How big is the step from OAS 20.6.4 to 24.7.6 ?

Question

We are currently running OAS 6.4, using only the Classic old OBIEE functionality.

We are now planning to install new application servers and install the new OAS 7.6

I can see that 7.6 belongs to a new version, 24, compared to 6.4 which belongs to version 20.

Is it possible to get the short version of when/why a new version is created ?

The reason why I need to know this is to plan how extensive our tests should be when we have installed the new version.

Is the step from 20.6.4 to 24.7.6 considered as a 'big' step ?

I would also like to now if any features has been added/removed/changed when it comes to the "Classic OBIEE" part of OAS 7.6

When I look at the new features for OAS 7.6, all I can see is functionality attached to the Visual Analyzer part of OAS.

Gianni Ceresa · Accepted Answer

Hi,

You are maybe over-reading versions (and Oracle changed the way to name their product a few times, confusing things).

OAS 6.4 is not version "20", it's the 2022 release. OAS 7.6 is not version "24", it's the 2024 release.

Oracle announced some years ago they would name OAS after the year, because it is a yearly release. But they keep publishing their binaries with their version numbers (5.5 = 2020, 5.9 = 2021, 6.4 = 2022, 7.0 = 2023, 7.6 = 2024).

OAS is released once a year, generally end of March. The rest of the time (during the year), no new functionality is added but bugs are fixed (these are the bundle patch released every few months). Only in the yearly release you will have new features. In the last years the logic is that most of the features of OAC up to (including) the January release are part of the OAS yearly release coming a few months later. But this isn't a strict rule (last year they did release OAS with also some features of OAC March release, it's just a general idea of what you could expect in the OAS yearly release).

So far, with all the OAS releases, I wouldn't call them big steps. In-place upgrade always worked and they all shared the same WebLogic FMW release, therefore I consider them as intermediate steps.

For the features everything is documented, go through the list to see if anything touched "classic".

https://docs.oracle.com/en/middleware/bi/analytics-server/whats-different-oas/index.html

Over the years most of the features have been "only" in DV (the new name of VA, Visual Analyzer). But in OAS 7.6 there is the Semantic Modeler, which can be used to replace the Model Administration tool to develop your semantic model (the RPD).