OBIEE Blog

It always amazes me how some people don’t bother doing simple research before asking question on OTN. I’m sure that sometimes they just don’t have time to explore the issue by themselves or maybe they don’t know where they should look for information. Questions in one sentence like “My BI Server isn’t starting” or “I have ODBC error” without detailed description pop-up all the time on OTN. I’m a huge fan of metalink (i’m using metalink 3) – I’ve been able to locate some answers always instantly especially before OTN has become such a useful place as it’s now. Filing a service request is a sure way to at least get to the cause of the problem. Of course many times you would hit a BUG or a ENHANCEMENT REQUEST but at least you would know that it’s not your fault.  Through trial and error I’ve compiled a list of best practices that will help you to maximize your Oracle Support experience. Enjoy my SR tutorial:

Most important pre-SR exercise – run a simple search in Metalink / OTN to make sure that this issue haven’t been identified yet – there’s nothing worse than going through days of support e-mail back and forth and then receiving an e-mail that it’s a well-known bug / feature.

1. Make sure to give as detailed description of the problem as possible. Try to describe circumstances when it happens. If you have a question about functionality, be specific about your needs and what you are trying to achieve. If your description is very long – I suggest you type it in word and attach along with the rest of your SR.

2. Take screen shots of the error screens. Circle the problematic area or error message to help support analyst to pinpoint the problem.

3. Put your RPD, web catalog, screen shots into 1 archive. Attach lines from relevant log files (not the whole thing, but extracts). And attach it to the SR. Don’t forget to give your RPD’s admin password.I realized that most of the time, support would request those anyway, so you can be proactive about it. Why shouldn’t you do it now, rather than wait for them to ask you to submit those.

4. Be patient. You SR is important, but sometimes analysts get busy with high-priority tickets. Don’t escalate if nobody is replying within 1 day.  My experience shows that people want to help – it’s just maybe they’re taking their time to counsel with someone else and that’s the reason of the hold-up.

5. Be courteous. If there’s an update or request for more information – do your diligence and reply right away. If you receive an Oracle survey afterward, take a few minutes and fill it out. I don’t know for sure, but I’d guess that can have an impact on someone’s job. If they helped you, why shouldn’t you help out.

Do you have your favourite SR tips? Please share them in the comments.

Part 1

Initially, I was going to write about whether or not the ETL skills are important for a BI developer, however, I’ve significantly broadened the focus of the post since.

There were few articles that have kept my attention for a while – discussion of the skill-sets that business intelligence developers should have. The articles are “Functional Expertise in a Technical BI Consultant” by Jeff McQuigg and “What Skills Does an Oracle BI Developer Need in 2009?” by Mark Rittman (I think I’ve mentioned that one before). I have a big respect and admiration of both experts and have found inspiration in their blogs and forum posts (both OTN and Toolbox). They both list multiple skills that intersect (such as ETL, database, and dimensional modelling). I think the difference between the articles is that Mark is putting the emphasis on application tools (Hyperion Applications, BI Applications, OWB, and others) while Jeff is emphasizing the importance of the general knowledge of BI and DWH concepts such as dimensional modelling and ETL backed up by OBIEE tools proficiency.

“Domain experience in BI, Data Warehousing, BI Tools, Dimensional Modeling, ETL, BI Apps, etc. is what you should be focusing on…”

I should add that Mark also mentions the importance of possessing various applicable skills, however, I felt that he was more elaborate about software applications.

“In addition to these product skills, you also needed to have a fair bit of database knowledge, partly because all of these tools worked directly with database data, so you had to know your indexing, materialized views, explain plans and so on…”

My only two additions to both lists would be web development and html/css skills for front-end OBIEE customization. It might not be very complex, but I’ve had a few instances where clients have asked me to work on such things as changing Answers text / links, modifying some style sheets, and revamping the Dashboard look.  The other skill is LDAP security and various SSO implementations.

One thing is clear – there’re many technologies, tools, and concepts that a good BI consultant should be comfortable with. Not only that, he/she should be proficient in critical thinking, information search, and just-in-time learning flexibility – being able to learn new tools/concepts on the fly.  I don’t even mention such items as communication skills, attention to detail, dressing appropriately – since those are given for those who’re working in an enterprise scene.

Christian Berg (an OBIEE and Hyperion expert)  has recently started a blog of his own and called it hekatonkheires, which apparently means “three giants who possessed a hundred and fifty hands”. I think it’s a very good description of someone working with OBIEE (Siebel Analytics).

(to be continued…)

Comments are appreciated as usual.

Dimensional modeling is very important in OBIEE. Many mistakes happen because of incorrectly defined time dimension or other dimensions. This service request below is a demo of how an incorrectly defined key in the beginning can block the development efforts in the future.

Overview:
========

Modified rpd and added a new dimension for Key Accounts (Sales.”Key Account”.”Key Acct”) into the Sales subject area . After this change when building a report with Sales.Brand and drillingdown on Brand to show Brand_SKU ( a different dimension throws an error in Answers.

ERROR
===========-
[nQSError: 14020] None of the fact tables are compatible with the query request Brand.Brand.

STEPS
===========
By following these steps the issue can be reproduced:

1. Add dimension called Sales.”Key Account”.”Key Acct into sales subject area in rpd
2. save rpd and checkin changes
3. create answers report with a different dimension Brand.
4. Drilldown on Brand to show the next level “Brand”.”Brand_SKU”.
5. Get the error mentioned above

EXPECTED BEHAVIOR
===========
The report should work fine because the “Brand”.”Brand_SKU” was not modified at all.

