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.

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.

Why did this make me think of the OBIA upgrade documentation?? ;-) via I think this summarizes everything.. [Update December 18, 2013: The lady in the picture is Kathy Sierra]

Oracle have published an interesting doc 968223.1, entitled “Enterprise Deployment of Oracle BI EE on OC4J and App Servers”. It details the differences between OC4J and OAS which is useful for the current versions of OBIEE. It then also gives a useful heads-up – that WebLogic becomes the App server of choice in the next version of OBIEE All of this changes in OBI EE 11g where several projects will become absolutely dependent upon an App Server.

(Sorry for the lame title, but it gives me an excuse to put this picture in :) ) I was really pleased by the response I got from my posting about The state of OBIEE on the web, knowing that it’s not just me goes a long way to keeping my blood pressure down. The OTN forum is still an unbalanced mix of tosh (is this guy for real?) with the occasional insightful and interesting post or idea such as this really neat one from Joe Bertram about using multiple presentation services on top of the same RPD to give different interfaces to different end devices.