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Does OBIEE have public facing capability?

Jerry S.

OBIEE 12c.

One of our departments want to provide data and maps on a public facing web page, for anyone to look at.

Is this possible? If so, can someone point me in the proper direction as I have been unsuccessful at googling it.

Thanks in advance for any help.

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[Deleted User]

Many possibilities:

- Put an OBI Presentation Server inside the DMZ and make it available through a public URL

- Use webservice calls from your public web server to the OBI server to get content

etc etc.

The question is as always in the detail: What exactly are you trying to achieve?

Gianni Ceresa

Jerry S. wrote:...for anyone to look at.

You will need to figure out licensing as well if you mean anyone as random people visiting a public website etc.

To extend Christian's first point, I would highly consider a proxy in front of your OBI to allows you to implement a first layer of security by limiting the available paths and ideally also set limits on the number of queries etc.

I would definitely consider his second point with the addition of some form of caching ideally.

If you hit directly OBI you have no way to plan for the load, your system could be down more often than up if you are hit by tons of requests.

So it's all about what is the real need? The answer could be quite different

Jerry S.

At this time, the details are somewhat vague. The question was asked because one of the departments wants to provide a world map with statistics for specific locations, on our website. That's about all I know right now.

The initial question is whether something like that can be done in OBIEE, or if some other type of package should be used. Perhaps OBIEE could be used to export the data to something else. I believe the data will be somewhat static, meaning that it will not be real time, but may change from day to day.

The points on security and licensing are well taken. Right now, we have different environments (Test, Acceptance, Production) on separate servers, running separate instances of OBIEE. Each environment uses a different RPD, different security structures, different databases, etc, and the environments are completely independent from one another, meaning that we can take down or modify any of them individually, without affecting the others. I am thinking that a new environment could be created to supply the public facing queries, so that is the model I am favoring, as it would not have any connection to any of our other data or environments. So I guess the real question is, could an OBIEE environment be created specifically for public facing queries?

As usual, they are trying to determine the simplest and most cost effective solution to the problem. OBIEE has become the centerpiece of our BI strategy, and is used quite heavily internally, so this is something totally new for us, and I am just trying to develop some type of response. We will need to check into licensing most definitely, as that will probably be the thing that allows this project to sink or swim.

[Deleted User]

Then I rejoin my point #2 and what Gianni said: rather think about an integration that pulls data or analyses from OBI using web services. Then you'd also just need a single account that opens the connection and retrieves things

Gianni Ceresa

I will join Christian on this.

Based on the info you posted, I would definitely look more into a webservice call. Your website can do the visualization using javascript and a map provider (can either be Google or any other or even just javascript high level (country borders) maps.

You schedule a call via webservice once or twice per day to OBIEE to get the data and store it in a file (CSV, Json, XML : any easy to read format for the visualization).

Not much security issues as nobody directly access your environment, data still come from OBIEE so no need to develop something extra on that side. Sounds like the easiest, cheapest and safest option. Or at least something along that line ...

Jerry S.

Thank you both for the information. If we go the route of using web services to pull the information, do you have any idea what type of license that would require? Would a license just be required for the web service, or for everyone accessing the web page?

Robert Angel

Hi,

they will both tell you the same thing on this, in all manners licensing, speak to your Oracle Sales Representative...

Gianni Ceresa

For licensing ... what Robert said: it's the only way to be sure to not be (for now) in troubles

I would assume only a single license would be required (the webservice will need to authenticate before to get anything out, so need a login/password). Once the data is extracted you use that file to display things to people accessing your web page, you don't have any link anymore with OBIEE and therefore you can't be required to have a license for everyone (that would be way too much even for Oracle ...).