This weekend just gone Metalink3 went to the digital dustbin. In principle this is a Good Thing, as multiple support websites for a single company is confusing and frustrating. Metalink is now “My Oracle Support” and is a flash-based whizz-bang affair. Everyone has different tastes, but there’s a lot to be said for plain HTML for ease and speed of access. But then people probably grumbled to the Wright Brothers that there was nothing wrong with land-transport at the time…

Introduction In this article I plan to get samplesales and paint repositories hosted on a single server, using one BI Server instance and two Presentation Services instances. This is on both Unix (OEL 4) and Windows, and both OC4J (OBIEE’s “basic installation” option) and OAS (“Advanced Installation”). Both samplesales and paint are shipped with 10.1.3.4 of OBIEE, you’ll find them in $OracleBI/OracleBI/server/Sample. This article assumes you’ve got the RPD of each into $OracleBI/OracleBI/server/Repository and unpacked the web cats for each into $OracleBIdata/web/catalog.

Introduction In this article I plan to get sample and paint repositories hosted on a single server, using one BI Server instance and two Presentation Services instances. This is on both Unix (OEL 4) and Windows, and both OC4J (OBIEE’s “basic installation” option) and OAS (“Advanced Installation”). Make sure you’ve read and followed part 1 - BI Server first. Remember that multiple Presentation Services instances on a machine is UNSUPPORTED BY ORACLE!

For some reason Oracle haven’t put out a 10.x version of the error & message codes reference guide for OBIEE, but the previous version for Siebel Analytics is still useful: PDF version: http://download.oracle.com/otndocs/products/bi/bi-ee/docs/784/AnyMsg.pdf HTML version: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E12103_01/books/AnyMsg/AnyMsg_Messages.html#wp1007961

xkcd.com is one of my favourite comics on the web. It strikes just the right balance of geeky witty humour without being too smart-ass. I liked this recent one a lot :-) A couple of other favourites: http://xkcd.com/149/ http://xkcd.com/327/ http://xkcd.com/123/

UPDATED: See a HOWTO for OBIEE and LoadRunner here: /2009/10/01/performance-testing-obiee-using-hp-performance-center-a.k.a.-loadrunner/ This is following on from my first post about OBIEE and LoadRunner, in which I failed dismally to get a simple session replaying. In a nutshell where I’d got to was using the “Web (Click and Script)” function which worked fine for logging in but when running a report resulted in an error on the rendered page. Digging around showed the error was from the javascript of the OBIEE front end.

A question that pops up on the OBIEE OTN forum quite often is how to use non-Oracle databases like MS SQL Server when the OBIEE server is running on a non-Windows OS such as Linux. The answer in a nutshell is that since version 10.1.3.3.1 OBIEE has been bundled with ODBC drivers for unix/linux from a company called DataDirect. See the release notes here for more information and installation instructions (as well as a list of support databases).

A follow up to my previous post about Metalink’s “Do you mean” feature, this one made me laugh: I shall miss this kind of thing when Metalink3 merges into My Oracle Support…. Meep meep!

As well as tinkering with the sawserver (Presentation Services) logging level and format, we can specific which bits of the log we’re interested in. This is useful for two reasons: We can enable detailed logging for a specific area, without impacting performance as much as detailed logging throughout would cause By only logging in detail the area of interest we can more easily read the log output and not have to wade through pages of irrelevant information Chapter 9 (“Using the Oracle BI Presentation Services Logging Facility”) of the Presentation Services Administration Guide details the log configuration.

UPDATED: See a HOWTO for OBIEE and LoadRunner here Introduction LoadRunner is a tool from HP (bought from Mercury) that can be used to simulate user activity. It supports a whole host of protocols but for OBIEE I’m obviously using the Web one. There are two flavours, “Web (Click and Script)” and “Web (HTTP/HTML)”. The latter simply shoves HTTP requests at the server, whereas “Click and Script” simulates mouse and keyboard entry and thus is more appropriate for this user-based application.