Metalink was retired this weekend and made way for the new My Oracle Support system. It didn’t go as smoothly as it could have done. This post is going to be a bit of a rambling rant. Ultimately people, including me, don’t like their cheese being moved (not unless there’s a really runny piece of Camembert at the end of it). That makes it a bit more difficult to discuss because some of people’s complaints will just be geeks being stubborn (and boy, can geeks be stubborn).

Introduction Whilst the BI Cluster Controller takes care nicely of clustering and failover for BI Server (nqsserver), we have to do more to ensure further resilience of the stack. A diagram I come back to again and again when working out configuration or connectivity problems is the one on P16 of the Deployment Guide. With this you can work out most issues for yourself through simple reasoning. Print it out, pin it to your wall, and read it!

Want to find all PDFs from Oracle about OBIEE? There’s some interesting ones that this turned up on Oracle’s public FTP. In particular: BI EE Environmental and Multi-User Development Migration Processes Securing Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (There’s also PowerPoint files on there including this one but Google doesn’t seem to index them) You can use Google’s Advanced Search page to build similar queries: You can also use Google Alerts so that any time a new entry matching your search criteria is added in Google’s index you get notified of it either by email or on an RSS feed:

Christian Screen has done a nice video explaining the CAF installation, and has promised a deep-dive followup which I’m looking forward to. Click here for the article

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 ;)