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.” To me that implies that once I’ve done this, my OBIA will be upgraded - but no, actually, some of the supporting bits will be upgraded, but I still have to do a heck of a lot more grunt work before what I consider OBIA (and the manual is called OBIA too!) is upgraded.

Very good post by @lex giving a nice clear explanation of what OBIA (Oracle Business Intelligence Applications) is

http://siebel-essentials.blogspot.com/2009/06/can-you-describe-oracle-bi-applications.html

This should be made a sticky on the OBIA forum in my opinion.

It’s clear from postings on the forum that an awful lot of people don’t understand what OBIA is or how it sits with OBIEE. I even attended a course last week in which the Oracle trainer stated that OBIEE included ETL and DW schemas, and stuck to this when challenged.

OBIEE’s Systems Management component exposes configuration and performance data through Java MBeans. As discussed in other posts these can be be accessed through several different ways:

• JConsole (see also here)
• oc4j
• Windows PerfMon (although I guess this isn’t actually using MBeans/JMX?)
• saw.dll?perfmon
• BI Management Pack

Since it’s a standard java technology being used we can in theory use anything that is designed for monitoring mbeans via jmx. Doing some Googling I discovered jManage.

If, for some reason, you need to check what web application server is in use for Presentation Services (as this chap needed to), you can use an add-in for FireFox called HttpFox to inspect the HTTP headers.

1. Install HttpFox (and obviously Firefox if you don’t have it already!)
2. Open the HttpFox window (Tools -> HttpFox -> Toggle HttpFox)
3. Click the Start button in the HttpFox window
4. Navigate to your OBIEE home page
5. Click the Stop button in the HttpFox window
6. Click on the first entry in the list, URL should be http://yourserver:7777/analytics/saw.dll?Dashboard
7. In the right-hand pane of the Headers tab you should see Server listed. In this instance, it’s Oracle-Application-Server-10g/10.1.3.1.0 Oracle-HTTP-Server

I found this post very interesting: Paul Graham : Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule (originally found here)

It was one of those mini-revelations when I found something that greatly resonated and explained an inexplicable frustration I find in the workplace sometimes.

I wonder how applicable it can be to a large corporation though, rather than a start-up where it’s given that people are allowed to be bolshy with their meetings? ;-)

We routinely change Oracle passwords as part of security best-practice, I keep hitting this and keep forgetting why! :-)

[sourcecode language=‘sql’] ALTER USER DAC_REPO IDENTIFIED BY 1KoBe3RH REPLACE YlR94tqp [/sourcecode]

Error report: SQL Error: ORA-00922: missing or invalid option 00922. 00000 - “missing or invalid option” *Cause: *Action:

Someone better qualified than me can explain why but I suspect it’s the leading number in the new password. Quoting the passwords then works fine:

One of my little gripes with Metalink is its purporting to be helpful when it’s blatantly not. Here’s one:

Now which is more likely, on Metalink 3; that I’m searching for sawserver (integral component to OBIEE), or sqlserver?!

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

Mark Rittman has an excellent article about querying the DAC repository database tables, including a downloadable RPD file. Being new to working with RPDs I thought it would be good practise to explore this as well as hopefully get some useful information about our current ETL deployment.

I downloaded the RPD to c:\OracleBI\server\Repository and opened it up in the Admin tool (Administrator/Administrator).
First off I changed the connection pool to point to my DAC repository database, having setup a TNS entry for it first.

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.

By a strange co-incidence after following this thread on OTN forums about a BI crash and struggling to understand the actual problem, I think I’ve encountered it myself!

I’ve got a test install of OBIEE running on my Windows XP laptop, and whilst building a report in Answers got this:

](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_RCx_EVJpczQ/SmiDrEorbbI/AAAAAAAAGcg/OPGwTLXXg8k/s1600/crash1.png)[ was:

szAppName : sawserver.exe szAppVer : 10.1.3.4 szModName : kernel32.dll szModVer : 5.1.2600.3119 offset : 000097a3

Going to the sawserver log at c:\OracleBIData\web\log\sawlog0.log disappointingly showed no error entries :(

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.

Part of looking at the various gubbins inside OBIEE led me to realise that the Oracle BI Management application drives quite a few things. It exposes MBeans (Management Beans, a java term), accessible through jmx. In the installation of OBIEE this component is referred to as “Systems Management”.

The MBeans give us real-time performance information, along with access to all the configuration options that are normally done through config files (instanceconfig.xml etc). Bear in mind if using it for updating configuration instead of through the files you don’t get any backup created, so for that reason alone I would suggest it should only be used for reading current values.

A few points to add to my previous posting on JConsole:

• As well as performance data, you have access to configuration data. Be aware that it is read-write! So whilst it might be a nice alternative to digging around for your instanceconfig.xml etc, you should be careful
• If you have your BI Server and Presentation Services deployed on separate servers then you will only get MBeans for the relevant service:

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.

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:

1. 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.
   It also helps people who come along afterwards as you get the completed picture rather than half a question/answer thread.
   Forums Etiquette

[edit] See this post too [/edit] On an OBIEE server run [sourcecode language=“bash”] nohup obiee/systemsmanagement/runagent.sh & [/sourcecode] and then run jconsole (make sure you’ve set the DISPLAY first if you’re running it from UNIX). NB: if you don’t have jconsole in your path you can search for it: [sourcecode language=“bash”] $whereis jconsole jconsole: /opt/java1.5/bin/jconsole /opt/java6/bin/jconsole</span> [/sourcecode] You should find it under your java/bin directory

You should get this kind of connection dialog: Click connect, and the console will launch. From here click on the MBeans tab, where you’ve got access to performance and configuration data

I’m working on a scripted load test for OBIEE using nqcmd to run reports multiple times. I hit this interesting issue.

Cut and pasting the logical SQL that Presentation Services sends to BI Server from Manage Sessions -> Statement, I kept getting this error when I ran it through nqcmd:

[10058][State: S1000] [NQODBC] [SQL_STATE: S1000] [nQSError: 10058] A general error has occurred.
[nQSError: 27005] Unresolved column: “Natural Account (COA)”.“Account Parent1 Code”.
Statement preparation failed

It’s possible to change the error pages served up by OAS/Apache by using the ErrorDocument directive. This is widely documented.

However, to get this to take effect in an oc4j application (such as analytics) you need to change mod_oc4j.conf too.
(I found this out from this post here)

Take backups of httpd.conf and mod_oc4j.conf, and then edit them as follows:

In httpd.conf add:
ErrorDocument 500 /500.html
where /500.html is a relative path to your custom document

New releases this week - 10.1.3.4.1 of OBIEE, and 7.9.6 of OBIA.

After a bit of scrabbling around found:

“The 10.1.3.4.1 release of the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition introduces no new features.”

Though there are some new bits and pieces for Publisher

For 7.9.6 OBIA, there’s no New Features document :(
By piecing together the “What’s New in This Release” for each document you can build up a picture (eg in the Upgrade Guide there’s reference to changes for the doc relating to a new version of Informatica), but it would be nice to have it all in one place: