I’m a geek. I like understanding things in their absolute entirety. It frustrates me to have to make presumptions or assumptions about something. I like to get down ’n dirty and find out what makes things tick.
So that necessitates reading manuals. And unfortunately, Oracle don’t make that easy all the time.
Some of the manuals are not very good, and others are difficult to find. Given the complexity of the OBIEE stack and proliferation of terminology and product names, sorting the wheat from the chaff can be a headache. Fair enough, for a corporation as big as Oracle with a product portfolio in the [hundreds? thousands?] creating a unified, comprehensive, easy-to-navigate point of reference for documentation must be near on impossible - but that’s their problem to figure out and mine to bitch about until it’s done ;-)
In all seriousness, documentation needs to be all in one place but sufficiently isolated so that generic search terms (think “system requirements” etc) can be found within the context of the product, not a dozen other related products.
So - Christian Turri has done the OBIEE 11g developer community a huge favour by taking matters into his own hands and creating a offline, fully indexed and searchable, collection of PDFs. You can read his rationale and further details here, or download the documentation as a zip file directly here.
