I’ve been spending some interesting hours digging into OBIEE 12c recently, with some interesting blog posts to show for it. Some of it is just curiosities discovered along the way, but the real meaty stuff is the in the RESTful APIs - lots of potential here for cool integrations I think… Lifting the Lid on OBIEE 12c Web Services - Part 1 Lifting the Lid on OBIEE 12c Web Services - Part 2 Extended Subject Areas (XSA) and the Data Set Service Changes in BI Server Cache Behaviour in OBIEE 12c : OBIS_REFRESH_CACHE Dynamic Naming of OBIEE 12c Service Instance Exports OBIEE 12c - “Add Data Source” in Answers (Photo credit: https://unsplash.

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Presentation Services can provide some very detailed logs, useful for troubleshooting, performance tracing, and general poking around. See here for details. There’s no bi-init.sh in 12c, so need to set up the LD_LIBRARY_PATH ourselves: export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/app/oracle/biee/bi/bifoundation/web/bin/:/app/oracle/biee/bi/lib/:/app/oracle/biee/lib/:/app/oracle/biee/bi/bifoundation/odbc/lib/ Run sawserver with flag to list all log sources /app/oracle/biee/bi/bifoundation/web/bin/sawserver -logsources > saw_logsources_12.2.1.txt Full list: https://gist.github.com/rmoff/e3be9009da6130839c71181cb58509a0

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In OBIEE 12c data-model-cmd is a wrapper for some java code which ultimately calls an internal RESTful web service in OBIEE 12c, bi-lcm. We saw in the previous post how these internal web services can be opened up slightly, and we’re going to do the same again here. Which means, time for the same caveat: None of these Web Services are documented, and they should therefore be assumed to be completely unsupported by Oracle.

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exportServiceInstance will export the RPD, Presentation Catalog, and Security model (application roles & policies etc – but not WLS LDAP) into a single .bar file, from which they can be imported to another environment, or restored to the same one at a later date (e.g. for backup/restore). To run exportServiceInstance you need to launch WLST first. The following demonstrates how to call it, and embeds the current timestamp & machine details in the backup (useful info, and also makes the backup name unique each time).

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So this had me scratching my head for a good hour today. Comparing SampleApp v511 against a vanilla OBIEE 12c install I’d done, one had “Add Data Source” as an option in Answers, the other didn’t. The strange thing was that the option wasn’t there in SampleApp – and usually that has all the bells and whistles enabled. After checking and re-checking the Manage Privileges option, and even the Application Policy grants, and the manual, I hit MoS - and turned up Doc ID 2093886.

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I had the pleasure of not one but two fry-ups in York, UK last weekend. The first was courtesy of Bill’s Restaurant Overall, pretty good, and I’ve had much worse. All the ingredients seemed decent. The black pudding was overcooked and almost biscuit-like, but that’s my only serious grumble. The bacon was cooked well. That black pudding, beans and the mashed/friend potato thing were each extra charges annoyed me. Particularly with a hangover, I just want to be able to order a full english, without playing Mastermind to work out what’s in or not.

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Architecturally, OBIEE 12c is - on the surface - pretty similar to OBIEE 11g. Sure, we’ve lost OPMN in favour of Node Manager, but all the old favourites are there - WebLogic Servers, BI Server (nqsserver / OBIS), Presentation Services (sawserver / OBIPS), and so on. But, scratch beneath the surface, or have a gander at slide decks such as this one from BIWA this year, and you realise that change is afoot.

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I wrote recently about Kibana’s excellent Timelion feature, which brings time-series visualisations to Kibana. In the comments Ben Huang asked: do you know how to show whats the difference between this Friday and last Friday by Timelion? So I thought I’d answer properly here. Timelion includes mathematical functions including add and subtract, as well as the ability to show data offset by an amount of time. So to answer Ben’s query, we combine the two.

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Running the OBIEE 12c startup on Windows: C:\app\oracle\fmw\user_projects\domains\bi\bitools\bin\start.cmd Just hangs at: Starting AdminServer ... No CPU being consumed, very odd. But then … looking at DOMAIN_HOME\servers\AdminServer\logs\AdminServer.out shows the last log entry was: Enter username to boot WebLogic server: And that’s bad news, cos that’s an interactive prompt, but not echo’d to the console output of the startup command, and there’s no way to interact with it. The start.cmd was being called by adding it to the Startup folder (C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\StartUp), and I guess it was something about this that stopped the prompt coming back to the console, because when I ran it manually from the command prompt, I got this:

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Another quick note on OBIEE 12c, this time on the importServiceInstance command. If you run it with a BAR file that doesn’t exist, it’ll fail (obviously), but the error at the end of the stack trace is slightly confusing: oracle.bi.bar.exceptions.UnSupportedBarException: The Bar file provided as input is not supported in this BI Platfrom release. Scrolling back up the stack trace does show the error message: SEVERE: Failed in reading bar file.

