I’m doing my first ever conference presentation next month at the 2010 Rittman Mead BI Forum.

My presentation is called Performance Testing OBIEE, which is something I’ve spent a lot of time working on over the last few months. I think the challenge is going to be distilling it all into a session that’s not going to overwhelm everyone or bore them to death! Well, actually, the challenge is going to be the presenting. I can talk geek one-on-one, but talking to a whole bunch of people, not wittering but staying focussed, holding their attention….uh oh.

Spotted this when trawling through My Oracle Support. It’s pretty common knowledge anyway amongst people already familiar with hacking around with OBIEE, but worth recording for people coming along to it new.

Doc ID 1068266.1 states:

UDML is not supported in OBI 10g.

in 11g, XUDML (the Oracle BI Server XML API) will be fully supported and documented.

JMX

OBIEE’s Systems Management functionality exposes performance counters and the application’s configuration options through Java MBeans and optionally a protocol called JMX.

It’s extremely useful, and is documented pretty widely :

• JConsole / JMX
• JConsole / JMX – followup
• Oracle BI Management / Systems Management MBeans
• PerfMon
• OBIEE MBeans and OC4J
• OBIEE performance monitoring and alerting with jManage

In this article I’m going to discuss the use of JMX to access these counters remotely, and a possible security issue that’s present in the BI Management Pack manual. The BI Management Pack is an add-on to Oracle’s Enterprise Manager / Grid Control for managing OBIEE, see Mark Rittman’s excellent guide on Oracle’s website.

We hit a very interesting problem in our Production environment recently. We’d made no changes for a long time to the configuration, but all of a sudden users were on the phone complaining. They could login to BI from EBS but after logging in the next link they clicked took them to the OBIEE “You are not logged in” screen.

Our users login to EBS R12 and then using EBS authentication log in to OBIEE (10.1.3.4). Our OBIEE is deployed on OAS, load balanced across two servers by an F5 BIG-IP hardware load balancer.

A sad little passing last week, of the Oracle Support Blog and related tweets by Chris Warticki.

Last week Chris posted this comment on twitter

“So, what to do if you’re the “online customer presence” and your own leadership wants to censor your posts and comments?”

followed by this terse blog posting:

Support Blog: No longer available

By chris.warticki on February 12, 2010 4:08 PM Please use My Oracle Support Communities instead

I stumbled across this blog posting recently, and am reposting the link here as I’ve seen no mention of it elsewhere. This surprised me as with Exadata (and most new technologies) any snippet of news or tech insight gets blogged and tweeted multiple times over.

Any insight into Exadata is interesting as unlike all the other Oracle software which can be downloaded and poked & prodded, this is a physical box so we rely on blog postings and marketing (with a BS filter) to understand more about it.

You get a call from your friendly DBA. He says the production database is up the spout, and it’s “that bee eye thingumy causing it”. What do you do now? All you’ve got to go on is a program name in the Oracle session tables of “nqsserver@MYSERVER (TNS V1-V3)” and the SQL the DBA sent you that if you’re lucky will look as presentable as this: The username against the SQL is the generic User ID that you had created for connections to the database from OBIEE.

This error caught me out today. I was building a Linux VM to do some work on, and for the life of me couldn’t get the OBIEE Admin Tool to connect to the BI Server on the VM.

The error I got when trying to define a DSN on the Windows box was:

[nQSError: 12008] Unable to connect to port 9703 on machine 10.3.105.132 [nQSError: 12010] Communication error connecting to remote end point: address = 10.3.105.132; port = 9703. [nQSError: 12002] Socket communication error at call=: (Number=-1) Unknown

Quick post as the snow’s coming down and I wanna go home …

I’ve been working on building a VM based on OEL5.4 and OBIEE 10.1.3.4.1. After installing XE 10.2 I tried to fire my RPD up, but hit this:

/usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/lib/libnnz10.so: cannot restore segment prot after reloc: Permission denied [nQSError: 46029] Failed to load the DLL /app/oracle/product/obiee/server/Bin/libnqsdbgatewayoci10g.so. Check if ‘Oracle OCI 10G’ database client is installed.

If you trace the ‘stack’ back you find that it parses down to this nub of an error:

Mucho kudos to Borkur Steingrimsson for getting the OBIEE admin tool working on Unix!

