Seamless Reporting With Endeca & OBIEE: Make Them Work Together

by Madan Thota

Endeca Information Discovery (EID) is a data discovery tool that helps business analysts to rapidly explore relevant data.  If you are already using Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) and wish to reuse the BI data models from Endeca Information Discovery, here are the options.  The primary difference between both tools is that one is used for pre-defined analytics while the other is used for having a conversation with your data (analytics vs information discovery).  The overall goal for both approaches is to get the most value out of the data available.   

Data Integration:

Approach 1: 

Using Oracle BI Connectors in Endeca Integrator. 
Select the “Load Data from OBI Server” wizard from the new project dialog box to help build the integration.  When a new project is started within the Integrator, the list of available wizards appears.  Select “Load Data from OBI Server” and complete all the details required in the subsequent steps.

Select an existing project or create a new project for the OBIEE connection in Endeca.  In the ‘Next’ screens, complete the data domain details, OBIEE Server details, Subject Area list, and tables information.  The wizard automatically populates the required metadata and base graphs. Execute the base graph that loads data from the OBI Server to Endeca data domain.  

It is important to verify the graphs generated and the connections created in the integrator.  Endeca uses a Oracle BI JDBC driver for connecting to the Oracle BI Driver.

Advantages of the 1st Approach:

1. Quickly explore data from your BI server, without going through report & dashboard development life cycles.  Endeca provides a faster way to analyze your data.
2. Reuse the business logic built in your Oracle BI data model.
3. Combine data from many sources on top of your BI Data. Business logic for combining sources can put in place using the integrator.
4. Combine structured data with unstructured data for doing information discovery.

Approach 2:  

Provisioning Service from Endeca Studio.

This process is slightly simpler than the first approach as users do not need to access to the integrator.  A pre-requisite is that the provisioning service should be installed and working.

This is a 2-step process.  

In the first step, configure the Oracle BI Data source in the data source library of the Endeca Control Panel.  

in the second step, create a new application using the ‘Load Data from a Database’ option. Complete the selection of the data source and attribute metadata.  The application shows a sample visualization of your data.

This approach is self-service based and users can use this to do their own analysis, but it is limited to one data set.  

I would recommend Approach 1 if you want more sophisticated data discovery that is capable of combining multiple sources into the analysis.  

Full catalog Search in OBIEE using Endeca

An interesting integration between Endeca and OBIEE is using Endeca as full catalog search engine.  This allows users to search OBIEE catalog for objects with related terms.  The 11g OBIEE Release provides the capability to use full-text search to find catalog objects and filter the search results by attributes.  This search is available when an administrator integrates Oracle BI Enterprise Edition with Oracle Endeca Server.  The search results will look similar to the image below.

[Note: This requires a configuration in the Endeca Server and Oracle BI.] 

Madan Thota is a Director of Services at KPI Partners and works with the expert team within the KPI Partners Offshore Technology Center.  His professional focus is in the world of enterprise decision support, business intelligence, and data architecture.  Check out Madan’s blog at KPIPartners.com.