OBIEE Blog

There’re some very interesting blog posts about handling OBIEE’s SCM process, however, the difficulty is that each project is different. For example, there’re so many environmental factors involved – everything depends on location. In some enterprises, they use corporate-wide version-control systems (such as TFS). In some places, they don’t. Some companies have a rigid DEV to SIT to UAT to PROD process, in some companies – such development is done ad-hoc.

Sometimes, webcat is copied manually. Sometimes, it’s merged online. Sometimes it’s archived and extracted.

Myriad options and almost endless number of possibilities.

Sometimes, the RPD is merged locally, sometimes it’s imported, sometimes, it’s done via MUDE projects. Everyone is different and each situation is different. And here’s when experience and expertise come into play – an experienced consultant can provide the best way of handling OBIEE’s deployment process.

There’s an interesting discussion about IIS and OC4J on OTN- OC4J discussion

I think there’s a lot of confusion as to what is a difference between web server and web application server (apparently web server just serves static HTML (it can also server PHP/ASP pages), however, doesn’t run applications — on the other side – it’s tough to distinguish between dynamic web applications written in script languages and Java container OC4J). If you

I think that it’s clear from the discussion that OBIEE requires IIS (in Windows server) and OC4J is an quasi-optional module for BI Publisher and Scheduler.

Another thing -check your connection pool settings. According to Oracle, BI Server might crash if there’re “Several Connection Pools in the custom RPD had ‘Execute Queries Asynchronously’ enabled. This is no longer recommended in OBI 10g as it can cause the OBI EE (NQServer) Server to crash.”

This is addressed in Bug No.BUG 7634602 – ‘OBI SERVER CRASH – 3-818156441′

While auditing our OBIEE security model We’ve stumbled into behavior that we think is a bug. If it’s not, then I hope it’s a feature that would be removed in the future. Here’s a description of how we get this particular Presentation services behavior:

1. Summary – Our goal is to be able to add new users in RPD in online mode, assign them to their respective repository security groups ( based on data-level and row-level security), and during their first login  have them automatically assigned to one of 2 appopriate Presentation catalog group (that is used for presentation security, such as prohibiting overwriting of shared reports). We use OS authentication model with Impersonator (OBIEE picks up and strips users’ OS username). However, the problem doesn’t seem to be SSO-related or OS-related.

These’re steps to reproduce:

a) create new user “test_user1″ in RPD “Business Intelligence” group (for Presentation group “Business Intelligence”). Check-in RPD and save it.

b)  login with the “test_user1″ first time to OBIEE

c) go to My Account. You can clearly see that “test_user1″ is a member of Presentation group “Business Intelligence” (which is good for us and correct at the same time)

d) log-out. close browser. clean cookies. log-in as an administrator (member of Presentation Services Admin). Go to Settings –> “Oracle BI Presentation Services Administration”–>”Manage Presentation Catalog Groups and Users”
Select Edit for the “Business Intelligence” group

as you can see – “test_user1″ isn’t there

e) If we click on “Add New Member”-> “Show Users and Groups” – there’ll be a red-stop symbol (padlock image)

We’ve filed an SR with Oracle Support, and still waiting for an answer. I personally think that in future OBIEE releases – the Presentation Services should be tied closer with BI server – maybe going as far as consolidating those 2 modules.

And have a nice work week!

I’ve seen the following situation. Ibot running perfectly fine on the development server, however, it started to fail the production with the above-mentioned error 68019. The security nature of it made me look into the instanceconfig.xml and cryptotools – since I’ve figured that this was the case. It seems as I was right as something got corrupted on the security side. After re-running cryptotools – everything went back to normal. Also, you can view these Oracle links in this in case you meet this problem:

http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=499157&tstart=0

QUESTION 1) Whether all OBIEE 10.1.3.3 Infrastructure components can now be deployed exclusively on a Linux platform?

ANSWER: According to the Oracle Business Intelligence Infrastructure Installation and Configuration
Guide> Installing Oracle BI EE Infrastructure > Oracle BI Installer Screens and Prompts

There are restrictions on Installing Oracle BI Under Linux. Using the Custom installation choice, only the following components are available under Linux:

> Oracle Business Intelligence JDBC Driver
> Oracle Business Intelligence Systems Management
> Oracle Business Intelligence Server
> Oracle Business Intelligence Cluster Controller
> Oracle Business Intelligence Scheduler
> Oracle Business Intelligence Client
> Oracle Business Intelligence Presentation Services
> Oracle Business Intelligence Presentation Services Plug-in
> Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher

Therefore, this implies that that the other OBI components can only be installed on Windows.