For some reason Oracle haven’t put out a 10.x version of the error & message codes reference guide for OBIEE, but the previous version for Siebel Analytics is still useful: PDF version: http://download.oracle.com/otndocs/products/bi/bi-ee/docs/784/AnyMsg.pdf HTML version: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E12103_01/books/AnyMsg/AnyMsg_Messages.html#wp1007961

Continue Reading

xkcd.com is one of my favourite comics on the web. It strikes just the right balance of geeky witty humour without being too smart-ass. I liked this recent one a lot :-) A couple of other favourites: http://xkcd.com/149/ http://xkcd.com/327/ http://xkcd.com/123/

Continue Reading

UPDATED: See a HOWTO for OBIEE and LoadRunner here: /2009/10/01/performance-testing-obiee-using-hp-performance-center-a.k.a.-loadrunner/ This is following on from my first post about OBIEE and LoadRunner, in which I failed dismally to get a simple session replaying. In a nutshell where I’d got to was using the “Web (Click and Script)” function which worked fine for logging in but when running a report resulted in an error on the rendered page. Digging around showed the error was from the javascript of the OBIEE front end.

Continue Reading

A question that pops up on the OBIEE OTN forum quite often is how to use non-Oracle databases like MS SQL Server when the OBIEE server is running on a non-Windows OS such as Linux. The answer in a nutshell is that since version 10.1.3.3.1 OBIEE has been bundled with ODBC drivers for unix/linux from a company called DataDirect. See the release notes here for more information and installation instructions (as well as a list of support databases).

Continue Reading

A follow up to my previous post about Metalink’s “Do you mean” feature, this one made me laugh: I shall miss this kind of thing when Metalink3 merges into My Oracle Support…. Meep meep!

Continue Reading

As well as tinkering with the sawserver (Presentation Services) logging level and format, we can specific which bits of the log we’re interested in. This is useful for two reasons: We can enable detailed logging for a specific area, without impacting performance as much as detailed logging throughout would cause By only logging in detail the area of interest we can more easily read the log output and not have to wade through pages of irrelevant information Chapter 9 (“Using the Oracle BI Presentation Services Logging Facility”) of the Presentation Services Administration Guide details the log configuration.

Continue Reading

UPDATED: See a HOWTO for OBIEE and LoadRunner here Introduction LoadRunner is a tool from HP (bought from Mercury) that can be used to simulate user activity. It supports a whole host of protocols but for OBIEE I’m obviously using the Web one. There are two flavours, “Web (Click and Script)” and “Web (HTTP/HTML)”. The latter simply shoves HTTP requests at the server, whereas “Click and Script” simulates mouse and keyboard entry and thus is more appropriate for this user-based application.

Continue Reading

I posted a while ago about the sawserver (Presentation Services) log configuration file. Today I’m doing some work digging around why sawserver’s throwing an error and so increased the log detail. This parameter is really helpful to use: fmtName=“short” Consider in these two screenshots, the first is with the default log format and shows about six entries. The second is short log format and is about ten times as much data.

Continue Reading

I have a couple of OTN forums bookmarked, and found that generally every few hours I get signed out and end up viewing them as Guest. I then have to click on sign in, enter password, etc. (Signing out this frequently is ridiculous, IMHO). I found that instead of using the direct URL of a forum, eg: http://forums.oracle.com/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=378 if I use this form: http://forums.oracle.com/forums/adfAuthentication?success_url=/forum.jspa?forumID=378 then I end up signed in more often, and if I’ve been signed out then it goes straight to the login page and then through to the forum.

Continue Reading

Here’s a set of scripts that I use on our servers as a quick way to check if the various BI components are up and running. Because we split the stack across servers, there are different scripts called in combination. On our dev boxes we have everything and so the script calls all three sub-scripts, whereas on Production each server will run one of: BI Server Presentation Server & OAS Informatica & DAC The scripts source another script called process_check.

Continue Reading

We’re upgrading from OBIA 7.9.5 (Financials - GL) to OBIA 7.9.6. Our reasons are for support (7.9.5 does not support Oracle 11g) and minor functionality additions. Our architecture is: HP-UX 64 bit Itanium (11.31), Oracle 11g (11.1.0.7), separate ETL server, 4x OBIEE servers (2x BI, 2xPS). We have no customisations in the ETL except something for budgets, which is superseded in 7.9.6. This post is a semi-formed articulation of my frustrations encountered during an initial run through of the upgrade in a sandbox.

