OBIEE Blog

I’m delighted to announce that a new useful OBIEE forum / discussion board is open. Idea was up in the air for a long time – and it seems as multiple people planned this for awhile independently (rnm1978, Mark Rittman, Adrian Ward, and other guys and myself included). Part of it was frustration with moderation on official Oracle’s board, and part of it was a need for a resource where OBIEE and business intelligent professionals could share secrets of the trade. The difficult part is keeping balance between sharing knowledge as well as  providing a moderated environment.

The board is already active with several interesting topics going. If you’re interested in participating – please apply at Google OBIEE group

Thanks to Mark Rittman who organized the movement and to all those who agreed to become moderators.

Not very OBIEE related. To folks on googlewave, I’ll be back very soon – just haven’t been able to look at it (just another validation that 1-person forum is a very difficult thing to do).

Too much work, not enough rest. Rushing to complete a project.  Stress is affecting everyone. I think, however, that if you can’t win over stress, then it will win over you. Trying to eat well and healthy and get sufficient exercise.

Next time – OBIEE and people skills….

Thanksgiving holiday, pre-Christmas routine, and a general lethargic state due to the weather. They don’t help us to write more about OBIEE. Also, I have a feeling that everyone has a feeling that all OBIEE topics have been covered. So everyone is just waiting for 11g – and then there’ll be a race.

RNM1978 posted a very good visual representation of OBIEE documentation – http://rnm1978.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/i-think-this-summarises-everything/
From one side, bad documentation has opened a niche for experts to blog and discover new things. On the other hand – if it’s not in the docs – it’s probably not covered by Oracle’s support – so some companies might be wary of installing new things.

As far as a new forum – I’m still working on identifying an open-source forum platform that would have all features that OTN has and more. There’re some candidates – but I’m still in the process of search.

I will be honest – I still check OTN – however, I give it a quick glance and then just leave. I still give respect to everyone who’s answering questions, however silly lazy ones. I’m wondering if the influx of new OBIEE will contribute to rates pushed down in the future. For one thing I’m sure now that there’re 2 different kind of “freshers” – one making a transition from another BI tool (Cognos, MS Analysis Services, Discoverer) or a closely-related area (Oracle data warehousing, OLAP) and those who have taken “$600 courses”. It’s very conflicting – since everyone has to start somewhere. However, starting by spamming OTN isn’t the right way to do it.

This is why I was actually against point system when it was implemented – it incentives seasoned consultants reply to silly questions – the ones they would have left without attention before.

Anyway, I hope everyone had a nice break! Back to work! And please stay healthy and well.

A. “Ago function returning wrong results in answer when comparing this year versus last year” This actually happened to me once – and i thought it was an incorrectly configured time dimension. You can experience this error when your “Time Series functions gives incorrect results when leap years are involved”. Oracle support suggested the following action plan :

1) Leave the logical column definition as earlier i.e. Ago(Measure, Year, 1)
2) Change the filter condition in the request to filter on year and months instead of date range e.g.
year = 2009 and month in (1,2,3,4)

B. “Value Suppression doesn’t work for Level Based Measures”. Someone had a requirement where they wanted to use level-based measures for reports accessing several fact tables in the future. To realize a prototype before starting with the necessary reports they tried to implement an easy example to test the ‘value suppression’ functionality

Unfortunately they are not able to build a nice looking report with four simple columns showing the year, # of orders (per year), quarter and # orders. Their problem is that the level based measure ‘# of order (per year)’ is shown line by line. They wanted to suppress these values and only show the value once per year. They tried to use the ‘value suppression functionality’ without success. They were able to Work around this issues by using a Pivot Table.

C. This issue in pivot table is very common –

OBIEE says “governor exceeded error”. The pivot tables and the charts might give these errors:

Error Generating Chart
An exception occurred in the cube.
Error Details
Error Codes: MOJ5XVNL:QBVC92JY
Governor limit exceeded in cube generation (Maximum data records exceeded.)

and for pivot table

View Display Error
Governor limit exceeded in cube generation (Maximum data records exceeded.)
Error Details
Error Codes: QBVC92JY

Theses messages mean that users are trying to return more rows to the pivot table then the governor will allow. One needs to adjust the following parameters until the report runs successfully.

Adjust the parameters below in instanceconfig.xml (add those tags if you don’t have them – since those values are by default) and then restart Presentation Server (sawserver)

< CubeMaxRecords >40000< /CubeMaxRecords >
< CubeMaxPopulatedCells >150000< /CubeMaxPopulatedCells >

I’ve been working on helping to configure system subject area to automate configuring Delivery Profiles. Unfortunately, Oracle’s documentation is severely lacking – and there’re only a few tutorials online. Even though they’re good – something isn’t working out yet – there’s an error in the Sessions log – that says something like nqsError “unable to locate table SET”. The only SET which is there looks like “Set Loglevel=2″. I’m trying to recreate all steps from the beginning.

On the other hand, I strongly believe that a partial in-place drill-down should be a feature in the OBIEE. Even though clicking on a column in BI Answers partially solves the issue – it doesn’t do in in such a way it would be useful. I’ve seen OBIEE being used for transactional type of reporting where users want to go deeper into detail level without loosing focus on other items.