Very interesting post by Kevin McGinley about CAF here: CAF = Migration Utility? Use Caution! It articulates better than I ever could reasons against using CAF particularly in a production environment. Since the tool came out I’d been struggling to get my head around it, convinced I was missing something. I still don’t profess to understand it properly, but Kevin’s article reassures me that I shouldn’t be losing too much sleep over it, especially given that it’s unsupported and won’t work with 11g.

Short but sweet this one - a way of troubleshooting connectivity problems between analytics (the Presentation Services Plug-in, either j2ee servlet or ISAPI, a.k.a. SAWBridge) and sawserver (Presentation Services). For a recap on the services & flow please see the first few paragraphs of this post. Problems in connectivity between analytics and sawserver normally manifest themselves through this error message: 500 Internal Server Error Servlet error: An exception occurred. The current application deployment descriptors do not allow for including it in this response.

This was my first UKOUG TEBS, in fact my first conference I’d ever attended! I was quite unsure what to expect, but three days later I can safely say it was invaluable. The variety of presentations and expertise being shared was impressive, and it was great to hear people sharing and discussing their ideas and opinions around the subjects I work with each day. Working in isolation is not a good idea, one can develop a blinkered or bunker mentality.

Oracle have published an interesting doc 968223.1, entitled “Enterprise Deployment of Oracle BI EE on OC4J and App Servers”. It details the differences between OC4J and OAS which is useful for the current versions of OBIEE. It then also gives a useful heads-up – that WebLogic becomes the App server of choice in the next version of OBIEE All of this changes in OBI EE 11g where several projects will become absolutely dependent upon an App Server.

(Sorry for the lame title, but it gives me an excuse to put this picture in :) ) I was really pleased by the response I got from my posting about The state of OBIEE on the web, knowing that it’s not just me goes a long way to keeping my blood pressure down. The OTN forum is still an unbalanced mix of tosh (is this guy for real?) with the occasional insightful and interesting post or idea such as this really neat one from Joe Bertram about using multiple presentation services on top of the same RPD to give different interfaces to different end devices.

A very interesting new PDF from Sun on deploying OBIEE has been published, with discussions on architecture, performance and best practice. This Sun BluePrints article describes an enterprise deployment architecture for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition using Sun servers running the Solaris Operating System and Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage systems. Designed to empower employees in organizations in any industry—from customer service, shipping, and finance to manufacturing, human resources, and more—to become potential decision makers, the architecture brings fault tolerance, security, resiliency, and performance to enterprise deployments.

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!

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:

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

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.