Incorporate OAC Client Tools into the OCI SDK

Joshua Snitzer

Our team is looking to eventually automate the deployments of the Semantic Model through an end-to-end CI/CD workflow.

Current State:

We use Oracle Visual Builder Studio to manage a git repo that contains the JSON files that make up the Semantic Model. We use the OAC Semantic Modeler tool to pull from our git repo, make changes, and then push and merge. We only have our non-production instances of OAC connected to the git repository for security concerns (we don't want to establish an SSH or HTTPS direct connection between Visual Builder and our production OAC). Instead, we manually download the latest version of our Semantic Model to a .zip file and then manually upload the file to a separate Semantic Model in our Production OAC. We then deploy the Semantic Model from within production OAC.

Client Tools are Insufficient:

We were recommended to look into installing the OAC client tools, since they contain utilities to convert the Semantic Model JSON to RPD and to then deploy the RPD to OAC, yet we don't want to persist / manage a custom VM in OCI Compute just to host these client tools on the cloud. We were also looking into whether we can install the client tools into a VM in Visual Builder Studio, but we're not sure if we can install the tools from the command line only.

Proposal:

Include the JSON to RPD and RPD deployment tools in the OCI SDK to help simplify the creation of a CI/CD pipeline for Semantic Models. An SDK will allow for pipelines to be built more quickly and more reliably, a deeper integration of Semantic Model deployments in enterprise approval processes, and the ability to extend Oracle's model consistency checking with tests of our own.

CPavan

we need this option to push the code without any manual intervention.

Joshua Snitzer

@Pravin Janardanam-Oracle @Benjamin Arnulf-Oracle would love your thoughts on this. There's otherwise no way for us to automatically elevate semantic modeler SMML from our git repository to our production instance of OAC.

Pravin Janardanam-Oracle

Currently, a VM is required for client tools installation. The command line utilities to convert SMML to RPD and deploy the semantic model are available in the client tools.

https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/analytics-cloud/acmdg/generate-rpd-file-json-smml.html?source=%3Aow%3Ams%3Apt%3A%3A

Equivalent functionality using REST APIs in Oracle Analytics Cloud is in the roadmap.