A brilliant posting here from Jonathan Lewis on the subject of Experts. He in turn is quoting Chen Shapira: “DBAs are under a lot of pressure not to be experts.”. Read the sentence again, as it took me a minute to figure out. He’s writing in the context of an Oracle DBA but I think it’s equally applicable to those working with an looking after installations of OBIEE et al.

An advance footnote I’ll start this by saying why I think things are how they are, and then I’ll get to the meat of my article. OBIEE in its current incarnation (v10.1.3) is a mature product. All the big bugs have been caught and fixed. All the known quirks are well documented. All the missing features are known. All the clever workarounds have been found. All the neat little hacks have been explored.

I honestly don’t dare click the “Did you mean” link ;-)

A frequent question on the OTN OBIEE forum is how to fix this error: [nQSError: 17001] Oracle Error code: 12154, message: ORA-12154: TNS:could not resolve the connect identifier specified at OCI call OCIServerAttach. [nQSError: 17014] Could not connect to Oracle database. The error is simply OBIEE reporting that it tried to connect from the BI Server to an Oracle database and the Oracle client returned an error. Distilling it down gives us this error:

October’s Oracle Critical Patch Update Advisory has been released. There are two vulnerabilities (CVE-2009-1999, CVE-2009-1990) listed under Oracle Application Server for “Component” Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and one (CVE-2009-3407) for “component” Portal. CVE-2009-1999 is OBIEE and “Fixed in all supported versions. No patch provided in this Critical Patch Update.”. CVE-2009-3407 looks like only OAS (not OBIEE), up to versions 10.1.2.3 and 10.1.4.2. CVE-2009-1990 is OBIEE and is the main vuln of interest.

w00t :-D Yesterday I got my “Pro” medal for 500 points on OTN Forums I’d been intending to post a grumpy rant about OTN recently, but maybe I’ll postpone that for a few days now ;)

Two new blogs of note : Shiv Bharti’s Blog Debashis’s OBIEE Blog Both are well worth a read & following.

Watch out if you are using init blocks in your RPD. We hit a bug (#9019374) recently that caused BI Server (10.1.3.4) to hang. The init block in question should have returned a date to update a repository variable, but because of badly-written SQL and abnormal data in the source table actually returned a null value. BI Server evidently didn’t like this null being inserted somewhere where it shouldn’t have and understandably logged :

The Critical Patch Update Pre-Release Announcement for October has been published. The pre-release is advance notice of the affected software prior to release of the quarterly Critical Patch Update. It is published on the Thursday prior to the patch releases (which was postponed by a week because of OOW). It looks like if you’re running OBIEE 10.1.3.4.0 or 10.1.3.4.1 through OAS 10.1.2.3.0/10.1.3.4.0/10.1.3.5.0 then you should check back next Tuesday 20th for details.

A new OBIEE benchmark has been published by Oracle. It’s on the same hardware as August’s benchmark - Sun T5440s. Anyone would think that Oracle like Sun ;-) Details here Numbers added to my collation post here