One of my little gripes with Metalink is its purporting to be helpful when it’s blatantly not. Here’s one: Now which is more likely, on Metalink 3; that I’m searching for sawserver (integral component to OBIEE), or sqlserver?!

Yet another way to access the BI Management data discussed here - through Windows’ PerfMon tool. This will only work for installations where your OBIEE server is running on Windows. You should be able to run PerfMon locally or remotely. Standard practise would be not to run it locally on a Production machine :-) To run PerfMon go to Start->Run and enter perfmon, or navigate Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Performance

Mark Rittman has an excellent article about querying the DAC repository database tables, including a downloadable RPD file. Being new to working with RPDs I thought it would be good practise to explore this as well as hopefully get some useful information about our current ETL deployment. I downloaded the RPD to c:\OracleBI\server\Repository and opened it up in the Admin tool (Administrator/Administrator). First off I changed the connection pool to point to my DAC repository database, having setup a TNS entry for it first.

Our main servers are Unix and I’m as happy as a pig in muck at the command line, so when I’m working on Windows (where I’ve got a test OBIEE install) I like to stick with the CLI where possible. PSService is one of those tools that I instinctively reach for without realising it. Combined with Launchy, it’s even better. Simply put, you can control windows services from the command line.

By a strange co-incidence after following this thread on OTN forums about a BI crash and struggling to understand the actual problem, I think I’ve encountered it myself! I’ve got a test install of OBIEE running on my Windows XP laptop, and whilst building a report in Answers got this: ](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_RCx_EVJpczQ/SmiDrEorbbI/AAAAAAAAGcg/OPGwTLXXg8k/s1600/crash1.png)[ was: szAppName : sawserver.exe szAppVer : 10.1.3.4 szModName : kernel32.dll szModVer : 5.1.2600.3119 offset : 000097a3 Going to the sawserver log at c:\OracleBIData\web\log\sawlog0.

The configuration of how Presentation Services (sawserver) does its logging is in the file web/config/logconfig.xml (same directory as instanceconfig.xml). It’s all nice and XML’d: Logging Detail Change the numerical values in the FilterRecord entries to alter the detail level of the logging. Lower means less detail, higher means more. Be aware that your log files can grow very rapidly if you set the logging too high, and unless you’re troubleshooting then leave them at the defaults.

Part of looking at the various gubbins inside OBIEE led me to realise that the Oracle BI Management application drives quite a few things. It exposes MBeans (Management Beans, a java term), accessible through jmx. In the installation of OBIEE this component is referred to as “Systems Management”. The MBeans give us real-time performance information, along with access to all the configuration options that are normally done through config files (instanceconfig.

A few points to add to my previous posting on JConsole: As well as performance data, you have access to configuration data. Be aware that it is read-write! So whilst it might be a nice alternative to digging around for your instanceconfig.xml etc, you should be careful If you have your BI Server and Presentation Services deployed on separate servers then you will only get MBeans for the relevant service: If you want to view the values of the BI Server MBeans and your Presentation Services server is not on the same box then you have to use JConsole/JMX, as Performance Monitor will not have access to the values: ](http://2.

As a kid I loved the idea of lego where you can disassemble and reassemble something from the ground up. As soon as I got my hands on a computer it was the same. You can have your Acorn Archimedes with its games, where do I find the sprites and sound files behind it? Likewise Microsoft Word, let me at the VBA underneath to hack it around and see what else it can do.

I read and post a bit on the OBIEE and OBIA OTN forums. The noise ratio isn’t too bad, but a few things really get my goat: Not responding to answers! If I’ve gone out of my way to help, or try to help, at least have the courtesy to acknowledge it, and ideally mark as Helpful or Correct as appropriate. Even a simple “thanks.” would do. It’s just good manners.