UPDATED: See a HOWTO for OBIEE and LoadRunner here: /2009/10/01/performance-testing-obiee-using-hp-performance-center-a.k.a.-loadrunner/

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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).

UPDATED: See a HOWTO for OBIEE and LoadRunner here

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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. [edit]I’m not sure if this is actually the case[/edit]

Here’s a set of scripts that I use on our servers as a quick way to check if the various BI components are up and running.

Because we split the stack across servers, there are different scripts called in combination. On our dev boxes we have everything and so the script calls all three sub-scripts, whereas on Production each server will run one of:

1. BI Server
2. Presentation Server & OAS
3. Informatica & DAC

The scripts source another script called process_check.sh which I based on the common.sh script that comes with OBIEE.

Very good post by @lex giving a nice clear explanation of what OBIA (Oracle Business Intelligence Applications) is

http://siebel-essentials.blogspot.com/2009/06/can-you-describe-oracle-bi-applications.html

This should be made a sticky on the OBIA forum in my opinion.

It’s clear from postings on the forum that an awful lot of people don’t understand what OBIA is or how it sits with OBIEE. I even attended a course last week in which the Oracle trainer stated that OBIEE included ETL and DW schemas, and stuck to this when challenged.

OBIEE’s Systems Management component exposes configuration and performance data through Java MBeans. As discussed in other posts these can be be accessed through several different ways:

• JConsole (see also here)
• oc4j
• Windows PerfMon (although I guess this isn’t actually using MBeans/JMX?)
• saw.dll?perfmon
• BI Management Pack

Since it’s a standard java technology being used we can in theory use anything that is designed for monitoring mbeans via jmx. Doing some Googling I discovered jManage.

If, for some reason, you need to check what web application server is in use for Presentation Services (as this chap needed to), you can use an add-in for FireFox called HttpFox to inspect the HTTP headers.

1. Install HttpFox (and obviously Firefox if you don’t have it already!)
2. Open the HttpFox window (Tools -> HttpFox -> Toggle HttpFox)
3. Click the Start button in the HttpFox window
4. Navigate to your OBIEE home page
5. Click the Stop button in the HttpFox window
6. Click on the first entry in the list, URL should be http://yourserver:7777/analytics/saw.dll?Dashboard
7. In the right-hand pane of the Headers tab you should see Server listed. In this instance, it’s Oracle-Application-Server-10g/10.1.3.1.0 Oracle-HTTP-Server

Yet another way to access the BI Management data discussed here - through Windows’ PerfMon tool.

This will only work for installations where your OBIEE server is running on Windows. You should be able to run PerfMon locally or remotely. Standard practise would be not to run it locally on a Production machine :-)

To run PerfMon go to Start->Run and enter perfmon, or navigate Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Performance

Mark Rittman has an excellent article about querying the DAC repository database tables, including a downloadable RPD file. Being new to working with RPDs I thought it would be good practise to explore this as well as hopefully get some useful information about our current ETL deployment.

I downloaded the RPD to c:\OracleBI\server\Repository and opened it up in the Admin tool (Administrator/Administrator).
First off I changed the connection pool to point to my DAC repository database, having setup a TNS entry for it first.

Our main servers are Unix and I’m as happy as a pig in muck at the command line, so when I’m working on Windows (where I’ve got a test OBIEE install) I like to stick with the CLI where possible.

PSService is one of those tools that I instinctively reach for without realising it. Combined with Launchy, it’s even better.

Simply put, you can control windows services from the command line.

By a strange co-incidence after following this thread on OTN forums about a BI crash and struggling to understand the actual problem, I think I’ve encountered it myself!

