Journey to the cloud

So today we'll discuss the migration to the cloud. A journey that on the surface or at least the sales pitch, sounds picture perfect. A swift migration to cloud and all your problems are solved. Well maybe not....

So our migration started like most others, in our case a on-premise Exadata, working well but not offering the strategic future that we wanted. Cloud on the other hand, offers the Exadata, the software as a service as well as the posserbility of bursting CPU's and/ or storage when needed rather than always having them.

In our instance we were not only moving Exadata to cloud but also from OBIEE on premise to the Oracle cloud BICs software as a service. Our first problem was initially we were on 11.7 of OBIEE, a version that you can't just migrate straight to cloud. So after many conversations, we upgraded, and rightly or wrongly went to the newest version avaiable for us to download, OBIEE 12c. This was out preparation work for the cloud.

Now time to get our hands on that shiny new cloud.... well sort of....
Firstly if your migrating data to the cloud, you'll need to decide how your going to transfer the data. In our case we didn't have a VPN installed, so the corporate network stopped us accessing the oracle cloud directly. Next our data wasn't big enough to qualify for the Oracle data service. As all good problem solvers we managd to use the tools at our disposal to get the end result.

We transfered the source data (transactional data) to the on-premise X4, total size 90GB. We then encrypted and used the HCC in low-query Archieve mode to compress the data down to an impressive 9GB. Now we're cooking on gas as they say, the file was now small enough to use the internet (with appropriate security in place) to upload the data file to the cloud. Repeat a number of times and eventually you manage to get the data to the cloud - not ideal but at least in our control.

Once the dat was there, the next problem was moving the RPD and catalog from OBIEE to BICs. Now having done the prep work, geniunly we thought this part would be easy. Oh how I was wrong....

Oracle often maintain a cloud first deelopment structure, see this link for details, however this wasn't strictly true in BICs. It turned out that the OBIEE on-premise version was ahead of the BICs version. Unfortunatly there isn't a way to "downgrade" a OBIEE VM, once you've upgraded your stuck. The RPD there is a was to downgrade. There is a good guide to this here.

Anyway on the 5th June the BICs envorinment was finally upgraded, enabling catalog from on-premise to loud to happen, in our case causing a 4 week delay to the project.

All in all we've managed to migrate to cloud, but it wasn't that easy journey you've heard about. Now we're here, well there are still some snags, but more details of that in my next post.