Quick and Short Overview of Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Connector

 Overview of Business Intelligence Cloud Connector

A Typical workflow for Oracle BICC involves following Steps

• Configure an external storage location that works for your data needs.

• Extract complete or partial data. You can select offerings or specific objects.

• Run extracts on-demand or schedule them to run at specified intervals during the day, in a week, or throughout the month.

• Run incremental extracts if you need only the data that changed since your last extract.

• Schedule multiple independent extracts at convenient intervals.

• Monitor extracts and review logs.

• Export configured offerings and associated data stores.

• Manage refresh metadata and specify dates for incremental refresh comparison.

Once BICC is configured and running , we can download the data Manually or automatically ( OIC or Oracle data cloud are good candidate to create pipeline to download data from BICC) .

Manual Download

Auto Download with OIC

Processing HCM Extract data file with OIC ( Oracle Integration Cloud)

 Recently we have use case where customer would like to 

1. Extract Time Card data from HCM
2. Addition data from some other HCM tables
3. Load data in ADW 
4. Validate and Merge data from HCM extract as well data from other HCM tables
5. Generate a new extract ( combination of Step#1 and 2) 
6. FTP file to customer .

And to implement this , I have designed a simple OIC flow . This OIC flow is scheduled flow and on execution

1. Validate if HCM extract files is available in UCM or not , if available then Read HCM files , process the data from HCM extract file and load into a database table (table1) in ADW, if no HCM extract file available in UCM server not then stop any further processing
2. Trigger a BIP report
3. Read data from BIP report and load into Table ( Table2) in ADW
4. Call DB api over DB adapter connection, validate data from Table1 , table2. Combined data from these 2 tables
5. Call SFTP adapter and load data into SFTP server,
6. Archive HCM extract file  

Below is very High level Process flow

for additional details feel free to reach me at inquiry@bizinsightinc.com.

OFS Activity Processing

 In this blog I have listed high level validation that I usually include in my OIC while creating activity in OFS , where source for Activity data is 3rd party ( Source system).

Validation

1. Is Activity type is valid value in OFS , if not just terminate the flow.
2. Is there any Technician details exists in Payload ( that is send by source system, while triggering OIC).
3. Is Technician details exists in OFS or this is new Tech.(Not yet created in OFS), if this is new tech then Create New Resource as well as new User in OFS ( and if required send email notifications to stakeholders)
4. If technician details exits and if flag in payload indicates that this is a preferred tech. for work, then once activity is created , call the OFS APIs and add the technician as preferred tech. for activity.
5. If there is preferred tech. exists in activity payload , also validate tech. schedule and see if he/she is working between SLA time line , if yes then continue assigning tech to activity , but of Tech is not working during Time line then assign activity to Team/branch etc.
6. Validate if new task has any priority associated with it , and based on data in the payload assign a Position to activity in Route

Once Activity created successfully in OFS , and there is need to send the data back to source or any down stream system ( when ever there is change of status of activity ) , then design and new OIC flow and subscribe to OFS activity events , like 

• ACTIVITY CREATED
• ACTIVITY UPDATE
• ACTIVITY MOVED etc 

and take action as per need .

Some Common Use Cases for Oracle BICC

 Some Common Use Cases for Oracle BICC

• Extracting data from Oracle SaaS applications: BICC can be used to extract data from a variety of Oracle SaaS applications, including Oracle Sales Cloud, Oracle Customer Service Cloud, and Oracle Human Capital Management Cloud. Though we can write BIP /OTBI report to extract the data ( but these 2 methods are good for reporting but not for Full load or Incremental data extract , as they query against the core tables) .

        BICC extract are very efficient and at any time we have option to reset to full load without                     changing in query or code.

The extracted data can then be loaded into a variety of data destinations, including Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW), Oracle Exadata Cloud Service, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

• Loading data into Oracle ADW: BICC can be used to load data into Oracle ADW from a variety of sources, including on-premises data warehouses, cloud data warehouses, and flat files. The loaded data can then be used for BI and analytics applications.

• Creating data marts: BICC can be used to create data marts that are based on data from Oracle SaaS applications.