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This article has been superseded by a newer version: Instrumenting OBIEE Database Connections For Improved Performance Diagnostics (Previously on this blog: 1, 2, 3…) Summary Instrument your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.

It’s not my fault really. When running an installation, presented with the option of (a) do a bunch of stuff and wait to continue the install later or (b) tick a box and continue now it’s a better man that I who would opt for option (a). When I recently installed OBIEE 11g, I was prompted to get a script run as root to set up the inventory, or tick “Continue Installation with local inventory” to continue with the install.

Short note to record this, as Google drew no hits on it. Windows XP machine with existing Oracle 11.1 client installation, all working fine. Installed Oracle 11.2 XE, and started getting these errors: [sourcecode] C:\Windows\System32>tnsping DBNAME TNS Ping Utility for 32-bit Windows: Version 11.2.0.2.0 - Production on 26-SEP-2011 11:01:11 Copyright (c) 1997, 2010, Oracle. All rights reserved. Used parameter files: C:\app\userid\product\11.1.0\client_1\network\admin\sqlnet.ora Used TNSNAMES adapter to resolve the alias Message 3513 not found; product=NETWORK; facility=TNS OK (20 msec) [/sourcecode]

I noticed in Ed Stevens’ blog posting here that some sourcecode he’d posted had certain lines highlighted. Wordpress provides the sourcecode tag for marking up sourcecode in blog posts. For example: cd /some/random/folder ls -l # do not run this next line! is much better presented as: [sourcecode language=“bash”] cd /some/random/folder ls -l # do not run this next line! [/sourcecode] by wrapping it in [sourcecode] tags I’ve known about the language=‘xx’ attribute that you can use with the tag, but Ed’s posting prompted me to check on the syntax and it turns out there a few tweaks one can use.

If you only read one blog post this month, read James Morle’s eloquent attack on the term “Best Practice”. I’m very excited to be joining RittmanMead next month! I’m looking forward to working with some of the industry’s most respected experts.

In Oracle 11g, the DBMS_STATS procedure GATHER_SCHEMA_STATS takes a parameter ‘options’ which defines the scope of the objects processed by the procedure call, as well as the action. It can be either GATHER or LIST (gather the stats, or list out the objects to be touched, respectively), and AUTO, STALE or EMPTY (defining the object selection to process). GATHER on its own will gather stats on all objects in the schema GATHER EMPTY / LIST EMPTY is self-explanatory - objects with no statistics.

When using preupgrade to upgrade an existing Fedora 14 installation to Fedora 15, the following two errors were encountered: Failed to fetch release info No groups available in any repository The box sits on a network behind a proxy out to the web. The resolution was to make sure that environment variables http_proxy and https_proxy are set: [sourcecode language=“bash”] export http_proxy=http://user:password@proxyserver:port export https_proxy=http://user:password@proxyserver:port [/sourcecode] Make sure you do this from the user from which you run preupgrade.

Excel may send chills down the spine of us when we hear users talking about its [ab]use, but it has its place in the toolset. For my money, it is a very good tool for knocking out graphs which look decent. Of course, rrdtool is my geek tool of choice for dynamic long-term graphing, but when doing scratch PoC work, I normally fall back to Excel. One thing which has frustrated me over time is, well, time, and Excel’s handling thereof.

Here’s a quotation that I’ve just read and wanted to share. It is all part of a BAAG approach to troubleshooting problems, performance in particular. From Greg Rahn (web|twitter) on oracle-l: There are always exceptions, but exceptions can be justified and supported with data. Just beware of the the silver bullet syndrome… The unfortunate part […] is that rarely anyone goes back and does the root cause analysis. It tends to fall into the bucket of “problem…solved”.