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

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).

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

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DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME!

I would only recommend this for read-only purposes such as generating the metadata dictionary or consistency check.

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* OpenOnline DSN [user [password]] - Opens the online repository. NB can’t edit properties without checking out objects first, and no way to do that from script.

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… :)

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

Full details here

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.

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. If the password is incorrect you get the error “The repository C:\CAF_Training\Source\samplesales.rpd cannot be opened”.

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…

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. It also assumes that you know your way around the architecture of BI and are familiar with NQSConfig.ini and instanceconfig.xml - if neither of those files mean anything to you then you will find some background reading useful.

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!

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

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/

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

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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).

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!

As well as tinkering with the sawserver (Presentation Services) logging level and format, we can specific which bits of the log we’re interested in. This is useful for two reasons:

1. We can enable detailed logging for a specific area, without impacting performance as much as detailed logging throughout would cause
2. By only logging in detail the area of interest we can more easily read the log output and not have to wade through pages of irrelevant information

Chapter 9 (“Using the Oracle BI Presentation Services Logging Facility”) of the Presentation Services Administration Guide details the log configuration.

UPDATED: See a HOWTO for OBIEE and LoadRunner here

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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. [edit]I’m not sure if this is actually the case[/edit]

I posted a while ago about the sawserver (Presentation Services) log configuration file. Today I’m doing some work digging around why sawserver’s throwing an error and so increased the log detail. This parameter is really helpful to use:

fmtName=“short”

Consider in these two screenshots, the first is with the default log format and shows about six entries. The second is short log format and is about ten times as much data.

I have a couple of OTN forums bookmarked, and found that generally every few hours I get signed out and end up viewing them as Guest. I then have to click on sign in, enter password, etc.

(Signing out this frequently is ridiculous, IMHO).

I found that instead of using the direct URL of a forum, eg: http://forums.oracle.com/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=378 if I use this form: http://forums.oracle.com/forums/adfAuthentication?success_url=/forum.jspa?forumID=378 then I end up signed in more often, and if I’ve been signed out then it goes straight to the login page and then through to the forum.

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:

1. BI Server
2. Presentation Server & OAS
3. Informatica & DAC

The scripts source another script called process_check.sh which I based on the common.sh script that comes with OBIEE.