Business Impact
===========
This is a very important issue that is holding up all BI projects. You cannot move forward until this issue is fixed.
Cause

The error thrown when drillingdown from Brand to Brand_SKU is caused because of incorrect definition of level keys in your rpd. The issue is, that by definition, a key is the lowest level of a table. Any higher levels are made up of aggregating the lowest or detail level. Since Brand and Product have the same detail key, there should be some consistency between the detail or lowest level of their respective hierarchies. There is not. The lowest level of the Brand hierarchy has a level key of CHILD_KEY_WID. The lowest level of the Product hierarchy has a level key of ‘SKU Nbr’ which is mapped to LVL6_KEY. It seems that the navigator is expecting the same detail key but is not seeing it. This seems to be the cause of the navigation error.

As confirmed by reviewing your rpd inhouse, the level keys are not properly defined for Brand and Product dimensions.
The levels were not defined according to best practices. The document from Engineering that lists the issues in your rpd that dont meet best practice is attached to the SR.
Solution

Please follow these steps in order to fix the error “[nQSError: 14020] None of the fact tables are compatible with the query request Brand.Brand”

1) Open rpd using Admin tool
2) Select BMM layer and delete the current hierarchy created for Brand
3) Make the following change to Product Dimension

–Dimension –Logical File –Physical File
Product Product HSAMI_SKU_DH and
HSAMI_BRAND_SKU_DH

The Product Dimension has two hierarchies, CMDYGRP and BRAND:
ALL
CMDYGRP
COMMODITY
SKU
BRAND
SKU

So now both hierarchies are constructed in one dimension over
one logical dimension table, with multiple phyiscal source tables.

4) Save changes to rpd
5) Test in Answers by creating report with Brand and Product columns
6) Navigation/Drilldown from brand and product should work fine.

How can we get the Prompt values to be displayed when the report is exported in MS Office formats or printed in PDF using the ‘Download’ or ‘Print’ report links?

When you use the ‘Printer Friendly’ option on the Dashboard, all objects on the Dashboard get downloaded for printing including the Dashboard Prompt section.

However using the report ‘Download’ or ‘Print’ link, this does not print the Dashboard Prompt section.
Please note this is expected behavior. Using the Printer Friendly icon at the lower lefthand corner, it prints the entire dashboard. Alternatively the ‘Download’ or ‘Print’ link option is available, for the report. So this will print the Compound layout view of the report, or any specific report sections that have been made available on the Dashboard.

A workaround to have the Dashboard Prompt values displayed when you use the Report ‘Download’ or ‘Print’ link is by having the filter view as part of the report.

Oracle has now raised the Enhancement Request# 8242921 to address this matter. The enhancement request is to enhance the product so that so there is also an option to download to the various formats at the dashboard page level. Similar to the Dashboard Page ‘printer friendly’ functionality.

Customer want to take away from all users ‘My Dashboard’. They want that the users only have the choice between the ‘common Dashboards’.
But the users (the report creators) need My Folders.
So Manage Privileges – Catalog – Personal Storage (My Folders and My Dashboard) does not fit exactly.

Customer has created default shared dashboards that they want the users to see/read by default, but they want to restrict user access to the Shared Dashboard folders.
They want users to be able to access their My Folders directory, but not have access to their My Dashboard link or My Dashboard folders. This is not possible with out of box functionality.

The following enhancement request has been created to benefit the users.

BUG 7665499 – TAKE AWAY FROM ALL OUR USERS ‘MY DASHBOARD’

Solution

The only way to deny access to ‘My Dashboard’ is via the “Personal Storage (My Folders and My Dashboard)” Catalog privilege. Denying this privilege to a group or user will take away access to both ‘My Dashboard’ and ‘My Folders’ – currently, you can’t separate the two. Therefore I have logged the following Enhancement Request.

BUG 7665499 – TAKE AWAY FROM ALL OUR USERS ‘MY DASHBOARD’
Alternatively, here is a suggestion of using current functionality would be:

1. Create a web catalog group and dashboard via “Manage Presentation Catalog Groups and Users” to be used as the default user dashboard.
2. Grant the ‘Everyone’ web group the appropriate privilege to this catalog group via “Manage Presentation Catalog” – e.g. ‘Read’.
3. In the admin tool, create a session init block to set the ‘PORTALPATH’ session variable to the webcatalog path of the default dashboard page.
3.a. You can find the path by looking at the properties of the folder under ‘_portal’ in the catalog group folder the default dashboard was created in – e.g. “/shared/user_default/_portal/Home”.
3.b. The init string could either select the literal path (e.g. select ‘/shared/user_default/_portal/Home’ from dual) so all users would be routed to the same dashboard. Alternatively, the path could be stored externally, e.g. in a table, and selected from it per userid. That way, it would be manageable outside of the admin tool.

This would force all users to the default dashboard specified in the path used to populate PORTALPATH for all users.
One issue that may occur is with existing users that have set their ‘Default Dashboard’ to anything but ‘Default’ in the ‘My Account’ link – they may be required to set it to ‘Default’, then log-off/log-on for the default dashboard setting to take affect.
I know of no way to get around this potential issue for this scenario short of each user making the change OR deleting users from the webcat such that a subsequent logon will ‘re-initialize’ their account (which will then use the init block set PORTALPATH value). Both of these options seem severe, and the second may prove problematic as long as the ‘My Account’ link is still active.