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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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

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.

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.