1.1 Understanding the 12c Migration Procedure

Oracle BI 12c (12.2.1) is the latest Business Intelligence release from Oracle. Migrating from Oracle BI 11g to 12c requires careful preparation, planning, and testing. Oracle provides tools and technology to automate much of the migration process. However, the precise strategy that you want to adopt depends on the configuration of the existing 11g system and the required configuration of the 12c system.

This document assumes that you have sufficient knowledge to debug and fix issues encountered in Oracle BI 12c. It also assumes that you have downloaded the Oracle BI 12c software and you have an existing Oracle BI 11g instance installed and running on your system.

Note:

The metadata and configuration migration is an out-of-place process. The migration process does not affect the existing 11g system in the production environment. You can continue to use the existing 11g system until you are ready to roll out the 12c system.

To help you develop an effective migration strategy, Oracle recommends that you complete the following steps:

1. Analyze and optimize the existing 11g system in preparation for migration to 12c.
2. Understand what is migrated and how.
3. Define a test plan to validate the migration.
4. Test a sample migration on a representative subset of the existing 11g system.
5. Perform the migration.

The migration strategy that you ultimately implement can be unique to your particular situation and depends on specific topologies and organizational requirements.

Topics:

• Analyzing and Optimizing the Existing 11g System
  Migrating metadata and configuration from an existing Oracle BI 11g system requires time and resources. A poorly optimized 11g deployment can disrupt the migration process and can affect the performance of the 12c system. Oracle recommends that you analyze and optimize the existing 11g system by removing redundant content and merging and consolidating similar content.
• Understanding What is Migrated and How
  Oracle has introduced many enhancements to existing features in the 12c release for Business Intelligence. Sometimes, these enhancements replace the existing functionality or reimplement it in a different way. Wherever possible, the existing 11g functionality and configuration is migrated to the corresponding 12c system. Although the appearance and behavior of the 12c system can be different, the end result is expected to be functionally equivalent.
• Defining a Test Plan to Validate the Migration
  Oracle recommends that you define a test plan to verify whether the 12c system has all the migrated data as you expected. Oracle BI 12c provides a set of validation tools that can be used to validate certain parts of the 12c system. However, they are supplementary to the validation task.
• Testing the Migration on a Representative Subset of the Existing 11g System
  Oracle recommends that you migrate sample data from the 11g system to the 12c system before performing the actual migration to ensure a smooth transition.
• Performing the Migration
  After performing a sample migration and verifying that the data is migrated as expected in to the 12c system, you can proceed to migrate the entire Oracle BI 11g system.