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

A brilliant posting here from Jonathan Lewis on the subject of Experts. He in turn is quoting Chen Shapira: “DBAs are under a lot of pressure not to be experts.”. Read the sentence again, as it took me a minute to figure out. He’s writing in the context of an Oracle DBA but I think it’s equally applicable to those working with an looking after installations of OBIEE et al.

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.

I honestly don’t dare click the “Did you mean” link ;-)

A frequent question on the OTN OBIEE forum is how to fix this error:

[nQSError: 17001] Oracle Error code: 12154, message: ORA-12154: TNS:could not resolve the connect identifier specified at OCI call OCIServerAttach. [nQSError: 17014] Could not connect to Oracle database.

The error is simply OBIEE reporting that it tried to connect from the BI Server to an Oracle database and the Oracle client returned an error. Distilling it down gives us this error:

October’s Oracle Critical Patch Update Advisory has been released. There are two vulnerabilities (CVE-2009-1999, CVE-2009-1990) listed under Oracle Application Server for “Component” Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and one (CVE-2009-3407) for “component” Portal.

• CVE-2009-1999 is OBIEE and “Fixed in all supported versions. No patch provided in this Critical Patch Update.”.
• CVE-2009-3407 looks like only OAS (not OBIEE), up to versions 10.1.2.3 and 10.1.4.2.
• CVE-2009-1990 is OBIEE and is the main vuln of interest. It’s unclear if it’s just OBIEE 10.1.3.4.x, or all versions of OBIEE through to and including 10.1.3.4.1. It’s also confusing putting it on the same table as OAS especially given it has similar versioning (10.1.3.x.x).

For information about patches, see My Oracle Support Note 881382.1. This doc lists patches 8927890 and 8927886 for OBIEE 10.1.3.4.1 and 10.1.3.4.0 respectively. Since no other versions are mentioned that suggests it doesn’t affect them but that’d be a heck of an assumption to make and if I were running < 10.1.3.4.0 I’d be raising an SR to seek clarification especially given the ambiguity of the table in the Advisory doc.

w00t :-D

Yesterday I got my “Pro” medal for 500 points on OTN Forums

I’d been intending to post a grumpy rant about OTN recently, but maybe I’ll postpone that for a few days now ;)

Two new blogs of note :

• Shiv Bharti’s Blog
• Debashis’s OBIEE Blog

Both are well worth a read & following.

Watch out if you are using init blocks in your RPD. We hit a bug (#9019374) recently that caused BI Server (10.1.3.4) to hang.

The init block in question should have returned a date to update a repository variable, but because of badly-written SQL and abnormal data in the source table actually returned a null value. BI Server evidently didn’t like this null being inserted somewhere where it shouldn’t have and understandably logged :

The Critical Patch Update Pre-Release Announcement for October has been published. The pre-release is advance notice of the affected software prior to release of the quarterly Critical Patch Update. It is published on the Thursday prior to the patch releases (which was postponed by a week because of OOW).

It looks like if you’re running OBIEE 10.1.3.4.0 or 10.1.3.4.1 through OAS 10.1.2.3.0/10.1.3.4.0/10.1.3.5.0 then you should check back next Tuesday 20th for details.

A new OBIEE benchmark has been published by Oracle. It’s on the same hardware as August’s benchmark - Sun T5440s. Anyone would think that Oracle like Sun ;-)

Details here

Numbers added to my collation post here

The latest point release of Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, 7.9.6.1, has been released and is available for download from here (direct link to download).

The version.txt reports the version as:

Build: 7.9.6.1.100609.2038 Release Version: Oracle Business Intelligence Applications 7.9.6.1 Package: 100609.2038

No updated documentation library yet through, so can’t nosey through the release notes. The docs that come with the download are labelled 7.9.6 and dated April 09 so don’t look like they’ve been updated either.

OBIEE comes with a very useful usage tracking feature. For information about it and how to set it up see these links:

• http://obiee101.blogspot.com/2008/08/obiee-setting-up-usage-tracking.html
• http://www.oracle.com/technology/obe/obe_bi/bi_ee_1013/usage_tracking/usage_tracking.htm
• http://108obiee.blogspot.com/2009/07/obiee-usage-tracking-setup-and-cloning.html

Usage Tracking captures the logical SQL of queries in a column called QUERY_TEXT in the table S_NQ_ACCT. However, out of the box this column is defined as 1k (1024 bytes) long. In some situations this will limit its usefulness because the text will be truncated if necessary when it’s inserted.

This is a supplemental post to this one describing how to set up a VUser in LoadRunner to test OBIEE. It’s various notes that I made during the development but which aren’t directly part of the step-by-step tutorial. They’re not necessarily vital for recording scripts, but observations and explanations that should be helpful when working with LoadRunner and OBIEE.

Validation using sawserver logs

It’s no use running a load test if the load you think you’re applying isn’t actually being applied. To validate the test you compare what happens on the server when the scenario is manually performed with what happens with it’s from a VUser and hopefully the same behaviour is observed.

My two earlier posts (here and here) detail the difficulties I had with LoadRunner (now called HP Performance Center). After a bit of a break along with encouragement from knowing that it must be possible because it’s how Oracle generates their OBIEE benchmarks I’ve now got something working. I also got a useful doc from Oracle support which outlines pretty much what I’ve done here too.

In essence what you do - and what the Metalink document 496417.1 states - is you use the Web (HTTP/HTML) protocol with URL-mode.

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]

(Updated 12th Oct 09)

Here’s a list of the OBIEE benchmark documents published by Oracle:

Benchmark	Date	Source document
1 - IBM System x3755	Sep-07	PDF
2 - HP DL380 G4	Sep-07	PDF
3 - Sun T2000	Sep-07	PDF
4 - Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440	Aug-09	PDF
5 - Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440	Oct-09	PDF

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. It appears to highlight the benefit that clustering provides in making the best use of resources.

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