Mark Rittman has an excellent article about querying the DAC repository database tables, including a downloadable RPD file. Being new to working with RPDs I thought it would be good practise to explore this as well as hopefully get some useful information about our current ETL deployment. I downloaded the RPD to c:\OracleBI\server\Repository and opened it up in the Admin tool (Administrator/Administrator). First off I changed the connection pool to point to my DAC repository database, having setup a TNS entry for it first.

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Our main servers are Unix and I’m as happy as a pig in muck at the command line, so when I’m working on Windows (where I’ve got a test OBIEE install) I like to stick with the CLI where possible. PSService is one of those tools that I instinctively reach for without realising it. Combined with Launchy, it’s even better. Simply put, you can control windows services from the command line.

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By a strange co-incidence after following this thread on OTN forums about a BI crash and struggling to understand the actual problem, I think I’ve encountered it myself! I’ve got a test install of OBIEE running on my Windows XP laptop, and whilst building a report in Answers got this: ](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_RCx_EVJpczQ/SmiDrEorbbI/AAAAAAAAGcg/OPGwTLXXg8k/s1600/crash1.png)[ was: szAppName : sawserver.exe szAppVer : 10.1.3.4 szModName : kernel32.dll szModVer : 5.1.2600.3119 offset : 000097a3 Going to the sawserver log at c:\OracleBIData\web\log\sawlog0.

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The configuration of how Presentation Services (sawserver) does its logging is in the file web/config/logconfig.xml (same directory as instanceconfig.xml). It’s all nice and XML’d: Logging Detail Change the numerical values in the FilterRecord entries to alter the detail level of the logging. Lower means less detail, higher means more. Be aware that your log files can grow very rapidly if you set the logging too high, and unless you’re troubleshooting then leave them at the defaults.

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Part of looking at the various gubbins inside OBIEE led me to realise that the Oracle BI Management application drives quite a few things. It exposes MBeans (Management Beans, a java term), accessible through jmx. In the installation of OBIEE this component is referred to as “Systems Management”. The MBeans give us real-time performance information, along with access to all the configuration options that are normally done through config files (instanceconfig.

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A few points to add to my previous posting on JConsole: As well as performance data, you have access to configuration data. Be aware that it is read-write! So whilst it might be a nice alternative to digging around for your instanceconfig.xml etc, you should be careful If you have your BI Server and Presentation Services deployed on separate servers then you will only get MBeans for the relevant service: If you want to view the values of the BI Server MBeans and your Presentation Services server is not on the same box then you have to use JConsole/JMX, as Performance Monitor will not have access to the values: ](http://2.

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As a kid I loved the idea of lego where you can disassemble and reassemble something from the ground up. As soon as I got my hands on a computer it was the same. You can have your Acorn Archimedes with its games, where do I find the sprites and sound files behind it? Likewise Microsoft Word, let me at the VBA underneath to hack it around and see what else it can do.

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I read and post a bit on the OBIEE and OBIA OTN forums. The noise ratio isn’t too bad, but a few things really get my goat: Not responding to answers! If I’ve gone out of my way to help, or try to help, at least have the courtesy to acknowledge it, and ideally mark as Helpful or Correct as appropriate. Even a simple “thanks.” would do. It’s just good manners.

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[edit] See this post too [/edit] On an OBIEE server run [sourcecode language=“bash”] nohup obiee/systemsmanagement/runagent.sh & [/sourcecode] and then run jconsole (make sure you’ve set the DISPLAY first if you’re running it from UNIX). NB: if you don’t have jconsole in your path you can search for it: [sourcecode language=“bash”] $whereis jconsole jconsole: /opt/java1.5/bin/jconsole /opt/java6/bin/jconsole</span> [/sourcecode] You should find it under your java/bin directory You should get this kind of connection dialog: Click connect, and the console will launch.

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I’m working on a scripted load test for OBIEE using nqcmd to run reports multiple times. I hit this interesting issue. Cut and pasting the logical SQL that Presentation Services sends to BI Server from Manage Sessions -> Statement, I kept getting this error when I ran it through nqcmd: [10058][State: S1000] [NQODBC] [SQL_STATE: S1000] [nQSError: 10058] A general error has occurred. [nQSError: 27005] Unresolved column: “Natural Account (COA)”.“Account Parent1 Code”.