Very interesting post by Kevin McGinley about CAF here:  CAF = Migration Utility? Use Caution!

It articulates better than I ever could reasons against using CAF particularly in a production environment.

Since the tool came out I’d been struggling to get my head around it, convinced I was missing something. I still don’t profess to understand it properly, but Kevin’s article reassures me that I shouldn’t be losing too much sleep over it, especially given that it’s unsupported and won’t work with 11g.

Short but sweet this one - a way of troubleshooting connectivity problems between analytics (the Presentation Services Plug-in, either j2ee servlet or ISAPI, a.k.a. SAWBridge) and sawserver (Presentation Services).

For a recap on the services & flow please see the first few paragraphs of this post.

Problems in connectivity between analytics and sawserver normally manifest themselves through this error message:

500 Internal Server Error Servlet error: An exception occurred. The current application deployment descriptors do not allow for including it in this response. Please consult the application log for details.

This was my first UKOUG TEBS, in fact my first conference I’d ever attended! I was quite unsure what to expect, but three days later I can safely say it was invaluable.

The variety of presentations and expertise being shared was impressive, and it was great to hear people sharing and discussing their ideas and opinions around the subjects I work with each day.

Working in isolation is not a good idea, one can develop a blinkered or bunker mentality. Blogging is good for breaking out of this, as is, I’m now convinced, twittering. However, nothing beats meeting up with folk and discussing problems face to face, listening and learning from their experience.

Oracle have published an interesting doc 968223.1, entitled “Enterprise Deployment of Oracle BI EE on OC4J and App Servers”.

It details the differences between OC4J and OAS which is useful for the current versions of OBIEE. It then also gives a useful heads-up – that WebLogic becomes the App server of choice in the next version of OBIEE

All of this changes in OBI EE 11g where several projects will become absolutely dependent upon an App Server. Within Oracle Fusion Middleware, WebLogic Server will be the application server and OBI EE 11g will be deployed and certified with WebLogic Server.

(Sorry for the lame title, but it gives me an excuse to put this picture in :) )

I was really pleased by the response I got from my posting about The state of OBIEE on the web, knowing that it’s not just me goes a long way to keeping my blood pressure down.

The OTN forum is still an unbalanced mix of tosh (is this guy for real?) with the occasional insightful and interesting post or idea such as this really neat one from Joe Bertram about using multiple presentation services on top of the same RPD to give different interfaces to different end devices.

A very interesting new PDF from Sun on deploying OBIEE has been published, with discussions on architecture, performance and best practice.

This Sun BluePrints article describes an enterprise deployment architecture for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition using Sun servers running the Solaris Operating System and Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage systems. Designed to empower employees in organizations in any industry—from customer service, shipping, and finance to manufacturing, human resources, and more—to become potential decision makers, the architecture brings fault tolerance, security, resiliency, and performance to enterprise deployments. Taking advantage of key virtualization technologies, the architecture can be used to consolidate multiple tiers onto a single system to help reduce cost and complexity. A short discussion of the performance characteristics of the architecture using a realistic workload also is included.

Introduction

Whilst the BI Cluster Controller takes care nicely of clustering and failover for BI Server (nqsserver), we have to do more to ensure further resilience of the stack.

A diagram I come back to again and again when working out configuration or connectivity problems is the one on P16 of the Deployment Guide. With this you can work out most issues for yourself through simple reasoning. Print it out, pin it to your wall, and read it!

Want to find all PDFs from Oracle about OBIEE?

There’s some interesting ones that this turned up on Oracle’s public FTP. In particular:

• BI EE Environmental and Multi-User Development Migration Processes
• Securing Oracle BI Enterprise Edition

(There’s also PowerPoint files on there including this one but Google doesn’t seem to index them)

You can use Google’s Advanced Search page to build similar queries:

Christian Screen has done a nice video explaining the CAF installation, and has promised a deep-dive followup which I’m looking forward to. Click here for the article

An advance footnote

I’ll start this by saying why I think things are how they are, and then I’ll get to the meat of my article.

OBIEE in its current incarnation (v10.1.3) is a mature product. All the big bugs have been caught and fixed. All the known quirks are well documented. All the missing features are known. All the clever workarounds have been found. All the neat little hacks have been explored.