BI Publisher Enterprise Deployment

From today I would like to start covering on the BI Publisher installation topic. As you know BI Publisher Enterprise server is a standard J2EE application, that means you can deploy (or install) the BI Publisher Enterprise onto any of the application server that supports J2EE standard. Such server would be Oracle Application Server, Oracle WebLogic server, IBM WebSphere, Apache Tomcat, etc. Here is a certification guide that lists all the supported Application servers.

BI Publisher Enterprise Server installation media comes with an installer and a default J2EE engine, which is OC4J. OC4J is a core J2EE engine of Oracle Application server and it offers a basic functionality of the application server. However, it doesn’t provide some of the required functionalities of application server that you would expect for your production environment such as manageability, scalability, robust and flexible security, performance, etc. Therefore it’s not recommended to use especially for your production environment, but it would be a good fit for your quick up-and-running development or POC instances.

In order to install BI Publisher with the default J2EE engine (OC4J) you can use the installer and it will take about 5 or 10 mins to install. Then you can start configuring the instance to meet your requirements. However, what if you need to install BI Publisher without using the installer ? For example you don’t want to delete and install again the whole Oracle BI EE but you do only for BI Publisher. Or, what if you would like to install BI Publisher with different application servers such as Oracle WebLogic, Oracle Application Server, etc?

That is the topic that I am going to talk about with the next couple of posts. I’ll cover the following points.

• How to install manually onto OC4J without using the installer?
• How to install on non-OC4J J2EE server? (with WebLogic server use case)
• How to configure BI Publisher repository

Stay tuned….