OBIEE Blog

If you’re in the UK  in late May and eager to improve your OBIEE skills, do some networking, and meet top experts in the field – I suggest you attend The Rittman Mead BI Forum. Kurt Wolff will be present (expert on all OBIEE-related topics, who worked on OBIEE’s grandfather product) for a very advanced session , where some of the topics will include:

Data modeling topics will include fact tables with different grains, solving complex security requirements, inputting user choices into formulas (for example, calculating a discounted price) without using variables, ragged hierarchies, using dynamically named physical tables, the use of specialized tables to avoid errors at query time or when setting prompts, preserving dimension values, calculations that require inner and outer joins among multiple tables, modeling a near real-time transaction environment, modeling a multi-tenant architecture.

Attendants will include: ” John Minkjan (OBIEE), Venkat Janakiraman (OBIEE, Essbase, Fusion Middleware), Mark Rittman (OBIEE, OLAP), Craig Stewart (ODI), Adam Bloom and Mike Durran (Oracle BI EE), Tony Heljula (OBIEE) and Emiel van Bockel (OBIEE, Database) and this year we are pleased to have Gerard Braat (OBIEE) and Robin Moffatt (OBIEE, Database).”

Sounds like a great opportunity to learn directly from the great OBIEE minds.

Good morning All,

I’m back from Florida vacation. What a change – to come from sunny Florida to cold and raining New York.

Trying to see what’s going on in the OBIEE world. Couple interesting topics on the OTN:

Write back – topic – very interesting and growing

Example on how not to ask questions about complex joins – the author should have provided all the details in the beggining

Not using AGO and TODATE functions – I don’t know why anyone would like to avoid using AGO and TODATE functions for time-series analysis. The only two options are: non-Oracle DB which doesn’t support complex PARTITION BY queries or someone doesn’t want to create time dimension.

Also, there’re some very good discussions on the OBIEE Enterprise Methodology Group.

Good luck and enjoy your week.

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.

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.

Hello,

I’m back after being busy with some really interesting issues at work.  I found a minute and I’d like to post few items.

First of all – the question “In OBI, How to move System Wide default settings from one environment to another?” comes up a lot – here’s an official response that I found on the knowledge base:

System wide default settings cannot be moved from one environment to another by design. The recommended way to move any other changes is to perform an Archive and then an unarchive. But, this method does not work for System wide default settings

The following Bug has been logged to make this feature available in the future releases:
BUG 8271294 – ARCHIVING AND UNARCHIVING DOES NOT STORE SYSTEM WIDE DEFAULTS

So now you know what to tell your project manager.

Second item I found interesting is:

“How to reduce the space between multiple pivot tables placed side by side?”

1. Provided that s_oracle10 is in use; backup the following files before editing them
- C:\OracleBI\web\app\res\s_oracle10\b_mozilla_4\views.css
- C:\OracleBI\oc4j_bi\j2ee\home\applications\analytics\analytics\res\s_oracle10\b_mozilla_4\views.css

2. Set the following section in both files above:
.PTSectsTable

There is currently no way to make a query use a specific connection pool. The following bug has been raised to address this requirement- As you are already aware, current workaround is to have separate database defined in physical layer :

Bug 9392303 – FIRST CONNECTION POOL CHOSEN BY DEFAULT FOR ALL QUERIES

Customers requirement :

They have a new application that need connect to mutiple database, so under
physical layer root have two connection pool.
So under Database in physical layer 1st connection pool points to an oracle
instance and second connection pool points to a different oracle instance.
When we run report in answers, the connection information is always taken
from the 1st connection pool by default – hence we get table cannot be found
ora error. Reason being the table exists in the database instance referenced
in the 2nd connection pool.
When we do view data in RPD , the results return fine – this is because while
clicking on view data, we explicitly have to select the connection pool.
While creating the logical table/column, we only specify the database name
and the schema name and the table name- no place to provide connection pool
info – hence the server chooses the 1st one by default.
Need a way to fix this – current workaround suggested is to have multiple
database created in physical layer.