In Oracle 11g, the DBMS_STATS procedure GATHER_SCHEMA_STATS takes a parameter ‘options’ which defines the scope of the objects processed by the procedure call, as well as the action. It can be either GATHER or LIST (gather the stats, or list out the objects to be touched, respectively), and AUTO, STALE or EMPTY (defining the object selection to process). GATHER on its own will gather stats on all objects in the schema GATHER EMPTY / LIST EMPTY is self-explanatory - objects with no statistics.

When using preupgrade to upgrade an existing Fedora 14 installation to Fedora 15, the following two errors were encountered: Failed to fetch release info No groups available in any repository The box sits on a network behind a proxy out to the web. The resolution was to make sure that environment variables http_proxy and https_proxy are set: [sourcecode language=“bash”] export http_proxy=http://user:password@proxyserver:port export https_proxy=http://user:password@proxyserver:port [/sourcecode] Make sure you do this from the user from which you run preupgrade.

Excel may send chills down the spine of us when we hear users talking about its [ab]use, but it has its place in the toolset. For my money, it is a very good tool for knocking out graphs which look decent. Of course, rrdtool is my geek tool of choice for dynamic long-term graphing, but when doing scratch PoC work, I normally fall back to Excel. One thing which has frustrated me over time is, well, time, and Excel’s handling thereof.

Here’s a quotation that I’ve just read and wanted to share. It is all part of a BAAG approach to troubleshooting problems, performance in particular. From Greg Rahn (web|twitter) on oracle-l: There are always exceptions, but exceptions can be justified and supported with data. Just beware of the the silver bullet syndrome… The unfortunate part […] is that rarely anyone goes back and does the root cause analysis. It tends to fall into the bucket of “problem…solved”.

Blogging from Oracle itself about OBIEE has always been a bit sparse, certainly in comparison to that which there is for core RDBMS. It’s good to see a new blog emerge in the last couple of months from OBI Product Assurance, including some nice ’n spicy detailed config/tuning info. Find it here: http://blogs.oracle.com/pa/. There’s a couple more OBI blogs from Oracle, but both are fairly stale: Implementing Oracle BI & EPM Solutions - Rob Reynolds OBIEE Ramblings Oracle BI Foundation (thanks Daan for pointing this one out)

OK, a bit tired on a Monday morning, and so a bit sarcastic. I’ve not really fallen off my chair, but I am shocked. I honestly didn’t think it would happen. Oracle have finally released OBI 11g for HP-UX Itanium: In other news, patchset 10.1.3.4.2 for OBI 10g was released today, I wonder if/when we’ll get an HP-UX Itanium version? The download page has it conspicuous by its absence even from “Coming Soon”:

Have you defined CLIENT_ID in your OBIEE RPD yet? You really ought to. As well as helping track down users of troublesome queries, it also tags dump files with the OBIEE user of an offending query should the worst occur: For details, see: Identify your OBIEE users by setting Client ID in Oracle connection Instrumenting OBIEE for tracing Oracle DB calls

A new version of OBI 10g (remember that?) has just been released, the Oracle twitter machine announced: Along with presumably a bunch of bugfixes, the release notes list new functionality in catalog manager: Download 10.1.3.4.2 from here

Trying to connect to a repository in ODI using OCI. Target database is Oracle 11.1.0.7. Throws this error: [sourcecode] com.sunopsis.sql.l: Oracle Data Integrator Timeout: connection with URL jdbc:oracle:oci8:@ODIPRD and user ODI_USER. at com.sunopsis.sql.SnpsConnection.a(SnpsConnection.java) at com.sunopsis.sql.SnpsConnection.t(SnpsConnection.java) at com.sunopsis.sql.SnpsConnection.connect(SnpsConnection.java) at com.sunopsis.tools.connection.DwgRepositoryConnectionsCreator.a(DwgRepositoryConnectionsCreator.java) at com.sunopsis.tools.connection.DwgRepositoryConnectionsCreator.a(DwgRepositoryConnectionsCreator.java) at com.sunopsis.graphical.l.oi.a(oi.java) […] [/sourcecode] Normally this error would be caused by a misconfigured Oracle client. For example, a missing or incorrect tnsnames.ora entry. I validated these and got a successful response using tnsping.

July’s Critical Patch Update from Oracle includes CVE-2011-2241, which affects OBIEE versions 10.1.3.4.1 and 11.1.1.3. No details of the exploit other than it “allows remote attackers to affect availability via unknown vectors related to Analytics Server.” It is categorised with a CVSS score of 5 (on a scale of 10), with no impact on Authentication, Confidentiality, or Integrity, and “Partial+” impact on Availability. So to a security-unqualified layman (me), it sounds like someone could remotely crash your NQSServer process, but not do any more damage than that.