(Sorry for the lame title, but it gives me an excuse to put this picture in :) ) I was really pleased by the response I got from my posting about The state of OBIEE on the web, knowing that it’s not just me goes a long way to keeping my blood pressure down. The OTN forum is still an unbalanced mix of tosh (is this guy for real?) with the occasional insightful and interesting post or idea such as this really neat one from Joe Bertram about using multiple presentation services on top of the same RPD to give different interfaces to different end devices.

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Whilst installing OBIA 7.9.6.1 I hit this problem when firing up Presentation Services (sawserver): Error loading security privilege /system/privs/catalog/ChangePermissionsPrivilege. A quick search on the forums threw up two posts suggesting a corrupted WebCat. Since I’d got this webcat fresh out of the box I was puzzled how it could be corrupted. I did a bit more tinkering (including nosying around in the sawserver log), before realising it was indeed corrupt, and that I was indeed a muppet.

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A very interesting new PDF from Sun on deploying OBIEE has been published, with discussions on architecture, performance and best practice. This Sun BluePrints article describes an enterprise deployment architecture for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition using Sun servers running the Solaris Operating System and Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage systems. Designed to empower employees in organizations in any industry—from customer service, shipping, and finance to manufacturing, human resources, and more—to become potential decision makers, the architecture brings fault tolerance, security, resiliency, and performance to enterprise deployments.

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Metalink was retired this weekend and made way for the new My Oracle Support system. It didn’t go as smoothly as it could have done. This post is going to be a bit of a rambling rant. Ultimately people, including me, don’t like their cheese being moved (not unless there’s a really runny piece of Camembert at the end of it). That makes it a bit more difficult to discuss because some of people’s complaints will just be geeks being stubborn (and boy, can geeks be stubborn).

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Introduction Whilst the BI Cluster Controller takes care nicely of clustering and failover for BI Server (nqsserver), we have to do more to ensure further resilience of the stack. A diagram I come back to again and again when working out configuration or connectivity problems is the one on P16 of the Deployment Guide. With this you can work out most issues for yourself through simple reasoning. Print it out, pin it to your wall, and read it!

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Want to find all PDFs from Oracle about OBIEE? There’s some interesting ones that this turned up on Oracle’s public FTP. In particular: BI EE Environmental and Multi-User Development Migration Processes Securing Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (There’s also PowerPoint files on there including this one but Google doesn’t seem to index them) You can use Google’s Advanced Search page to build similar queries: You can also use Google Alerts so that any time a new entry matching your search criteria is added in Google’s index you get notified of it either by email or on an RSS feed:

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Christian Screen has done a nice video explaining the CAF installation, and has promised a deep-dive followup which I’m looking forward to. Click here for the article

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A brilliant posting here from Jonathan Lewis on the subject of Experts. He in turn is quoting Chen Shapira: “DBAs are under a lot of pressure not to be experts.”. Read the sentence again, as it took me a minute to figure out. He’s writing in the context of an Oracle DBA but I think it’s equally applicable to those working with an looking after installations of OBIEE et al.

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An advance footnote I’ll start this by saying why I think things are how they are, and then I’ll get to the meat of my article. OBIEE in its current incarnation (v10.1.3) is a mature product. All the big bugs have been caught and fixed. All the known quirks are well documented. All the missing features are known. All the clever workarounds have been found. All the neat little hacks have been explored.

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I honestly don’t dare click the “Did you mean” link ;-)

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A frequent question on the OTN OBIEE forum is how to fix this error: [nQSError: 17001] Oracle Error code: 12154, message: ORA-12154: TNS:could not resolve the connect identifier specified at OCI call OCIServerAttach. [nQSError: 17014] Could not connect to Oracle database. The error is simply OBIEE reporting that it tried to connect from the BI Server to an Oracle database and the Oracle client returned an error. Distilling it down gives us this error:

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October’s Oracle Critical Patch Update Advisory has been released. There are two vulnerabilities (CVE-2009-1999, CVE-2009-1990) listed under Oracle Application Server for “Component” Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and one (CVE-2009-3407) for “component” Portal. CVE-2009-1999 is OBIEE and “Fixed in all supported versions. No patch provided in this Critical Patch Update.”. CVE-2009-3407 looks like only OAS (not OBIEE), up to versions 10.1.2.3 and 10.1.4.2. CVE-2009-1990 is OBIEE and is the main vuln of interest.

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w00t :-D Yesterday I got my “Pro” medal for 500 points on OTN Forums I’d been intending to post a grumpy rant about OTN recently, but maybe I’ll postpone that for a few days now ;)

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Two new blogs of note : Shiv Bharti’s Blog Debashis’s OBIEE Blog Both are well worth a read & following.

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Watch out if you are using init blocks in your RPD. We hit a bug (#9019374) recently that caused BI Server (10.1.3.4) to hang. The init block in question should have returned a date to update a repository variable, but because of badly-written SQL and abnormal data in the source table actually returned a null value. BI Server evidently didn’t like this null being inserted somewhere where it shouldn’t have and understandably logged :

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The Critical Patch Update Pre-Release Announcement for October has been published. The pre-release is advance notice of the affected software prior to release of the quarterly Critical Patch Update. It is published on the Thursday prior to the patch releases (which was postponed by a week because of OOW). It looks like if you’re running OBIEE 10.1.3.4.0 or 10.1.3.4.1 through OAS 10.1.2.3.0/10.1.3.4.0/10.1.3.5.0 then you should check back next Tuesday 20th for details.

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A new OBIEE benchmark has been published by Oracle. It’s on the same hardware as August’s benchmark - Sun T5440s. Anyone would think that Oracle like Sun ;-) Details here Numbers added to my collation post here

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The latest point release of Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, 7.9.6.1, has been released and is available for download from here (direct link to download). The version.txt reports the version as: Build: 7.9.6.1.100609.2038 Release Version: Oracle Business Intelligence Applications 7.9.6.1 Package: 100609.2038 No updated documentation library yet through, so can’t nosey through the release notes. The docs that come with the download are labelled 7.9.6 and dated April 09 so don’t look like they’ve been updated either.

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OBIEE comes with a very useful usage tracking feature. For information about it and how to set it up see these links: http://obiee101.blogspot.com/2008/08/obiee-setting-up-usage-tracking.html http://www.oracle.com/technology/obe/obe_bi/bi_ee_1013/usage_tracking/usage_tracking.htm http://108obiee.blogspot.com/2009/07/obiee-usage-tracking-setup-and-cloning.html Usage Tracking captures the logical SQL of queries in a column called QUERY_TEXT in the table S_NQ_ACCT. However, out of the box this column is defined as 1k (1024 bytes) long. In some situations this will limit its usefulness because the text will be truncated if necessary when it’s inserted.

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This is a supplemental post to this one describing how to set up a VUser in LoadRunner to test OBIEE. It’s various notes that I made during the development but which aren’t directly part of the step-by-step tutorial. They’re not necessarily vital for recording scripts, but observations and explanations that should be helpful when working with LoadRunner and OBIEE. Validation using sawserver logs It’s no use running a load test if the load you think you’re applying isn’t actually being applied.

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