Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.3/2 - Working with Disconnected Analytics - sadis Utility

I came across a very interesting utility today. I am not sure how many are actually aware of it. It is called as sadis.exe. As you would know, BI EE has a very unique feature called as Disconnected Analytics. Now lets try to understand what disconnected analytics is and then later see how sadis and disconnected analytics are related. Disconnected Analytics is a small footprint of the actual BI EE that can be used in a standalone laptop or a PC. It is primarily meant for users who would like access the BI Answers and BI Dashboards but do not have the ability to connect to the network where the BI EE is actually installed (say CEOs/CFOs who are travellling frequently). So, in order for these users to leverage the features of BI EE(one can argue that the reports and dashboards can be exported in various formats and then can be given to the travelling users. But one of the major drawbacks with this is that one does not get the same navigation interface as the BI EE so the ability to analyze the data is compromised. Disconnected Analytics overcomes this) disconnected analytics was introduced. Given below is the architecture of disconnected analytics (taken directly from the docs).

      

Now, this article is not about configuring disconnected analytics. But rather this is for users who would like to know how disconnected analytics would look like if they have BI EE already installed. This is where the sadis utility comes in. This is located under {OracleBI}/Server/Bin. If you have BI EE already installed, then you can still startup disconnected analytics on the same machine. sadis utility does that and you can browse through your presentation catalog without even having the presentation services running!!!. Now lets see what this utility does. Open up a command prompt and navigate to {OracleBI}/Server/Bin. Now enter the following command in the command prompt.

sadis /u Administrator /p Administrator /c {OracleBIData}\web\catalog\paint

      

sadis accepts 4 parameters. They are

      /u – Username for BI Server

      /p – Password for BI Server

      /c – Full path to the Web Catalog

      /s – Start Disconnected analytics in silent mode (You would just get the system tray icon. You need to manually navigate to the web browser and open up the catalog.)

Now this would open up a new browser. Also in addition to that you would find a new icon in your system tray. If this icon is present then that means that disconnected analytics has been started on your machine.

The browser opened would have the Dashboards for the user Administrator.

      

If you notice the URL in the browser carefully, it would have something like this

http://localhost:9762/sawd?Dashboard&NQUSER=Administrator&NQPASSWORD=Administrator

So, the port for disconnected analytics is 9762 and also instead of saw?Dashboard you would find sawd?dashboard where sawd denotes disconnected mode. This would accept all the go url parameters that you would use for normal SAW URL. This would also work even if you bring down the presentation services. Very interesting indeed!!!

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