#obihackers There’s a #obihackers IRC channel on freenode, where a dozen or so of us have hung out for several years now. Chat is usually OBIEE, Oracle, ODI, and general geek out. Bear in mind this is the equivalent of us hanging out in a bar; if you wanna shoot the shit with a geeky question about OBIEE go ahead, but if you’ve come to get help with your homework without even buying a round, you’ll probably get short shrift… ;-)

InfluxDB is a great time series database, that’s recently been rebranded as part of the “TICK” stack, including data collectors, visualisation, and ETL/Alerting. I’ve yet to really look at the other components, but InfluxDB alone works just great with my favourite visualisation/analysis tool for time series metrics, Grafana. Getting data into InfluxDB is easy, with many tools supporting the native InfluxDB line input protocol, and those that don’t often supporting the carbon protocol (from Graphite), which InfluxDB also supports (along with others).

Thanks to the power of twitter, I can look back on all the many and varied Full English breakfasts that I’ve (mostly) enjoyed: 👉🏻 https://twitter.com/search?q=rmoff%20%23fullenglish&src=typd What makes a good Full English? Good ingredients, cooked well. Nothing worse than a limp pink sausage, as it were. Sausage, standard pork or Cumberland at most. Definitely no daft apricot and guava bean with a hint of foie gras nonsense. Must be cooked right well, crispy skin, almost burnt.

It struck me today when I was writing my most recent blog over at Rittman Mead that I’ve been playing with visualising OBIEE metrics for years now. Back in 2009 I wrote about using something called JManage to pull metrics out of OBIEE 10g via JMX: Still with OBIEE 10g in 2011, I was using rrdtool and some horrible-looking tcl hacking to get the metrics out through jmx : 2014 brought with it DMS and my first forays with Graphite for storing & visualising data:

I will now be blogging mostly over at the venerable blog of my employer, Rittman Mead. You can see my first posting here: Web Services in BI Publisher 11g. Don’t entirely exclude this rnm1978 blog from your feeds, as I may still post more esoteric and random tidbits here.

This article has been superseded by a newer version: Instrumenting OBIEE Database Connections For Improved Performance Diagnostics (Previously on this blog: 1, 2, 3…) Summary Instrument your code. Stop guessing. Make your DBA happy. Make your life as a BI Admin easier. The Problem OBIEE will typically connect to the database using a generic application account. (Hopefully, you’ll have isolated it to an account used only for this purpose - if you haven’t, you should.

It’s not my fault really. When running an installation, presented with the option of (a) do a bunch of stuff and wait to continue the install later or (b) tick a box and continue now it’s a better man that I who would opt for option (a). When I recently installed OBIEE 11g, I was prompted to get a script run as root to set up the inventory, or tick “Continue Installation with local inventory” to continue with the install.

Short note to record this, as Google drew no hits on it. Windows XP machine with existing Oracle 11.1 client installation, all working fine. Installed Oracle 11.2 XE, and started getting these errors: [sourcecode] C:\Windows\System32>tnsping DBNAME TNS Ping Utility for 32-bit Windows: Version 11.2.0.2.0 - Production on 26-SEP-2011 11:01:11 Copyright (c) 1997, 2010, Oracle. All rights reserved. Used parameter files: C:\app\userid\product\11.1.0\client_1\network\admin\sqlnet.ora Used TNSNAMES adapter to resolve the alias Message 3513 not found; product=NETWORK; facility=TNS OK (20 msec) [/sourcecode]

I noticed in Ed Stevens’ blog posting here that some sourcecode he’d posted had certain lines highlighted. Wordpress provides the sourcecode tag for marking up sourcecode in blog posts. For example: cd /some/random/folder ls -l # do not run this next line! is much better presented as: [sourcecode language=“bash”] cd /some/random/folder ls -l # do not run this next line! [/sourcecode] by wrapping it in [sourcecode] tags I’ve known about the language=‘xx’ attribute that you can use with the tag, but Ed’s posting prompted me to check on the syntax and it turns out there a few tweaks one can use.

If you only read one blog post this month, read James Morle’s eloquent attack on the term “Best Practice”. I’m very excited to be joining RittmanMead next month! I’m looking forward to working with some of the industry’s most respected experts.