A faithful FireFox user for many users, I’ve been having a rather delightful rekindling of my old love for Opera recently. Back in the days, when I was a beardless bairn, I even paid for Opera I liked it so much. Then Firefox came along and Opera got dropped by the wayside like a teenage crush. Well Opera 10.5 was released recently and I’m liking it. I miss my Firefox extensions too much to switch entirely, but damn, Opera is FAST!

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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.

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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.

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I’ve been playing around with SQL Tuning Sets, and was trying to clear up my mess. To list all the tuning sets: [sourcecode language=“sql”] SET WRAP OFF SET LINE 140 COL NAME FOR A15 COL DESCRIPTION FOR A50 WRAPPED select name,created,last_modified,statement_count,description from DBA_SQLSET [/sourcecode] [sourcecode] NAME CREATED LAST_MODI STATEMENT_COUNT DESCRIPTION ————— ——— ——— ————— —————————————————————————————- sts_test_02 09-MAR-10 09-MAR-10 1 Test run 1 sts_test_01 12-FEB-10 12-FEB-10 1 an old STS test test test [/sourcecode]

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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.

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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.

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A new document has been published by Oracle, discussing ways of improving performance for OBIA 7.9.6 and 7.9.6.1. Its primary focus is around improving ETL performance. There’s some very interesting content including hardware sizing recommendations, and I’d strongly recommend anyone working with OBIA reads it. It’s called “Oracle Business Intelligence Applications Version 7.9.6 Performance Recommendations” and is available on My Oracle Support through Doc ID 870314.1

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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There is a LOT written about performance. And this post is now adding to it. Some of it’s excellent, some of it less so. But a lot of it starts from a point so far down the process that unless you know the first bit, you’re going to raring off and end up chasing your tail or p###ing in the wind…. (pardon my french). Without a well structured approach that you understand and always follow you’ll hit on solutions by luck only.

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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.

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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.

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Oracle Application Server (OAS) is the Web and Application server typically deployed with OBIEE. There are several settings which by default may be viewed as security weaknesses. Whether realistically a target or not, it’s good practice to always be considering security and lock down your servers as much as reasonably possible. I adopt the default stance of having to find a reason to leave something less secure, rather than justify why it needs doing.

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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:

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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