features that may be de-supported in the future include:

• Flash Templates
• WebDAV Server Delivery Channel
• Oracle Marketing Segmentation*
• BI Scheduler Job Manager
• Flat Files and XML-based Data Sources*
• Session Personalization using System Session Variables*
• Act As Another User*
• Database Storage for User Group Memberships
• Oracle E-Business Suite*

*These features are disabled by default

OAS vs. OAC

After reviewing the numerous differences between OAS and OBIEE, it might seem as though Oracle simply duplicated their OAC product for on-prem users. But there are a few minor differences between the two products, aside from the fact that one is on-prem and the other is in the cloud.

According to Oracle, OAS was released with most of the features of OAC, with a few notable exceptions. Most prominent among these exceptions are data replication and natural language generation. The features that the two products have in common are significantly more numerous. Some of these common features include:

• Corporate analytics dashboards
• Pixel-perfect reports
• Enterprise semantic models
• Role-based access control
• Data preparation
• Data visualization
• Storytelling
• Sharing and collaboration
• Mobile exploration (with the exception of Oracle Analytics Day by Day)
• Natural language and voice-activated search
• Data enrichment
• One-click “Explain”
• Machine learning for predictive analytics

OAS also shares a commonality with OAC in that it gives you access to your data no matter where it’s sourced from Oracle databases, applications, third-party data sources, or even .CSV or .XLSX files. For a full list of connectable data sources, check out these resources from Oracle on supported data sources (RCU Schema and Visualizations, Reports, and Dashboards).

Conclusion

OBIEE users will recognize OAS and its functionality, although some features have been removed or will soon be DE supported and removed. Overall, OAS seems to be more similar to OAC than to OBIEE—and that’s intentional, as OAS was developed to help on-prem customer’s transition to the cloud with less stress.

Source us-analytics.com