I’ve got a test install of OBIEE running on my Windows XP laptop, and whilst building a report in Answers got this:

](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_RCx_EVJpczQ/SmiDrEorbbI/AAAAAAAAGcg/OPGwTLXXg8k/s1600/crash1.png)[ was:

szAppName : sawserver.exe szAppVer : 10.1.3.4 szModName : kernel32.dll szModVer : 5.1.2600.3119 offset : 000097a3

Going to the sawserver log at c:\OracleBIData\web\log\sawlog0.log disappointingly showed no error entries :(

A few points to add to my previous posting on JConsole:

• As well as performance data, you have access to configuration data. Be aware that it is read-write! So whilst it might be a nice alternative to digging around for your instanceconfig.xml etc, you should be careful
• If you have your BI Server and Presentation Services deployed on separate servers then you will only get MBeans for the relevant service:

As a kid I loved the idea of lego where you can disassemble and reassemble something from the ground up. As soon as I got my hands on a computer it was the same. You can have your Acorn Archimedes with its games, where do I find the sprites and sound files behind it? Likewise Microsoft Word, let me at the VBA underneath to hack it around and see what else it can do.

[edit] See this post too [/edit] On an OBIEE server run [sourcecode language=“bash”] nohup obiee/systemsmanagement/runagent.sh & [/sourcecode] and then run jconsole (make sure you’ve set the DISPLAY first if you’re running it from UNIX). NB: if you don’t have jconsole in your path you can search for it: [sourcecode language=“bash”] $whereis jconsole jconsole: /opt/java1.5/bin/jconsole /opt/java6/bin/jconsole</span> [/sourcecode] You should find it under your java/bin directory

You should get this kind of connection dialog: Click connect, and the console will launch. From here click on the MBeans tab, where you’ve got access to performance and configuration data

I’m working on a scripted load test for OBIEE using nqcmd to run reports multiple times. I hit this interesting issue.

Cut and pasting the logical SQL that Presentation Services sends to BI Server from Manage Sessions -> Statement, I kept getting this error when I ran it through nqcmd:

[10058][State: S1000] [NQODBC] [SQL_STATE: S1000] [nQSError: 10058] A general error has occurred.
[nQSError: 27005] Unresolved column: “Natural Account (COA)”.“Account Parent1 Code”.
Statement preparation failed

It’s possible to change the error pages served up by OAS/Apache by using the ErrorDocument directive. This is widely documented.

However, to get this to take effect in an oc4j application (such as analytics) you need to change mod_oc4j.conf too.
(I found this out from this post here)

Take backups of httpd.conf and mod_oc4j.conf, and then edit them as follows:

In httpd.conf add:
ErrorDocument 500 /500.html
where /500.html is a relative path to your custom document

New releases this week - 10.1.3.4.1 of OBIEE, and 7.9.6 of OBIA.

After a bit of scrabbling around found:

“The 10.1.3.4.1 release of the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition introduces no new features.”

Though there are some new bits and pieces for Publisher

For 7.9.6 OBIA, there’s no New Features document :(
By piecing together the “What’s New in This Release” for each document you can build up a picture (eg in the Upgrade Guide there’s reference to changes for the doc relating to a new version of Informatica), but it would be nice to have it all in one place:

We’ve got a setup of two OAS/Presentation Services boxes and two BI Server boxes, with load balancing/failover throughout.
The Load Balancing of the web requests is being done through a separate bit of kit, an F5 BIG-IP load balancer. This directs the requests at the two OAS servers.

The problem we have is that by default OAS serves HTTP on port 7777, but the F5 is using port 80. A request for our load balanced URL: http://bi.mycompany.com/analytics/ barfs out with

(See here and here for history)

I edited the shell script which is eventually called by run-saw.sh to start the sawserver, (OracleBI)/setup/sawserver.sh, to use trus:
Comment out the final line:

$SASAWSERVER

and insert as a new line:

tusc -fepan -o /tmp/sawserver_tusc.out $SASAWSERVER

The output of trus ended with this:

open("/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/lib/libstd_v2.so.1", O_RDONLY|0x800, 0) ……… ERR#2 ENOENT
open("/app/oracle/product/obiee/server/Bin64/libstd_v2.so.1", O_RDONLY|0x800, 0) . ERR#2 ENOENT
open("/app/oracle/product/obiee/web/bin64/libstd_v2.so.1", O_RDONLY|0x800, 0) …. ERR#2 ENOENT
open("/app/oracle/product/obiee/odbc/lib64/libstd_v2.so.1", O_RDONLY|0x800, 0) … ERR#2 ENOENT
open("/usr/lib/libstd_v2.so.1", O_RDONLY|0x800, 0) …………………………. ERR#2 ENOENT
open("/lib/libstd_v2.so.1", O_RDONLY|0x800, 0) …………………………….. ERR#2 ENOENT
open("/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/lib/libstd_v2.so.1", O_RDONLY|0x800, 0) ……… ERR#2 ENOENT
open("/opt/aCC/lib/hpux64/libstd_v2.so.1", O_RDONLY|0x800, 0) ……………….. ERR#2 ENOENT

We’re getting this error in the Presentation Services plug-in [analytics].
Log file: /j2ee/home/application-deployments/analytics/home_default_group_1/application.log

09/03/30 13:16:38.75 analytics: Servlet error
java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused (errno:239)
at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.socketConnect(Native Method)
at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.doConnect(PlainSocketImpl.java:333)
at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connectToAddress(PlainSocketImpl.java:195)
at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connect(PlainSocketImpl.java:182)
at java.net.SocksSocketImpl.connect(SocksSocketImpl.java:366)
at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:517)
at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:467)
at java.net.Socket.(Socket.java:364)
at java.net.Socket.(Socket.java:178)
at com.siebel.analytics.web.sawconnect.ConnectionPoolSocketFactoryImpl.createSocket(ConnectionPoolSocketFactoryImpl.java:63)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:585)
at com.siebel.analytics.web.sawconnect.ConnectionPoolSocketFactoryImpl.createSocket(ConnectionPoolSocketFactoryImpl.java:70)
at com.siebel.analytics.web.sawconnect.ConnectionPool.createNewConnection(ConnectionPool.java:314)
at com.siebel.analytics.web.sawconnect.ConnectionPool.getConnection(ConnectionPool.java:133)
at com.siebel.analytics.web.SAWBridge.processRequest(SAWBridge.java:299)
at com.siebel.analytics.web.SAWBridge.doGet(SAWBridge.java:325)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:743)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:856)
at com.evermind[Oracle Containers for J2EE 10g (10.1.3.3.0) ].server.http.ServletRequestDispatcher.invoke(ServletRequestDispatcher.java:713)
at com.evermind[Oracle Containers for J2EE 10g (10.1.3.3.0) ].server.http.ServletRequestDispatcher.forwardInternal(ServletRequestDispatcher.java:3
70)
at com.evermind[Oracle Containers for J2EE 10g (10.1.3.3.0) ].server.http.HttpRequestHandler.doProcessRequest(HttpRequestHandler.java:871)
at com.evermind[Oracle Containers for J2EE 10g (10.1.3.3.0) ].server.http.HttpRequestHandler.processRequest(HttpRequestHandler.java:453)
at com.evermind[Oracle Containers for J2EE 10g (10.1.3.3.0) ].server.http.AJPRequestHandler.run(AJPRequestHandler.java:302)
at com.evermind[Oracle Containers for J2EE 10g (10.1.3.3.0) ].server.http.AJPRequestHandler.run(AJPRequestHandler.java:190)
at oracle.oc4j.network.ServerSocketReadHandler$SafeRunnable.run(ServerSocketReadHandler.java:260)
at oracle.oc4j.network.ServerSocketAcceptHandler.procClientSocket(ServerSocketAcceptHandler.java:239)
at oracle.oc4j.network.ServerSocketAcceptHandler.access$700(ServerSocketAcceptHandler.java:34)
at oracle.oc4j.network.ServerSocketAcceptHandler$AcceptHandlerHorse.run(ServerSocketAcceptHandler.java:880)
at com.evermind[Oracle Containers for J2EE 10g (10.1.3.3.0) ].util.ReleasableResourcePooledExecutor$MyWorker.run(ReleasableResourcePooledExecutor.
java:303)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:595)