OBIEE Blog

This image – apparently copyrighted by A. Abela (thank you very much, by the way) – is a great starting point for deciding which chart to choose. Of course, OBIEE currently doesn’t support some of them (such as Variable width column chart) – but I think it’s a very good illustration on various chart types. The chart is available here:
Chart

Also, please check this presentation with some og the AJAX/HTML 5 chart examples – Cool charts – link here
Those are small things – but they could get a lot of brownie points for developers – they would make OBIEE look hip and modern. I really loved the interactive bouncing charts. Not terribly original – but they do create a better experience. Think about users!

I think that the future hold tighter web integration (xml / ajax) for BI systems as well as some great UI. Just look at Iphone – their UI was one of the major reasons for their success. I noticed the trend that many products get that slick look (salesforce, qlickview) – and I hope OBIEE 11G isn’t far behind. I’ve not had a chance to look at it hand-on (just screenshots from presentations) – but again – I hope that product managers looks closely into user experience. The latest version isn’t bad at all – but it’s not far away from distant siebel analytics’s screen/layout. I hope developers would get the facility to customize front-end more liberaly (right now – it involves a lot of xml hacking if you go beyond some CSS stylesheets).

Best wishes.

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.

If you’re running OBIEE under 64-bit Solaris – this might be of use. I just want to add from myself – that it’s not a good idea to change repository in online mode.

Admintool Check-in changes: Internal Assertion Error Condition FALSE , file server/Utility/Generci/NQThreads/SUGThread.cpp, line 515 [ID 820803.1]

When checking in changes in Admintool, you are getting the error:

nQSError:28019 Near line 230: In the metadata expression … the following error occured nQSError 46036 Internal Assertion Error Condition FALSE , file server/Utility/Generci/NQThreads/SUGThread.cpp, line 515
Cause

This is a defect:
Bug 6652490: PSR:FUNC:ESSBASE: OBSERVED THE ERROR WHILE CHECK-IN OR SAVING RPD IN ONLINE MODE ?

Bug was logged for 10.1.3.3.2 with OBI server on Solaris 64 bits

Although the abstract mentions Essbase the bug is reproducible against any database.
But only when OBI is on 64 bits solaris platform.
It applies to all versions from OBI 10.1.3.3.1 and later.

Test case:
From Admin tool created the new rpd (i.e. physical layer) and Drag-Drop
the db to Business model & Presentation layer then tried to Check In / Save
form Admin tool in Online mode but I observed the below error form Admin tool
window as well as NQServer.log
Error Message:
[46036] Internal Assertion: Condition FALSE, file server/Utility/Generic/NQ
Threads/SUGThread.cpp, line 515.
2007-11-27 04:44:12
[46036] Internal Assertion: Condition FALSE, file
server/Utility/Generic/NQ
Threads/SUGThread.cpp, line 515

Off line mode able to check-in or saved sucessfully.

Also we only had the error on a Business Model that had been dragged and dropped from the physical.
Solution
The workaround is to modify the NQSConfig.INI file.
Change the “SERVER_THREAD_STACK_SIZE = 0;”
with “SERVER_THREAD_STACK_SIZE = 512 KB;”

and restart the OBI server

Increasing thread stack size (by setting SERVER_THREAD_STACK_SIZE to a bigger number) is the solution to this issue in all versions including 10.1.3.4.

Increasing thread stack size requires more memory from the server machine.
That is the only impact it should have. But increasing from 256k (default) to 512k is a minor change

This defect will be fixed in the next main release

Hello everyone.

I just realized that this post is inspired by Venkat.

I’m finally posting a solution to the problem I’ve identified a while ago related to a specific Pivot Table View. I think the final outcome should look something like this image:

To get this result – I’ve used the “New calculated column” menu on the pivot table (circled in red):

OBIEE pivot table menu

Then, what you really need to have in the Columns is the most granular level column (sounds redundant – in this case it’s a Date column). I used Excel to quickly generate formulas, such as this for Q1.  It’s really easy to generate these formulas below. I hope it’s pretty self-explaining – you add things up in a granular level – this way you can combine things – that you wouldn’t be able to combine otherwise:

‘1/1/2007′+’1/2/2007′+’1/3/2007′+’1/4/2007′+’1/5/2007′+’1/6/2007′+’1/7/2007′+’1/8/2007′+’1/9/2007′+’1/10/2007′+’1/11/2007′+’1/12/2007′+’1/13/2007′+’1/14/2007′+’1/15/2007′+’1/16/2007′+’1/17/2007′+’1/18/2007′+’1/19/2007′+’1/20/2007′+’1/21/2007′+’1/22/2007′+’1/23/2007′+’1/24/2007′+’1/25/2007′+’1/26/2007′+’1/27/2007′+’1/28/2007′+’1/29/2007′+’1/30/2007′+’1/31/2007′+’2/1/2007′+’2/2/2007′+’2/3/2007′+’2/4/2007′+’2/5/2007′+’2/6/2007′+’2/7/2007′+’2/8/2007′+’2/9/2007′+’2/10/2007′+’2/11/2007′+’2/12/2007′+’2/13/2007′+’2/14/2007′+’2/15/2007′+’2/16/2007′+’2/17/2007′+’2/18/2007′+’2/19/2007′+’2/20/2007′+’2/21/2007′+’2/22/2007′+’2/23/2007′+’2/24/2007′+’2/25/2007′+’2/26/2007′+’2/27/2007′+’2/28/2007′+’3/1/2007′+’3/2/2007′+’3/3/2007′+’3/4/2007′+’3/5/2007′+’3/6/2007′+’3/7/2007′+’3/8/2007′+’3/9/2007′+’3/10/2007′+’3/11/2007′+’3/12/2007′+’3/13/2007′+’3/14/2007′+’3/15/2007′+’3/16/2007′+’3/17/2007′+’3/18/2007′+’3/19/2007′+’3/20/2007′+’3/21/2007′+’3/22/2007′+’3/23/2007′+’3/24/2007′+’3/25/2007′+’3/26/2007′+’3/27/2007′+’3/28/2007′+’3/29/2007′+’3/30/2007′+’3/31/2007′

Calculated item OBIEE

The same logic works for Q2,3,4. For individual dates, it would be the same idea:

And for months, it’s the same logic:

To sum up  – by using the “calculated item” feature of pivot table view – you can create reports with mixed granularity on them. The pros are that you’ll be able to support legacy views (in some instances it’s absolutely critical to mimic existing view). The cons are that it involves some manual entry / data manipulation and that it’s not very flexible (I couldn’t find out how to use variables in this example).

Last thing – it seems as first column gets added on the left and the consequent ones to the right – keep this in mind while designing this view – since I’ve noticed you can’t really manipulate with the locations of the calculated columns.

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 >