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

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: BI Server Presentation Server & OAS Informatica & DAC The scripts source another script called process_check.

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

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.