Wednesday, March 20, 2013

11g OCM

Hurray

Just been awarded 11g Oracle Certified Master !  ( OCM)



Tuesday, March 12, 2013

MIssing Graphs on OBIEE upgrade


Problem
You may upgrade or patch your OBIEE and find graphs missing

If you are upgrading to 11.1.1.6.2  or higher note you need Adobe Flash Player 10.1 installed in your browser. In some cases you may not be prompted for the installer/upgrader of Flash .... so go to Adobe.com and get the latest Flash player and see if it solves the problem.


Regards

Chris

Using Fully Qualified Table Names in OBIEE

Problem Description

1.  You have created a read-only user on your Oracle production database, to use as a reporting user that OBIEE can connect as.
2.  You've used the Admin Tool to successfully map the tables in
3.  However as soon as you try and do anything more you get an error ORA-00942 table or view does not exist


Why ?

Solution :   OBIEE needs to be told to qualify the table names with the Schema Owner.

Go back to the Connection Pool definition and tick the box "Use Fully Qualified Table Names", and save the repo.

Problem Solved.


Later

Chris.

Friday, March 8, 2013

Adding a Connection Pool to OBIEE

Folks

Some recommendations

If you're adding an Oracle Connection Pool the tendency is to use the TNS Alias.   This implies, though , the following problems

1: Admin Client needs the TNS Entry ( AND addition of TNS_ADMIN environmental variables into the Windows Envars, which you may not have Admin access to do on your workstation ).... sooo how to fix

2:  Server needs the TNS entry in $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin, where Oracle_HOME=MW_HOME/Oracle_BI1 - e.g.
/u01/obidev/mw/Oracle_BI1/network/admin

Means you have a pain keeping them in sync, especially as databases get created/added etc

Easy  fix : just use the  full connection string in the connection pool DS string

(DESCRIPTION =    (ADDRESS_LIST =      (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = mydbhost.org.com)(PORT= 1521))        )    (CONNECT_DATA =      (SERVICE_NAME = MYSERVICE)    )  )

( all on one line ) .   Now you don't have to maintain anything  !   YES a 10gRAC string will be long but  it's a simple copy and paste


FINALLY.   If you are adding a Connection POOL SAVE the definition and Check it IN before importing Metadata.


Ran into a problem on the import that locked the CP definition as checked OUT  and had to bounce nqsserver - nqserror 36004

Upgrading OBIEE




Points to watch out for


1.  Follow the instructions

2. Do not forget to upgrade the Catalog; this has caused me more stress than anything else, even for point fixes like .3 to .8

This means editing sawserver instanceconfig in a ridiculously long directory like

/u01/obidev/mw/instances/instance1/config/OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent/coreapplication_obips1

and changing UpgradeAndExit to TRUE, bouncing SAWSERVER/Presentation services, and then changing the flag back to FALSE, then starting it again.

....   Check all errors in the log file.

If you do not do this the symptom is a lot of Dashboards and Analyses do not appear in the system and it can be very difficult to figure out what is going on.

Regards

Chris.

Restarting OBIEE Quickly.

This is a fast and dirty method  .  Used to restart the BI Server = nqsserver

Relies on the fact that OPMN will start it up again immediately.


effectively  : get nqsserver pid and feed it to kill -9


Much faster than doing it through the console.

OS : Linux x86-64 RHEL5


ps -ef|grep obidev|grep nqsserver|grep -v grep|awk '{ print $2}'|xargs kill -9


replace obidev and nqsserver as appropriate with the owner name and process name - e.g. if bouncing Presentation Services