OBIEE Blog

If you are going to upgrade to from 10g to 11g soon, you should consider the following issue :

Why Does The OBIEE 11g Consistency Check Show Errors And Warnings After An Upgrade That Did Not Occur In 10g?

The goal is to understand why an OBIEE repository (RPD) that completed an error and warning free consistency check in 10g, results in many warnings or errors when the RPD is upgraded to 11g and a consistency check is executed.

A wide range of errors and warnings have been seen.  A few examples have been copied below; however, many other errors or warnings could show after the upgrade.

For example:

Error: The content filter of a source for logical table: Fact response details references multiple dimensions. [nQSError:15001] Could not load navigation space for subject area Test_Area

Error 38126 Object Type: Logical Level
Logical Level “XyZ”.”123″ .. has name with leading or trailing spaces

Error 15004 Object Type: Business Model
Internal Error: Missing functional dependency association for colum 5: X_TABLE.ROW_ID
[nQSError: 15001] Could not load navigation space for subject area Test_Area.

Error 38079 Object Type: Physical Foreign Key
Foreign Key “ABC.123″….
FKey#2 A comparison is being carried out between non-compatible types

Warning: Fact table is not joined to logical dimension table. This will cause the problems when extracting project(s).

Warning: Missing Functional dependency association for column:

Oracle’s reply was:

In general with each release, the consistency checker is enhanced  to improve the consistency rules and to correct consistency checks that may not have been occurring in a previous release, but should have been.  Therefore, it is common and expected for each major release upgrade that you will see additional consistency check errors or warnings that you did not see in a previous release.

The majority of consistency check  errors and warnings that show in 11g but did not show in 10g are legitimate and represent a RPD design issue. The goal of these warnings and errors is to enforce RPD design rules and each one should be investigated and addressed as these could cause additional issues.

It is also advisable if you are in ‘online’ mode to check the nqserver.log from the BI Server to ensure you are correcting all the errors associated with a particular Subject Area and/or consistency check issue.

The default location will be here (assuming default instance name).

[middleware_home]/instances/instance1/diagnostics/logs/OracleBIServerComponent/coreapplication_obis1

My advice is to make a good contingency plan, including roll-back possibility along with full regression testing (which can be tricky in OBIEE).

Good evening,

I hope everyone’s month is going well in the BI world. I’m having a real difficult time fighting word press blog spam. I’m currently using Akismet but please let me know if you find a better way to manage it. It’s so bad that I’m about to disable commenting system.

I’m going to start a whole section dedicated to version 11G. I’m thinking of covering version 11.1.1.5

I think topics such as Installation, Configuration, Deployment, New Modelling techniques, as well as Security. From what I see, it’s a very application (I suspect the whole codebase has been re-written). I’m going to try to follow a systematic approach and to make a good care of categorization.

Please let me know if you’d like me to cover any special area.

This is a nice webinar by Mark Johnson that gives an overview of integration of OBIEE and PeopleSoft:

He’s doing an excellent job explaining authentication and authorization methods there.

Sometimes thoughts materialize – in this case, I was thinking – wouldn’t it be great if Oracle provided a configured instance of OBIEE 11G – with everything pre-configured so that it’d be easy to get evaluate it quickly without going through the pains of learning new application server (Weblogic) and installation steps.

It seems as I was heard. I’m grateful to several people making me aware of the new app:

If you want to learn and play with sample OBIEE 11g, you should download it from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bi-foundation/obiee-samples-167534.html

Installation is breeze. I’ve managed to installed everything in under 1 hour (downloading 25gb takes a few hours)

Again, I think it’s very thoughtful and smart move on Oracle’s part to provide this tool.

KPI Partners uploaded a very high-quality OBIEE 11g demo. I reallly liked it.

Please let me know what you think.