Solutions to issues when using SQL Server with Fusion OBIEE

Tip of the week:
Environment: Microsoft Windows 2008 R2, SQL-Server 2008 R2, Oracle Fusion BI 11g.
Oracle’s BI platform fortifies its stronghold in Gartner’s magic quadrant for Enterprise Business Intelligence, especially with Fusion OBI. It’s imperative that several companies get creative to take advantage of heterogeneous BI tools to be cost-effective. For example, companies can buy limited OBIEE & OBIA licenses and leverage the data warehouse content via Microsoft’s BI tools. Of course, such strategy to consume Oracle’s content over non-Oracle tools requires Oracle’s blessing in terms of licensing.
Once you have cleared the licensing obstacle, now the actual challenge begins. Yes, using SQL-Server as the data warehousing DB for Fusion OBI platform is not as easy as using an Oracle DB. We came across several undocumented SQLServer related issues and I would like to share as much details as possible.
As most of the issues gyrate around DAC installation/configuration, ensure you complete the following.

1. Ensure you install Microsoft SQL Server JDBC Drivers 3.0 which is compatible with SQL Server 2008.
2. Copy sqljdbc.jar and sqljdbc4.jar files from C:\Program Files\sqljdbc_3.0\enu to your DAC installation directory. For eg. to E:\oracle\DAC\bifoundation\dac\lib
3. Stop the DAC Server. Open commands prompt and go to E:\oracle\DAC\bifoundation\dac\lib and copy sqljdbc4.jar sqljdbc.jar. In a way we invented this fix ;)

We spent several hours to resolve the issues using the above fixes and I am sure this will unquestionably save your time too :) . Should you have any questions, please post the question.