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!

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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:

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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

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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.

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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.

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

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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:

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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.

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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 ;)

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

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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 :

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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.

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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

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The latest point release of Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, 7.9.6.1, has been released and is available for download from here (direct link to download). The version.txt reports the version as: Build: 7.9.6.1.100609.2038 Release Version: Oracle Business Intelligence Applications 7.9.6.1 Package: 100609.2038 No updated documentation library yet through, so can’t nosey through the release notes. The docs that come with the download are labelled 7.9.6 and dated April 09 so don’t look like they’ve been updated either.

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OBIEE comes with a very useful usage tracking feature. For information about it and how to set it up see these links: http://obiee101.blogspot.com/2008/08/obiee-setting-up-usage-tracking.html http://www.oracle.com/technology/obe/obe_bi/bi_ee_1013/usage_tracking/usage_tracking.htm http://108obiee.blogspot.com/2009/07/obiee-usage-tracking-setup-and-cloning.html Usage Tracking captures the logical SQL of queries in a column called QUERY_TEXT in the table S_NQ_ACCT. However, out of the box this column is defined as 1k (1024 bytes) long. In some situations this will limit its usefulness because the text will be truncated if necessary when it’s inserted.

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This is a supplemental post to this one describing how to set up a VUser in LoadRunner to test OBIEE. It’s various notes that I made during the development but which aren’t directly part of the step-by-step tutorial. They’re not necessarily vital for recording scripts, but observations and explanations that should be helpful when working with LoadRunner and OBIEE. Validation using sawserver logs It’s no use running a load test if the load you think you’re applying isn’t actually being applied.

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My two earlier posts (here and here) detail the difficulties I had with LoadRunner (now called HP Performance Center). After a bit of a break along with encouragement from knowing that it must be possible because it’s how Oracle generates their OBIEE benchmarks I’ve now got something working. I also got a useful doc from Oracle support which outlines pretty much what I’ve done here too. In essence what you do - and what the Metalink document 496417.

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A new blog from James Morle, who I don’t know but from other bloggers sounds well respected, and describes himself thus: Since it’s been nearly ten years since I wrote my book, Scaling Oracle8i, I thought it was about time that I started writing again. I thought I would start with the new-fangled blogging thing, and see where it takes me. Here goes. He’s got a really interesting post on “red flags” to look for in diagnosing performance problems in Oracle: Spotting the Red Flags (Part 1 of n).

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SQL Developer v2.1 Early Adopter was released yesterday. Download it here New features list Hat-tip and hat-tip

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Bit of an odd one this. Oracle 11g database, a user’s password has expired. But when I try to change it, I can’t: [sourcecode language=“bash”] $sqlplus MYUSER/oldPW@oraDBServer SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production on Wed Sep 23 07:57:41 2009 Copyright (c) 1982, 2005, Oracle. All rights reserved. ERROR: ORA-28001: the password has expired Changing password for MYUSER New password: Retype new password: ERROR: ORA-01017: invalid username/password; logon denied Password unchanged [/sourcecode]

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