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Interesting quirk in running Baseline Validation Tool for OBIEE here. If you invoke obibvt from the bin folder, it errors with Parameter ‘directory’ is not a directory PS C:\OracleBI-BVT> cd bin PS C:\OracleBI-BVT\bin> .\obibvt -config C:\OracleBI-BVT\bin\bvt-config.xml -deployment current INFO: Result folder: Results\current Throwable: Parameter 'directory' is not a directory Thread[main,5,main] SEVERE: Unhandled Exception SEVERE: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Parameter 'directory' is not a directory at org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils.validateListFilesParameters(FileUtils.java:545) at org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils.listFiles(FileUtils.java:521) at org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils.listFiles(FileUtils.java:691) at com.oracle.biee.bvt.UpgradeTool.loadPlugins(UpgradeTool.java:537) at com.

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Yesterday I wrote about Monitoring Logstash Ingest Rates with InfluxDB and Grafana, in which InfluxDB provided the data store for the ingest rate data, and Grafana the frontend. Mark Walkom reminded me on twitter that the next release of Logstash will add more functionality in this area - and that it’ll integrate back into the Elastic stack: @rmoff nice, LS 5.0 will have APIs exposing metrics too. they’ll be integrated back into Marvel/Monitoring!

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In this article I’m going to show you how to easily monitor the rate at which Logstash is ingesting data, as well as in future articles the rate at which Elasticsearch is indexing it. It’s a nice little touch to add to any project involving Logstash, and it’s easy to do. Logstash is powerful tool for data ingest, processing, and distribution. It originated as simply the pipe to slurp at log files and put them into Elasticsearch, but has evolved into a whole bunch more.

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Here’s a collection of useful articles that I’ve found over the years that give good advice on writing a good abstract, mistakes to avoid, etc: Adam Machanic - Capturing Attention: Writing Great Session Descriptions Gwen Shapira - Concrete Advice for Abstract Writers Kellyn Pot’Vin-Gorman - Abstracts, Reviews and Conferences, Oh My! Russ Unger - Conference Proposals that Don’t Suck Martin Widlake - Tips on Submitting an Abstract to Conference Bridget Kromhout - give actionable takeaways (post photo courtesy of Calum MacAulay on https://unsplash.

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Kibana is a tool from Elastic that makes analysis of data held in Elasticsearch really easy and very powerful. Because Elasticsearch has very loose schema that can evolve on demand it makes it very quick to get up and running with some cool visualisations and analysis on any set of data. I demonstrated this in a blog post last year, taking a CSV file and loading it into Elasticsearch via Logstash.

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Two vulns for OBIEE in the latest critical patch update (CPU): http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/security-advisory/cpuapr2016v3-2985753.html?elq_mid=45463&sh=91225181314122121267715271910&cmid=WWMK10067711MPP001C140 Patches is bundle patch .160419: 12.2.1: https://support.oracle.com/epmos/faces/ui/patch/PatchDetail.jspx?parent=DOCUMENT&sourceId=2102148.1&patchId=22734181 11.1.1.9: https://support.oracle.com/epmos/faces/ui/patch/PatchDetail.jspx?parent=DOCUMENT&sourceId=2102148.1&patchId=22393988 11.1.1.7: https://support.oracle.com/epmos/faces/ui/patch/PatchDetail.jspx?parent=DOCUMENT&sourceId=2102148.1&patchId=22225110 Note that April 2016 is the last regular patchset for 11.1.1.7, ref: https://support.oracle.com/epmos/faces/DocumentDisplay?id=2102148.1#mozTocId410847. If you’re still on it, or earlier, time to upgrade! (Photo credit: https://unsplash.com/@jenlittlebirdie)

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Recently added to the oracledi project over at java.net is an adaptor enabling Oracle GoldenGate (OGG) to send data to Elasticsearch. This adds a powerful alternative to [micro-]batch extract via JDBC from Oracle to Elasticsearch, which I wrote about recently over at the Elastic blog. Elasticsearch is a ‘document store’ widely used for both search and analytics. It’s something I’ve written a lot about (here and here for archives), as well as spoken about - preaching the good word, as it were, since the Elastic stack as a whole is very very good at what it does and a pleasure to work with.

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I’ve recently been playing around with the ELK stack (now officially known as the Elastic stack) collecting data from an IRC channel with Elastic’s Logstash, storing it in Elasticsearch and analysing it with Kibana. But, this isn’t an “ELK” post - this is a Kafka post! ELK is just some example data manipulation tooling that helps demonstrate the principles. As I wrote about last year, Apache Kafka provides a handy way to build flexible “pipelines”.

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On a family holiday in South Devon last week I had some good food experiences. Top of the pile was a Lardy Cake, a delicacy new to me but which I’ll be sure to be searching out again. It reminded me of an Eccles cake, but bigger and lardier! I got mine from Vinnicombes on the High Street in Sidmouth. Just down the coast from Sidmouth is a village called Beer.

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Timelion was released in November 2015 and with the 4.4.2 release of Kibana is available as a native visualisation once installed. It adds some powerful capabilities to Kibana as an timeseries analysis tool, using its own data manipulation language. Installing Timelion is a piece of cake: ./bin/kibana plugin -i kibana/timelion After restarting Kibana, you’ll see it as an option from the application picker There’s a bit of a learning curve with Timelion, but it’s worth it.

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