clouds-1117607_640It is no great surprise that all the major vendors are pushing cloud solutions. With an affiliation to Oracle and recent attendance at the Irish Oracle Usergroup i am seeing a lot of what Oracle is working on in the cloud. Company wise we are working with Oracle to take Oracle Form to Mobile CLoud Services, currently a work in progress but am seeing some great possibilities.

I recently registered to try out Oracle’s Business Intelligence Cloud Service for 31 days. I think Oracle had a lot of catching up to do, having recently used SAP’s Visual BI tool, QLikTech and Tableau. They have certainly come a long way and are pushing ease of use and the ability to connect to a variety of data sources. I will come back with more thoughts on the BI interface but for now wanted to mention how easy it was to setup an automated feed of data from my laptop (could have been any corporate data source I had access to) to the Oracle Cloud Data store.

Oracle provide a BI Cloud Service Data Synch tool. I suspect its roots are in the Siebel BI tools but have not seen or used it over the years. It really was very easy to take a complete Oracle Database User schema and make it available in the BI Cloud tool via a copy or data synch to the cloud.  The Data Synch tool is available from Oracle Technology Network. Run the .exe and the sync product will be installed in a directory.

To setup the sync tool you need to set the Java_HOME in the config.bat file (sadly I am on Windows). Watch the quotes if you have a space in the path..

set JAVA_HOME=”C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_74″

Run datasync.bat and configure the database connections – one for the supplying data source, one for the receiving data source in the cloud. I used my local Oracle 12c database on my laptop with Oracle(Thin) connection type. As simple or difficult as your envidata_sourceronment allows. This really is targeted at the business user as you can load from file or from a good selection of data stores. As well as the data sources listed here, TimesTen and Teradata are also supported. No SAP Hana! The target is in the cloud and only requires a username (my email address), my password for Oracle Cloud services and the URL of the Cloud Service – for me that was https://businessintell-pitssuk.analytics.us2.oraclecloud.com

I then created a Project and chose Tables or Views to Sync to the cloud. Since I was using an Oracle Database as a source I picked Tables using the Relational Data tab.

Create a Job for the Project. This can be a one off sync or can have a repeating schedule. Then just Run the Job from the top level buttons. The data was quickly up in the cloud and available to the new BI Cloud tool. The Sync tool does not exactly have an elegant interface but does the job well.

Now that I have some data in the Cloud I will try out the new Cloud BI Cloud Service on what I see as my Cloud data