One of the perks of my job is that I get to travel to some pretty nice places (hi, San Francisco, Bergen, Åland Islands), and get to eat some pretty good food too. If you’re looking for some techie content, then move along and go and read about Kafka, but if you enjoy food pr0n then stay put. I was working for a client in the centre of Manchester this week, staying as usual at a Premier Inn.

I got this lovely failure during a fresh install of OBIEE 11.1.1.9. I emphasise that it was during the install because there’s other causes for this error on an existing system to do with corrupted credential stores etc – not the case here. The install had copied in the binaries and was in the process of building the domain. During the early stages of this where it starts configuring and restarting the AdminServer it failed, with the AdminServer.

The Oracle by Example (ObE) here demonstrating how to use Goldengate to replicate transactions big data targets such as HDFS is written for the BigDataLite 4.2.1, and for me didn’t work on the current latest version, 4.4.0. The OBE (and similar Hands On Lab PDF) assume the presence of pmov.prm and pmov.properties in /u01/ogg/dirprm/. On BDL 4.4 there’s only the extract to from Oracle configuration, emov. Fortunately it’s still possible to run this setup out of the box in BDL 4.

I’ve always defaulted to Slideshare for hosting slides from presentations that I’ve given, but it’s become more and more crap-infested. The UI is messy, and the UX sucks - for example, I want to download a slide deck, I most definitely 100% am not interested in “clipping” it…even if you ask me every. damn. time: Looking around it seems the other popular option is Speakerdeck. The UI is clean and simple, and I as both a user and uploader I feel like I’m there to read and share slides rather than be monetised as an eyeball on the site.

#obihackers There’s a #obihackers IRC channel on freenode, where a dozen or so of us have hung out for several years now. Chat is usually OBIEE, Oracle, ODI, and general geek out. Bear in mind this is the equivalent of us hanging out in a bar; if you wanna shoot the shit with a geeky question about OBIEE go ahead, but if you’ve come to get help with your homework without even buying a round, you’ll probably get short shrift… ;-)

InfluxDB is a great time series database, that’s recently been rebranded as part of the “TICK” stack, including data collectors, visualisation, and ETL/Alerting. I’ve yet to really look at the other components, but InfluxDB alone works just great with my favourite visualisation/analysis tool for time series metrics, Grafana. Getting data into InfluxDB is easy, with many tools supporting the native InfluxDB line input protocol, and those that don’t often supporting the carbon protocol (from Graphite), which InfluxDB also supports (along with others).

Thanks to the power of twitter, I can look back on all the many and varied Full English breakfasts that I’ve (mostly) enjoyed: 👉🏻 https://twitter.com/search?q=rmoff%20%23fullenglish&src=typd What makes a good Full English? Good ingredients, cooked well. Nothing worse than a limp pink sausage, as it were. Sausage, standard pork or Cumberland at most. Definitely no daft apricot and guava bean with a hint of foie gras nonsense. Must be cooked right well, crispy skin, almost burnt.

It struck me today when I was writing my most recent blog over at Rittman Mead that I’ve been playing with visualising OBIEE metrics for years now. Back in 2009 I wrote about using something called JManage to pull metrics out of OBIEE 10g via JMX: Still with OBIEE 10g in 2011, I was using rrdtool and some horrible-looking tcl hacking to get the metrics out through jmx : 2014 brought with it DMS and my first forays with Graphite for storing & visualising data:

I will now be blogging mostly over at the venerable blog of my employer, Rittman Mead. You can see my first posting here: Web Services in BI Publisher 11g. Don’t entirely exclude this rnm1978 blog from your feeds, as I may still post more esoteric and random tidbits here.

This article has been superseded by a newer version: Instrumenting OBIEE Database Connections For Improved Performance Diagnostics (Previously on this blog: 1, 2, 3…) Summary Instrument your code. Stop guessing. Make your DBA happy. Make your life as a BI Admin easier. The Problem OBIEE will typically connect to the database using a generic application account. (Hopefully, you’ll have isolated it to an account used only for this purpose - if you haven’t, you should.