OBIEE Blog

I decided to come up with my own list of an ideal Business Intelligence consulting company. I know this is rudimentary, however, I’ve been thinking about various factors that help to distinguish between good and bad consulting companies. Partly, my motivation to write this post is coming from a surprising number of new companies that all claim to be business intelligence experts. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not bashing all new companies – I just have a grudge against fake companies / consultants that trigger a general distrust in BI technology software suite. Here’s a list in no particular order:

Consultancy that is successful:
- has adequate financial resources to maintain payroll and fight invoice lag
- has leaders who have excellent understanding of what’s involved in successful BI projects from the points of staffing, project management, and client relations
- rewards its consultants accordingly, deals with them fairly. it’s helping to increase performance and productivity and in the long run will bring more business from satisfied customers
- it is realistic – doesn’t promise to over deliver… doesn’t underbid the project intentionally and then “blackmails” the client
- actively participates in conferences and trade shows
- has a good informational web site that it’s using to communicate to prospective clientele

Those are few things that I’ve thought about. Please feel free to add more in your comments.

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′

If you’re unable to configure proxy “Act as” feature maybe this can help you.

The customer had OID/SSO users in lowercase but had the users in the proxy table in upper case.

Also the string (’VALUEOF(NQ_SESSION.RUNAS)’) was not in uppercase in both the proxyblock and proxylevel init blocks

Initially, on selecting ‘act as’ the following error was reported:
“This functionality has not been correctly configured by your administrator (Can’t retrieve the list of target users).”

The customer had OID/SSO users in lowercase but had the users in the proxy table in upper case. Advised the customer to add upper function to proxy related init block queries and in the XML template file queries as well. This resolved this error message and the customer was able to see the list of target users.

Then on selecting a particular user from the list of target users it failed. It gave the error message : “Not logged in”.

Since the customer had OID/SSO setup, the customer was advised to test with rpd users.

Even with rpd users the functionality still failed to work and reported the following error:
“Access for requested connection is refused. Failed to get the value of PROXY session variable”.

Finally, what seemed to resolved the problem for the customer was changing the string (’VALUEOF(NQ_SESSION.RUNAS)’) in all uppercase in both the proxyblock and proxylevel init blocks.

Symptoms
After migration from 10.1.3.2.1 to 10.1.3.4 Prompt selection window not rendering correctly when a Multi Select Prompt is created for OBI EE Dashboard Prompts.

In Answers, On clicking to go to the selector screen for the Multi-Select Prompt, in it we see on the right:
match: begins with…. the right side is empty. Also the left side (’Selected’) is empty.
So, No values display in the list.

Details:
- Customer has tried entering a value in the textbox and clicking go, nothing happens.
- The issue does not happen on customers 10.1.3.2.1 instance. It only happens on their 10.1.3.4 instance which they have migrated from 10.1.3.2.1.
- Web Server is Apache\Tomcat 5.5
- Java version is JDK 1.5.18

Steps to reproduce:

- Log into Answers
- At top of left Answers window select ‘New Dashboard Prompt icon, & select a subject area
- from the list on the left select a dimension (eg Calendar Month Desc)
- change Control to ‘Multi-select’
- select ‘Constrain’
- change Defaults To to ‘Specific Value’
- from that list select a value
- top right of screen select the Preview icon
- next to default value, select the icon to bring up the Multi-select window.
- the issue is seen here, no values in the list.
Cause

Client migrated from 10.1.3.2 to 10.1.3.4. During the migration they replaced the ‘res’ folder with the copy from their 10.1.3.2 version and then regenerated the war file. The same war file was deployed in Tomcat.

This is the root of the problem. The ‘res’ folder should not be copied from the older version instance.
Solution

Obtain a fresh 10.1.3.4 ‘res’ folder and replace the copied 10.1.3.2.1 version with that.

Modified the NQSConfig.ini file to change the TMP directory and the DATA_STORAGE_PATH (Cache).
Restarted the BI server and presentation server and noticed that files are not being written to the expected locations.

For example, the TMP directory was changed from:

WORK_DIRECTORY_PATHS = “/u01/app/oracle/product/10.1.3/obiee/OracleBIData/tmp”;

To:
WORK_DIRECTORY_PATHS = “/obi-tmp/tmp”;

The DATA_STORAGE_PATH was changed from:
DATA_STORAGE_PATH = “C:\OracleBI\server\Data\Temp\Cache” 500 MB ;

To:
DATA_STORAGE_PATH = “/obi-tmp/cache” 500 MB;

After making these changes, the TMP and cache files are still being written to the original locations.
Cause

Cache and TMP file locations are controlled by NSQConfig.ini parameters and the SATEMPDIR environment variable.
While the NSQConfig.ini file had been partially updated, the SATEMPDIR had not been updated at all.

The cache settings need to be updated in the NSQConfig.ini file under “[MDX_MEMBER_CACHE]” and “Query Result Cache Section.”

If the SATEMPDIR environment variable is not set and both cache locations are not updated in the
NSQConfig.ini file, the files will continue to write to the default locations.
Solution

Please complete/verify the following steps to change TMP and Cache File locations:

1. Open the NQSConfig.ini file and verify/modify desired paths for the TMP and Cache files.
You should leave original values in the file, but prefix with a “#” symbol to comment out the value.
For example:

TMP Files

#WORK_DIRECTORY_PATHS = “/u01/app/oracle/product/10.1.3/obiee/OracleBIData/tmp”;
WORK_DIRECTORY_PATHS = “/obi-tmp/tmp”;

Cache Files

Query Result Cache Section

[ CACHE ]

ENABLE = NO;
// A comma separated list of <directory maxSize> pair(s)
// e.g. DATA_STORAGE_PATHS = “d:\OracleBIData\nQSCache” 500 MB;
#DATA_STORAGE_PATHS = “/u01/app/oracle/product/10.1.3/obiee/OracleBIData/cache” 500 MB;
DATA_STORAGE_PATHS = “/obi-tmp/cache” 500 MB;

[ MDX_MEMBER_CACHE ]

#DATA_STORAGE_PATH = “/u01/app/oracle/product/10.1.3/obiee/OracleBIData/cache” 500 MB;
DATA_STORAGE_PATH = “/obi-tmp/cache” 500 MB;

2. Then update the SATEMPDIR environment variable to show the same physical path as the WORK_DIRECTORY_PATHS variable in the NSQConfig.ini file (”/obi-tmp/tmp”).
The SATEMPDIR is only applicable to the TMP files.

NOTE: On Linux/Unix systems, this environment variable is defined in the common.sh file in the OracleBI/setup directory.

On Windows, the SATEMPDIR is defined under System Settings -> Advanced -> Environment Variables.

3. After making these changes, stop the BI Presentation Server and BI Server. Then restart.

4. After restarting, you will see .tmp and cache files written to the new directories.