I wrote last year about Graphing I/O data using gnuplot and Oracle V$SYSSTAT, using a script from Kevin Closson in his article How To Produce Raw, Spreadsheet-Ready Physical I/O Data With PL/SQL. Good For Exadata, Good For Traditional Storage. Here I’ve got a simple comparison of the data recorded through this script (in essence, Oracle’s V$SYSSTAT), and directly on the OS through HP’s MeasureWare. It’s graphed out with my new favourite tool, rrdtool:

I’ve added two new toys to my geek arsenal today. First is one with which I’ve dabbled before, but struggled to master. The second is a revelation to me and which I discovered courtesy of twitter. rrdtool rrdtool is a data collection and graphing tool which I’ve been aware of for a while. I wanted to use it when I wrote about Collecting OBIEE systems management data with JMX, but couldn’t get it to work.

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:

Introduction This is the second 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 article takes data that part one showed you how to collect into a tab-separated file that looks something like this: [sourcecode] 2010-11-29-14:48:18 1 0 11 0 3 2 1 676 340 0 53 1 0 41 0 3 0 2010-11-29-14:49:18 1 0 11 0 3 2 1 676 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 3 0 2010-11-29-14:50:18 2 0 16 1 4 3 1 679 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 4 0 2010-11-29-14:51:18 2 2 19 1 4 3 1 679 32 0 53 1 0 58 0 4 0 2010-11-29-14:52:18 2 1 19 1 4 3 4 682 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 4 0 2010-11-29-14:53:18 2 1 19 1 4 3 4 682 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 4 0 2010-11-29-14:54:18 2 0 19 1 4 3 1 682 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 4 0 [/sourcecode]

They say about travelling that it’s the journey and not the destination, and the same is true with this problem we hit during a deployment to Production. We were deploying a new OBIEE 10g implementation, with authentication provided by Microsoft Active Directory (AD) through the LDAP functionality in OBIEE. As a side note, it’s a rather nice way to do authentication, although maybe I’m biased coming from our previous implementation which used EBS integrated authentication and was a bugger to set up and work with.

Continuing in the beard-scratching theme of Unix related posts (previously - awk), here’s a way to graph out the I/O profile of your Oracle database via the Oracle metrics in gv$sysstat, and gnuplot. This is only the system I/O as observed by Oracle, so for belts & braces (or to placate a cynical sysadmin ;-)) you may want to cross-reference it with something like sar. First, a pretty picture of what you can get:

Introduction We’re in the process of implemention Resource Manager (RM) on our Oracle 11gR1 Data Warehouse. We’ve currently got one DW application live, but have several more imminent. We identified RM as a suitable way of - as the name would suggest - managing the resources on the server. In the first instance we’re looking at simply protecting CPU for, and from, future applications. At some point it would be interesting to use some of the more granular and precise functions to demote long-running queries, have nighttime/daytime plans, etc.

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.

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.

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.