Continue Reading

I keep hitting this error when setting up OBIA. I suppose it’s what it says on the tin, but Googling it didn’t match so I’m posting this so next time I hit it I remember :-) Repository Error ([REP_51821] Failed to connect from Integration Service (pmserver) to repository Oracle_BI_DW_Base running in exclusive mode.) The cause is the Repository Service having OperatingMode set to Exclusive. This is necessary for some of the setup operations like restoring the pre-built Repository, but if you forget to switch it back the Integration Service will suddenly stop working.

Continue Reading

I successfully installed OAS 10.1.3.3 and patched to 10.1.3.4. http://localhost:7777 gave the OAS welcome page, but going to http://localhost:7777/em gave 404 Not Found. In [OASHome]/j2ee/home/config/servers.xml search for ascontrol, you should get: change the start attribute to true Restart OAS ([OAShome]/opmn/bin/opmnctl restartproc) and Enterprise Manager should now be available

Continue Reading

There’s been a bit of hype about Bing recently, so I thought I’d try it out in trying to get to the bottom of this question on the OBIEE forum. The question was around the nqschangepassword utility and the error it’s reporting: nQSError: 46090 The odbc.ini file could not found or could not be accessed. I did a google for the error to see what other issues could cause the error.

Continue Reading

I’m starting on an upgrade from OBIA 7.9.5 to 7.9.6 and wading through the two main docs: 7.9.6 Upgrade guide 7.9.6 Installation guide It would be nice if Oracle could come up with some less confusing terminology. It seems that not only is the whole product of OBIA referred to as OBIA (see @lex’s posting for a good explanation), but that the sub-components which are not-OBIEE-or-DAC-or-Informatica is also OBIA, c.f. page 6-1 of the Upgrade guide “[…]upgrade your Oracle BI Applications environment to the current version.

Continue Reading

Very good post by @lex giving a nice clear explanation of what OBIA (Oracle Business Intelligence Applications) is http://siebel-essentials.blogspot.com/2009/06/can-you-describe-oracle-bi-applications.html This should be made a sticky on the OBIA forum in my opinion. It’s clear from postings on the forum that an awful lot of people don’t understand what OBIA is or how it sits with OBIEE. I even attended a course last week in which the Oracle trainer stated that OBIEE included ETL and DW schemas, and stuck to this when challenged.

Continue Reading

OBIEE’s Systems Management component exposes configuration and performance data through Java MBeans. As discussed in other posts these can be be accessed through several different ways: JConsole (see also here) oc4j Windows PerfMon (although I guess this isn’t actually using MBeans/JMX?) saw.dll?perfmon BI Management Pack Since it’s a standard java technology being used we can in theory use anything that is designed for monitoring mbeans via jmx. Doing some Googling I discovered jManage.

Continue Reading

If, for some reason, you need to check what web application server is in use for Presentation Services (as this chap needed to), you can use an add-in for FireFox called HttpFox to inspect the HTTP headers. 1. Install HttpFox (and obviously Firefox if you don’t have it already!) 2. Open the HttpFox window (Tools -> HttpFox -> Toggle HttpFox) 3. Click the Start button in the HttpFox window 4. Navigate to your OBIEE home page

Continue Reading

I found this post very interesting: Paul Graham : Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule (originally found here) It was one of those mini-revelations when I found something that greatly resonated and explained an inexplicable frustration I find in the workplace sometimes. I wonder how applicable it can be to a large corporation though, rather than a start-up where it’s given that people are allowed to be bolshy with their meetings? ;-)

Continue Reading

We routinely change Oracle passwords as part of security best-practice, I keep hitting this and keep forgetting why! :-) [sourcecode language=‘sql’] ALTER USER DAC_REPO IDENTIFIED BY 1KoBe3RH REPLACE YlR94tqp [/sourcecode] Error report: SQL Error: ORA-00922: missing or invalid option 00922. 00000 - “missing or invalid option” *Cause: *Action: Someone better qualified than me can explain why but I suspect it’s the leading number in the new password. Quoting the passwords then works fine:

Continue Reading