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).

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

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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]

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(Updated 12th Oct 09) Here’s a list of the OBIEE benchmark documents published by Oracle: BenchmarkDateSource document1 - IBM System x3755Sep-07PDF2 - HP DL380 G4Sep-07PDF3 - Sun T2000Sep-07PDF4 - Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440Aug-09PDF5 - Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440Oct-09PDF Collecting the numbers into one table gives this: Based on the details in the documents I think these were all against OBIA’s Service Analytics schema & dashboards/reports. Interesting to note the side-by-side comparison in benchmark 3 (Sun T2000) of two servers, in one case both running BI and Presentation Services and in the other having the two components separate.

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Here’s a list of the OBIEE benchmark documents published by Oracle: 28,000 User Benchmark on Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 Server running Solaris 10 [Aug 09] 10,000 User Benchmark on Sun T2000 [Sept 07] 5,800 User Benchmark on HP DL380 G4 [Sept 07] 4,000 User Benchmark on an IBM System x3755 Server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux

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Production cluster is 2x BI Server and 2x Presentation Services, with a BIG-IP F5 load balancer on the front. Symptoms Users started reporting slow login times to BI. Our monitoring tool (Openview) reported that “BIServer01 may be down. Failed to contact it using ping.”. BIServer01 cannot be reached by ping or ssh from Windows network. Diagnostics nqsserver and nqsclustercontroller on BIServer01 was logging these repeated errors: [nQSError: 12002] Socket communication error at call=send: (Number=9) Bad file number

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A new version of the web browser Opera was released recently. Several years ago I used Opera and may even have paid for it IIRC. Then Firefox came along, and the “it’s not IE” excuse was lost for Opera. Not that I mind IE too much nowadays but at the time it was atrocious. Since then I’ve revisited Opera each time a new release has come out, but nothing has impressed me enough to ditch Firefox (and nowadays Google Chrome).

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Bringing together in one place all of the script syntax that I’ve found so far for using with OBIEE’s AdminTool.exe /command Details and examples on usage in the following blogs (where I compiled the commands from): Venkat Erik Eckhardt (translated from Czech, original here) @lex Kumar Kambam DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME! I would only recommend this for read-only purposes such as generating the metadata dictionary or consistency check. * OpenOnline DSN [user [password]] - Opens the online repository.

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There’s an undocumented feature in AdminTool.exe that you can use the /command switch with a text file containing scripted commands to make changes to an RPD file (or create a new one). It’s undocumented and UNSUPPORTED so be careful using it. Some good details in these blog posts, especially Erik’s which has a good list of syntax. Venkat Erik Eckhardt (translated from Czech, original here) @lex Kumar Kambam I’m intrigued to know how the original posters figured out the commands available, if it’s undocumented… :)

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Kudos to the My Oracle Support blog for taking the time to respond to my to my comment about searching for Metalink 3 SRs throwing an error. In essence, if you previously used Metalink 3 you must use https://support.oracle.com. If you use https://metalink.oracle.com/ then you’ll hit the problems I did. ML3 SR’s are not supported on https://metalink.oracle.com/CSP/ui/index.html. This front end is used for support on legacy server technology, middleware including BEA, and EBusinessSuite

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Another way of keeping up with what’s going on in the obiee world, add this RSS feed of del.icio.us obiee tags to your reader. It may be less “current” (because people might discover and bookmark ‘old’ pages), but it’s another tool in the armoury :) If you want an aggregated RSS feed of OBIEE / Oracle related blog postings try this one.

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Following the Oracle CAF tutorial here, I got to Cloning Answers Requests section and then got stuck. I’d set up my environment exactly the same as in the tutorial, down to the same paths etc. After firing up the CAF to clone requests from the SampleSales catalog: I clicked on Next and got the error “Exception occurred when while initializing repository!!!” By playing around with the passwords and path names I determined that both RPD files existed and that CAF could load them enough to validate the passwords.

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This weekend just gone Metalink3 went to the digital dustbin. In principle this is a Good Thing, as multiple support websites for a single company is confusing and frustrating. Metalink is now “My Oracle Support” and is a flash-based whizz-bang affair. Everyone has different tastes, but there’s a lot to be said for plain HTML for ease and speed of access. But then people probably grumbled to the Wright Brothers that there was nothing wrong with land-transport at the time…

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Introduction In this article I plan to get samplesales and paint repositories hosted on a single server, using one BI Server instance and two Presentation Services instances. This is on both Unix (OEL 4) and Windows, and both OC4J (OBIEE’s “basic installation” option) and OAS (“Advanced Installation”). Both samplesales and paint are shipped with 10.1.3.4 of OBIEE, you’ll find them in $OracleBI/OracleBI/server/Sample. This article assumes you’ve got the RPD of each into $OracleBI/OracleBI/server/Repository and unpacked the web cats for each into $OracleBIdata/web/catalog.

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Introduction In this article I plan to get sample and paint repositories hosted on a single server, using one BI Server instance and two Presentation Services instances. This is on both Unix (OEL 4) and Windows, and both OC4J (OBIEE’s “basic installation” option) and OAS (“Advanced Installation”). Make sure you’ve read and followed part 1 - BI Server first. Remember that multiple Presentation Services instances on a machine is UNSUPPORTED BY ORACLE!

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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

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xkcd.com is one of my favourite comics on the web. It strikes just the right balance of geeky witty humour without being too smart-ass. I liked this recent one a lot :-) A couple of other favourites: http://xkcd.com/149/ http://xkcd.com/327/ http://xkcd.com/123/

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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.

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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).

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A follow up to my previous post about Metalink’s “Do you mean” feature, this one made me laugh: I shall miss this kind of thing when Metalink3 merges into My Oracle Support…. Meep meep!

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