A new blog from James Morle, who I don’t know but from other bloggers sounds well respected, and describes himself thus: Since it’s been nearly ten years since I wrote my book, Scaling Oracle8i, I thought it was about time that I started writing again. I thought I would start with the new-fangled blogging thing, and see where it takes me. Here goes. He’s got a really interesting post on “red flags” to look for in diagnosing performance problems in Oracle: Spotting the Red Flags (Part 1 of n).

SQL Developer v2.1 Early Adopter was released yesterday. Download it here New features list Hat-tip and hat-tip

Bit of an odd one this. Oracle 11g database, a user’s password has expired. But when I try to change it, I can’t: [sourcecode language=“bash”] $sqlplus MYUSER/oldPW@oraDBServer SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production on Wed Sep 23 07:57:41 2009 Copyright (c) 1982, 2005, Oracle. All rights reserved. ERROR: ORA-28001: the password has expired Changing password for MYUSER New password: Retype new password: ERROR: ORA-01017: invalid username/password; logon denied Password unchanged [/sourcecode]

For some reason Oracle haven’t put out a 10.x version of the error & message codes reference guide for OBIEE, but the previous version for Siebel Analytics is still useful: PDF version: http://download.oracle.com/otndocs/products/bi/bi-ee/docs/784/AnyMsg.pdf HTML version: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E12103_01/books/AnyMsg/AnyMsg_Messages.html#wp1007961

We’re upgrading from OBIA 7.9.5 (Financials - GL) to OBIA 7.9.6. Our reasons are for support (7.9.5 does not support Oracle 11g) and minor functionality additions. Our architecture is: HP-UX 64 bit Itanium (11.31), Oracle 11g (11.1.0.7), separate ETL server, 4x OBIEE servers (2x BI, 2xPS). We have no customisations in the ETL except something for budgets, which is superseded in 7.9.6. This post is a semi-formed articulation of my frustrations encountered during an initial run through of the upgrade in a sandbox.

I’m starting on an upgrade from OBIA 7.9.5 to 7.9.6 and wading through the two main docs: 7.9.6 Upgrade guide 7.9.6 Installation guide It would be nice if Oracle could come up with some less confusing terminology. It seems that not only is the whole product of OBIA referred to as OBIA (see @lex’s posting for a good explanation), but that the sub-components which are not-OBIEE-or-DAC-or-Informatica is also OBIA, c.f. page 6-1 of the Upgrade guide “[…]upgrade your Oracle BI Applications environment to the current version.

We routinely change Oracle passwords as part of security best-practice, I keep hitting this and keep forgetting why! :-) [sourcecode language=‘sql’] ALTER USER DAC_REPO IDENTIFIED BY 1KoBe3RH REPLACE YlR94tqp [/sourcecode] Error report: SQL Error: ORA-00922: missing or invalid option 00922. 00000 - “missing or invalid option” *Cause: *Action: Someone better qualified than me can explain why but I suspect it’s the leading number in the new password. Quoting the passwords then works fine:

I read and post a bit on the OBIEE and OBIA OTN forums. The noise ratio isn’t too bad, but a few things really get my goat: Not responding to answers! If I’ve gone out of my way to help, or try to help, at least have the courtesy to acknowledge it, and ideally mark as Helpful or Correct as appropriate. Even a simple “thanks.” would do. It’s just good manners.

We’re getting problems with an instance of Informatica / out-of-the-box OBIA on a new set of servers. When we run the execution plan we get this error soon after starting: MAPPING> DBG_21075 Connecting to database [TNSENTRY], user [MYUSER] MAPPING> CMN_1761 Timestamp Event: [Tue Mar 24 18:56:33 2009] MAPPING> CMN_1022 Database driver error… CMN_1022 [ Database driver error… Function Name : Logon ORA-12537: TNS:connection closed Database driver error… Function Name : Connect

I’m learning about a lot of the Oracle BI stack through reading manuals and trial-and-error. One thing I’ve realised is that Metalink holds a whole heap of useful information. For example, simply searching on “publisher cluster” throws up these two very pertinent docs: OBIEE Clustered Installation with BI Publisher (Doc ID 744515.1) BI Publisher does not accept cluster jdbc connection strings (Doc ID 559795.1) The first one is a publically available PDF, the second one is the answer to the problem I spent more time than I needed to scratching my head over yesterday.