Blogging from Oracle itself about OBIEE has always been a bit sparse, certainly in comparison to that which there is for core RDBMS. It’s good to see a new blog emerge in the last couple of months from OBI Product Assurance, including some nice ’n spicy detailed config/tuning info. Find it here: http://blogs.oracle.com/pa/. There’s a couple more OBI blogs from Oracle, but both are fairly stale: Implementing Oracle BI & EPM Solutions - Rob Reynolds OBIEE Ramblings Oracle BI Foundation (thanks Daan for pointing this one out)

Just because something produces the correct numbers on the report, it doesn’t mean you can stop there. How you are producing those numbers matters, and matters a lot if you have an interest in the long-term health of your system and its ability to scale. OBIEE is the case in point here, but the principle applies to any architecture with >1 tiers or components. Let me start with a rhetorical question.

Over the last few months I’ve been doing a lot of exploring of OBIEE Systems Management data, covered in a mini-series of blog posts, Collecting OBIEE systems management data. There are a vast number of counters exposed, ranging from the very interesting (Active Sessions, Cache Hits, etc) to the less so (Total Query Piggybacks, although for some seriously hardcore performance tuning even this may be of interest). This short blog post is about a couple of counters which I’ve been monitoring but which looks to not be entirely reliable.

Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame observed: This is sage advice (if a little crude :-)) to bear in mind when building reports for users.

In the following list, which two mind-mapping programs are rated best? Now look at the actual numbers, and answer again Different answer? I can’t be the only one in this frantic world whose eyes are drawn to the pictures instead of words and leap to conclusions. It’s only because I use FreeMind and was surprised it scored so low …. and then realised it hadn’t. Looks like the HTML rendering isn’t the same here (FF3.