As part of compiling the monthly interesting links posts, I go through a ton of RSS feeds, sourced from specific blogs that I follow as well as general aggregators. These aggregators include quality sources like InfoQ, and certain tags on lobste.rs. Here I’ll often find some good articles that I missed in my general travels around the social media feeds in the previous month. I also, so you don’t have to, dive into the AI slop-pit that is Medium and various categories feeds. In amongst the detritus and sewage of LLMs left to ramble unchecked are the occasional proverbial diamonds in the rough, which make the sifting worth the effort.

I thought it might be interesting—and a useful vent to preserve my sanity—to note down some of the “smells” I’ve noticed.

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.

Last month I wrote about a problem that Informatica as part of OBIA was causing us, wherein an expired database account would bring Oracle down by virtue of multiple connections from Informatica. I raised an SR with Oracle (under OBIA support), who after some back-and-forth with Informatica, were told: This is not a bug. That the two error messages coming back from Oracle are handled differently is the result of a design decision and as such not a product fault.

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.

After it was ripped down last week, Chris Warticki’s blog is back online, albeit with the last posting redirecting visitors to a new location on Oracle Communities. Maybe I’m getting too old for this s##t, but I’m yet to really get a handle on how Oracle want to interact with real people on the ground. Oracle Communities is a fairly new site that I’ve not explored so much because of no OBIEE area.

Metalink was retired this weekend and made way for the new My Oracle Support system. It didn’t go as smoothly as it could have done. This post is going to be a bit of a rambling rant. Ultimately people, including me, don’t like their cheese being moved (not unless there’s a really runny piece of Camembert at the end of it). That makes it a bit more difficult to discuss because some of people’s complaints will just be geeks being stubborn (and boy, can geeks be stubborn).

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.

I’m starting on an upgrade from OBIA 7.9.5 to 7.9.6 and wading through the two main docs: 7.9.6 Upgrade guide 7.9.6 Installation guide It would be nice if Oracle could come up with some less confusing terminology. It seems that not only is the whole product of OBIA referred to as OBIA (see @lex’s posting for a good explanation), but that the sub-components which are not-OBIEE-or-DAC-or-Informatica is also OBIA, c.f. page 6-1 of the Upgrade guide “[…]upgrade your Oracle BI Applications environment to the current version.

I read and post a bit on the OBIEE and OBIA OTN forums. The noise ratio isn’t too bad, but a few things really get my goat: Not responding to answers! If I’ve gone out of my way to help, or try to help, at least have the courtesy to acknowledge it, and ideally mark as Helpful or Correct as appropriate. Even a simple “thanks.” would do. It’s just good manners.