As a kid I loved the idea of lego where you can disassemble and reassemble something from the ground up. As soon as I got my hands on a computer it was the same. You can have your Acorn Archimedes with its games, where do I find the sprites and sound files behind it? Likewise Microsoft Word, let me at the VBA underneath to hack it around and see what else it can do.

With that in mind I’ve enjoyed discovering bits of the “underbelly” of OBIEE from manuals, blogs and a few SRs I’ve raised.

Here’s my list so far, please feel free to add to it in the comments and correct any errors or missing credits :) Oracle BI Management data This server-based performance and diagnostic data can be access through several methods:

perfmon ðŸ”—

Credit: http://obiee101.blogspot.com/2009/07/obiee-perfmon-performance-monitor.html

oc4j ðŸ”—

An alternative to jconsole is to access the Oracle BI Management MBeans through oc4j. @lex has details here

Windows perfmon ðŸ”—

More details in separate post here

jconsole ðŸ”—

The same data as through perfmon above, full details here: jmx agent

jManage ðŸ”—

jManage is an open-source tool that can also be used to access the MBeans: jmanage13 See this post for information sawping Credit: http://tipsonobiee.blogspot.com/2009/07/sawping.html

C:\OracleBI\web\bin>sawping.exe -help sawping [-p port] [-s host] [-v (verbose mode)] [-q (quiet mode)] [-h]C:\OracleBI\web\bin>sawping.exe -s myPSserver.company.net -v Server alive and well

NB not got this working yet on unix:

obiee/web/bin64 $./sawping64 /usr/lib/hpux64/dld.so: Unable to find library ’libsawcomm643r.so'.

Found in [OracleBI Home]/web/bin (or Bin64)

nqcmd Great little command line tool. We’re using it for some crude load testing (get a bunch of logical-SQL statements and use unix scripting to fire them in parallel at the BI Server) as well as monitoring of the BI Server (“pinging” it regularly with some small logical-SQL to make sure it responds correctly) Found in [OracleBI Home]/server/Bin (or Bin64)

UnixChk (UNIX only, duh) What it says on the tin - validates your Unix environment is suitable for OBIEE

Usage: UnixChk.sh [-b] [-s | ]

diagcap Support asked me to run this, you’ll find it in [OBIEE home]/server/Bin

Usage: ./diagcap.sh -d [-p] [-h] -d : directory that info will be stored The directory must be empty -p : absolute path to Oracle BI root directory May be omitted if the SAROOTDIR environment variable is set -h : show this help message

It collects all the config files and log files from your environment into a TAR archive, which you can then send to support.

tusc Not OBIEE as such, but interesting for the truly nosy. This is a unix (HP) tool which you use to invoke a program and then get low-level diagnostics on what it’s up to. Most of the output may be gobbledegook to all but the hardcore programmer, but it does sometimes pick out if a library file is missing etc. For example to invoke nqqserver in run-sa.sh:

tusc -vfe ${ANA_BIN_DIR}/nqsserver 2>&1 &

Administration Tool Maybe not so unknown, but has front-end for monitoring clusters which I liked

The AdminTool can also be fed a script via the command line, see details here

Other stuff This is a list of binaries that might or might not be of interest and that I plan to have a play with at some point

NB obiee/setup/sa-init64.sh and common.sh scripts might need running first to set the environment variables correctly.

obiee/web/bin

obiee/server/Bin

$nqerrormsgcompiler ErrorMessageCompiler [] [] Exiting

$nqscripthostexec Usage: nqscripthostexec Memory fault(coredump)

In Googling these various binaries I found an excellent PDF from Andreas Nobbmann’s presentation in Brighton earlier this year: Scripting OBIEE - Is UDML and XML all you need?

Another useful page is here: http://gerardnico.com/wiki/dat/obiee/executable_files/start