It struck me today when I was writing my most recent blog over at Rittman Mead that I’ve been playing with visualising OBIEE metrics for years now. Back in 2009 I wrote about using something called JManage to pull metrics out of OBIEE 10g via JMX: Still with OBIEE 10g in 2011, I was using rrdtool and some horrible-looking tcl hacking to get the metrics out through jmx : 2014 brought with it DMS and my first forays with Graphite for storing & visualising data:

I will now be blogging mostly over at the venerable blog of my employer, Rittman Mead. You can see my first posting here: Web Services in BI Publisher 11g. Don’t entirely exclude this rnm1978 blog from your feeds, as I may still post more esoteric and random tidbits here.

This article has been superseded by a newer version: Instrumenting OBIEE Database Connections For Improved Performance Diagnostics (Previously on this blog: 1, 2, 3…) Summary Instrument your code. Stop guessing. Make your DBA happy. Make your life as a BI Admin easier. The Problem OBIEE will typically connect to the database using a generic application account. (Hopefully, you’ll have isolated it to an account used only for this purpose - if you haven’t, you should.

If you only read one blog post this month, read James Morle’s eloquent attack on the term “Best Practice”. I’m very excited to be joining RittmanMead next month! I’m looking forward to working with some of the industry’s most respected experts.

Blogging from Oracle itself about OBIEE has always been a bit sparse, certainly in comparison to that which there is for core RDBMS. It’s good to see a new blog emerge in the last couple of months from OBI Product Assurance, including some nice ’n spicy detailed config/tuning info. Find it here: http://blogs.oracle.com/pa/. There’s a couple more OBI blogs from Oracle, but both are fairly stale: Implementing Oracle BI & EPM Solutions - Rob Reynolds OBIEE Ramblings Oracle BI Foundation (thanks Daan for pointing this one out)

OK, a bit tired on a Monday morning, and so a bit sarcastic. I’ve not really fallen off my chair, but I am shocked. I honestly didn’t think it would happen. Oracle have finally released OBI 11g for HP-UX Itanium: In other news, patchset 10.1.3.4.2 for OBI 10g was released today, I wonder if/when we’ll get an HP-UX Itanium version? The download page has it conspicuous by its absence even from “Coming Soon”:

Have you defined CLIENT_ID in your OBIEE RPD yet? You really ought to. As well as helping track down users of troublesome queries, it also tags dump files with the OBIEE user of an offending query should the worst occur: For details, see: Identify your OBIEE users by setting Client ID in Oracle connection Instrumenting OBIEE for tracing Oracle DB calls

A new version of OBI 10g (remember that?) has just been released, the Oracle twitter machine announced: Along with presumably a bunch of bugfixes, the release notes list new functionality in catalog manager: Download 10.1.3.4.2 from here

July’s Critical Patch Update from Oracle includes CVE-2011-2241, which affects OBIEE versions 10.1.3.4.1 and 11.1.1.3. No details of the exploit other than it “allows remote attackers to affect availability via unknown vectors related to Analytics Server.” It is categorised with a CVSS score of 5 (on a scale of 10), with no impact on Authentication, Confidentiality, or Integrity, and “Partial+” impact on Availability. So to a security-unqualified layman (me), it sounds like someone could remotely crash your NQSServer process, but not do any more damage than that.

I noticed on Nico’s wiki (which is amazing by the way, it has so much information in it) a bunch of additional parameters for nqcmd other than those which are displayed in the default helptext (nqcmd -h). These are the additional ones: [sourcecode] -b -w<# wait seconds> -c<# cancel interval seconds> -n<# number of loops> -r<# number of requests per shared session> -t<# number of threads> -T (a flag to turn on time statistics) -SmartDiff (a flag to enable SmartDiff tags in output) -P -impersonate -runas [/sourcecode]