Excel may send chills down the spine of us when we hear users talking about its [ab]use, but it has its place in the toolset. For my money, it is a very good tool for knocking out graphs which look decent. Of course, rrdtool is my geek tool of choice for dynamic long-term graphing, but when doing scratch PoC work, I normally fall back to Excel. One thing which has frustrated me over time is, well, time, and Excel’s handling thereof.

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I noticed on Nico’s wiki (which is amazing by the way, it has so much information in it) a bunch of additional parameters for nqcmd other than those which are displayed in the default helptext (nqcmd -h). These are the additional ones: [sourcecode] -b -w<# wait seconds> -c<# cancel interval seconds> -n<# number of loops> -r<# number of requests per shared session> -t<# number of threads> -T (a flag to turn on time statistics) -SmartDiff (a flag to enable SmartDiff tags in output) -P -impersonate -runas [/sourcecode]

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A chap called Kevin posted a comment on a previous posting of mine asking did you ever come across anything that could be used to change the LDAP server settings from a command line (admintool.exe, UDML, or otherwise)? I did a quick play around with some UDML and it appears that you can. Set up the initial LDAP server definition in the RPD First I added a dummy LDAP server to samplesales.

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Introduction This is the third part of three detailed articles making up a mini-series about OBIEE monitoring. It demonstrates how to capture OBIEE performance information, and optionally graph it out and serve it through an auto-updating webpage. This final article describes how to bolt on to OAS a simple web page hosting the graphs that you created in part 2, plotting data from OBIEE collected in part 1. The webpage This is just an old-school basic HTML page, with a meta-refresh tag (which note that Chrome doesn’t work with) and img tags:

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Those of you who read my blog regularly may have noticed I have a slight obsession with the OBIEE systems management capability which is exposed through JMX. Venkat has blogged this week about JMX in OBI11g, and it’s clearly a technology worth understanding properly. I’ve recently been tinkering with how to make use of it for monitoring purposes, most recently using JConsole and discussed here. What follows is an extension of this idea, cobbled together with a bit of shell scripting, awk, gnuplot, and sticky backed plastic.

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Here are a couple of little unix scripts that I wrote whilst developing my performance testing OBIEE method. They’re nothing particularly special, but may save you the couple of minutes it’d take to write them :) Note that some of this data is available from Usage Tracking and where it is I’d recommend getting it from there, databases generally being easier to reliably and repeatably query than a transient log file.

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Bringing together in one place all of the script syntax that I’ve found so far for using with OBIEE’s AdminTool.exe /command Details and examples on usage in the following blogs (where I compiled the commands from): Venkat Erik Eckhardt (translated from Czech, original here) @lex Kumar Kambam DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME! I would only recommend this for read-only purposes such as generating the metadata dictionary or consistency check. * OpenOnline DSN [user [password]] - Opens the online repository.

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There’s an undocumented feature in AdminTool.exe that you can use the /command switch with a text file containing scripted commands to make changes to an RPD file (or create a new one). It’s undocumented and UNSUPPORTED so be careful using it. Some good details in these blog posts, especially Erik’s which has a good list of syntax. Venkat Erik Eckhardt (translated from Czech, original here) @lex Kumar Kambam I’m intrigued to know how the original posters figured out the commands available, if it’s undocumented… :)

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Introduction In this article I plan to get sample and paint repositories hosted on a single server, using one BI Server instance and two Presentation Services instances. This is on both Unix (OEL 4) and Windows, and both OC4J (OBIEE’s “basic installation” option) and OAS (“Advanced Installation”). Make sure you’ve read and followed part 1 - BI Server first. Remember that multiple Presentation Services instances on a machine is UNSUPPORTED BY ORACLE!

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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.

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Yet another way to access the BI Management data discussed here - through Windows’ PerfMon tool. This will only work for installations where your OBIEE server is running on Windows. You should be able to run PerfMon locally or remotely. Standard practise would be not to run it locally on a Production machine :-) To run PerfMon go to Start->Run and enter perfmon, or navigate Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Performance

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Our main servers are Unix and I’m as happy as a pig in muck at the command line, so when I’m working on Windows (where I’ve got a test OBIEE install) I like to stick with the CLI where possible. PSService is one of those tools that I instinctively reach for without realising it. Combined with Launchy, it’s even better. Simply put, you can control windows services from the command line.

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The configuration of how Presentation Services (sawserver) does its logging is in the file web/config/logconfig.xml (same directory as instanceconfig.xml). It’s all nice and XML’d: Logging Detail Change the numerical values in the FilterRecord entries to alter the detail level of the logging. Lower means less detail, higher means more. Be aware that your log files can grow very rapidly if you set the logging too high, and unless you’re troubleshooting then leave them at the defaults.

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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.

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