Folk from Yorkshire are tight, so the stereotype goes. So here’s a cheap-ass way to monitor OBIEE 10g using nothing but the OBIEE built-in systemsmanagement component, the jmx agent, and jconsole (which is part of the standard Java distribution): From here you can also export to CSV the various counters, and then store history, plot it out with gnuplot or Excel, etc. If anyone’s interested let me know and I’ll document a bit more about how I did this, but it’s basically building on previous work I’ve documented around jmx and OBIEE.

Jeff McQuigg has posted two presentations that he gave at Openworld 2010 on his website here: http://greatobi.wordpress.com/2010/10/26/oow-presos/ They’re full of real content and well worth a read. There’s excellent levels of detail and plenty to think about if you’re involved in OBI or DW development projects.

More of a unix thing than DW/BI this post, but I have a beard so am semi-qualified…. The requirement was to improve the performance of some ODI processing that as part of its work was taking one huge input file, and splitting it into chunks based on content in the file. To add some (minor) spice the file was fixed width with no deliminators, so the easy awk answers that I found on google weren’t applicable.

I’m a geek. I like understanding things in their absolute entirety. It frustrates me to have to make presumptions or assumptions about something. I like to get down ’n dirty and find out what makes things tick. So that necessitates reading manuals. And unfortunately, Oracle don’t make that easy all the time. Some of the manuals are not very good, and others are difficult to find. Given the complexity of the OBIEE stack and proliferation of terminology and product names, sorting the wheat from the chaff can be a headache.

@alexgorbachev tweeted me recently after picking up my presentation on Performance Testing and OBIEE. His question got me thinking, and as ever the answer “It Depends” is appropriate here :-) Why is the measurement being done? Without knowing the context of the work Alex is doing, how to measure depends on whether the measurement needs to be of: - The actual response times that the users are getting, or The response times that the system is currently capable of delivering This may sound like splitting hairs or beard-scratching irrelevance, but it’s not.

Here are a couple of little unix scripts that I wrote whilst developing my performance testing OBIEE method. They’re nothing particularly special, but may save you the couple of minutes it’d take to write them :) Note that some of this data is available from Usage Tracking and where it is I’d recommend getting it from there, databases generally being easier to reliably and repeatably query than a transient log file.

OBIEE 11g is going to be officially launched on 7th July (this year!) in London: Launch Event: Introducing Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g h/t to Twitter and blogs (including an Oracle-branded one) this morning. Good news travels fast! :-) Looks like John Minkjan won the bet, did he know something we didn’t? ;-) (although is “Launch” the same as “GA”?)

Here’s my presentation “Performance Testing and OBIEE” that I gave at the RittmanMead BI Forum 2010: Performance Testing and OBIEE.pptx It’s a Powerpoint 2007 file (pptx) for which you may need the Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer 2007. I’ve included copious notes on each slide which hopefully cover the gist of what I talked about when I was delivering it. There are also a handful of funky animations which is why I’ve left it in pptx and not exported to PDF or other format (sorry Open Office users).

I’ve just returned from the RittmanMead 2010 BI Forum which this year was at the Seattle Hotel in Brighton Marina. The event was limited to 50 attendees, and I think this was a good number. The event was explicitly pitched at a very technical expert level, and the audience very much represented this. Whereas at a larger conference you may find the odd manager wandering around pretending to be technical ;-) this event was most definitely not pitched at such types.

Troubleshooting EBS-BI integrated authentication can be a tiresome activity, so here’s a shortcut that might help. If you suspect the problem lies with EBS then you can leave OBIEE out of the equation. Login to EBS Use FireBug or Fiddler2 to inspect web traffic as follows: Click the BI link from EBS Should be first a request to EBS server, which returns 302 and redirects to http://<bi server>:<port>/analytics/saw.dll?Dashboard&acf=101507310 Record the value of acf (eg 101507310)