The other day an esteemed reader of this humble blog asked me a question about installing Intelligent Advisor on Amazon Elastic Cloud. Of course I immediately sugested they try Oracle Cloud instead but the questions were valid and it soon struck me that this site has not, for a long time updated it’s installation posts and guides (notably the Create an OPA Self-Study Series). So I had a few minutes to spare while waiting for a train the other day and I sat down and recorded an example. To assist with the example, which is extremely edited to simply hightlight he key points, here are the things that I needed to install the entire stack for an Intelligent Advisor Install.

1. I started with Windows 2012 R2 Server as the base image. Old, stable and easy to navigate
2. I choose 100Gb for the disk size and Large for the image
3. I downloaded WebLogic 12.2.1.3 Quick Installer
4. I downloaded Oracle Database 12c database
5. I downloaded JDK 8 261
6. I downloaded the latest version of SQL Developer
7. I downloaded the 20B release of Intelligent Advisor

The install routine is very well documented here online and you could pretty much follow that as-is. my own way of installing in this demonstration focuses at the end on the Data Source, which is often forgotten about during the install. Here are the stumblng blocks you might come across:

1. Local Security Policy stopping IE from being launched so you cannot install Chrome.
2. Local Server setup put IE in enhanced security mode which slows everything down.
3. Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Missing which stops SQL Developer running. (See the section entitled Note: the Windows EXE requires a MSVCR100.dll to run. Most computers will already have this file and in the Windows PATH. However, if the first copy of the file found by the EXE is a 32-bit copy of the DLL, then SQL Developer will fail to start. You can fix this by copying a 64-bit version of the DLL into the BIN directory or updating your OS PATH such that a 64 bit copy of the DLL is found first.).
4. Creating the database user for the install with the correct permissions.
5. Ensuring the Data Source in your WebLogic is targeting the database and can connect / the database name is correct and the data source is accessible from the WebLogic server you created
6. Ensuring for this demonstration machine that Node Manager is not using a secure connection

As I state clearly in the beginning of this video, this is for demonstration purposes only, and it is entirely your responsibility to ensure that you have licenses, permission and authority to do any of this. Good luck with your Intelligent Advisor Install and do not hesitate to leave a comment if you run into issues.

Although most customers (globally) will have chosen Oracle Intelligent Advisor in Public Cloud, it is undeniably a very useful experience for a consultant to have installed and configured the product from scratch. It also allows you to learn about the different inner workings of the product, for example the config properties table where the parameters for the Oracle Intelligent Advisor Hub are stored – and that you can play with to understand more about the Intelligent Advisor Install.

Other reasons for wanting to use this method are obvious and many. For example, the ability to operate with the default admin user and experiment / learn all the different permissions, roles, parameters and other elements of an Intelligent Advisor Install.

You can’t beat having all permissions as far as learning the ins and outs of the Oracle Intelligent Advisor product is concerned, so installing it yourself as a learning exercise is really high up in my list of important things to do. Likewise, you can use this to experiment with upgrading from one version to another, and work with the component parts like Oracle WebLogic and so on.

Get installing today! And if you want to do it the old-school way on a local disk, we’ve got you covered.

PS : If you have deployed or purchased Oracle Intelligent Advisor and are looking for ways to accelerate adoption, then check out our article and infographic.