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It’s possible to change the error pages served up by OAS/Apache by using the ErrorDocument directive. This is widely documented. However, to get this to take effect in an oc4j application (such as analytics) you need to change mod_oc4j.conf too. (I found this out from this post here) Take backups of httpd.conf and mod_oc4j.conf, and then edit them as follows: In httpd.conf add: ErrorDocument 500 /500.html where /500.html is a relative path to your custom document

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New releases this week - 10.1.3.4.1 of OBIEE, and 7.9.6 of OBIA. After a bit of scrabbling around found: “The 10.1.3.4.1 release of the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition introduces no new features.” Though there are some new bits and pieces for Publisher For 7.9.6 OBIA, there’s no New Features document :( By piecing together the “What’s New in This Release” for each document you can build up a picture (eg in the Upgrade Guide there’s reference to changes for the doc relating to a new version of Informatica), but it would be nice to have it all in one place:

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We’ve got a setup of two OAS/Presentation Services boxes and two BI Server boxes, with load balancing/failover throughout. The Load Balancing of the web requests is being done through a separate bit of kit, an F5 BIG-IP load balancer. This directs the requests at the two OAS servers. The problem we have is that by default OAS serves HTTP on port 7777, but the F5 is using port 80. A request for our load balanced URL: http://bi.

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Why does Google more often than not return the korean (kr) version of OTN forums for a match, but not english? If I search Google for “Send notification:” “oracle.ons.Notification” the top hit is for kr.forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=650662 If you strip the kr from the URL you get this, which makes more sense given the locality when doing the search in Google. Only mildly irritating, but odd behaviour nonetheless

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I noticed that the j2ee server.log file was filling up with these entries: oracle.ons.Notification@afba5d 09/04/02 10:15:12.207 Send notification: oracle.ons.Notification@17ca0f5 09/04/02 10:15:42.217 Send notification: oracle.ons.Notification@1a28842 09/04/02 10:16:12.227 Send notification: oracle.ons.Notification@5144d5 09/04/02 10:16:42.237 Send notification: oracle.ons.Notification@19078ed 09/04/02 10:17:12.247 Send notification: oracle.ons.Notification@fcc268 09/04/02 10:17:42.257 Send notification: oracle.ons.Notification@16df388 A quick google turned up this page in which bug 7132128 (“OC4J EMITS “SEND NOTIFICATION” MESSAGES THAT FILL SERVER.LOG”) is identified. The server.log is currently only 6MB and given the size of the server it will be a while before it causes us problems, but it’s worth being aware of.

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A very minor irritation, but an irritation nonetheless, is when I go to Application Server Control in OAS I have to login twice. Reading around I found this is an Apache feature, and is actually designed behaviour. For reasons I’ve not explored our servers have several different hostnames which resolve to the same IP, e.g.: myserver myserver-app myserver-data When you request a page from Apache using a hostname other than that configured as ServerName in Apache’s httpd.

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(See here and here for history) I edited the shell script which is eventually called by run-saw.sh to start the sawserver, (OracleBI)/setup/sawserver.sh, to use trus: Comment out the final line: $SASAWSERVER and insert as a new line: tusc -fepan -o /tmp/sawserver_tusc.out $SASAWSERVER The output of trus ended with this: open("/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/lib/libstd_v2.so.1", O_RDONLY|0x800, 0) ……… ERR#2 ENOENT open("/app/oracle/product/obiee/server/Bin64/libstd_v2.so.1", O_RDONLY|0x800, 0) . ERR#2 ENOENT open("/app/oracle/product/obiee/web/bin64/libstd_v2.so.1", O_RDONLY|0x800, 0) …. ERR#2 ENOENT open("/app/oracle/product/obiee/odbc/lib64/libstd_v2.so.1", O_RDONLY|0x800, 0) … ERR#2 ENOENT

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In investigating the problems with sawserver I was pointed towards a tool called tusc (which appears to be an HP version of truss). You can use it to invoke a program, and get out a bunch of debug information including system calls. You run it like this: $tusc -fep /app/oracle/product/obiee/web/bin64/sawserver64 As a beginner when it comes to hardcore *nix I can only look at this and take pot shots at what’s going on, but with Google by my side I’m interested in the last lines of the output:

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Follow on from setting up Publisher in a clustered environment, I’ve found a nasty little bug in the scheduling element of Publisher, Quartz. Looking at the oc4j log file /opmn/logs/default_group~home~default_group~1.log I can see OC4J starting up, and then a whole load of repeated messages: 09/03/30 11:28:43 Oracle Containers for J2EE 10g (10.1.3.3.0) initialized - ClusterManager: detected 1 failed or restarted instances. - ClusterManager: Scanning for instance “myserver.fqdn.company.net1238408921404”’s failed in-progress jobs.

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We’re getting this error in the Presentation Services plug-in [analytics]. Log file: /j2ee/home/application-deployments/analytics/home_default_group_1/application.log 09/03/30 13:16:38.75 analytics: Servlet error java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused (errno:239) at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.socketConnect(Native Method) at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.doConnect(PlainSocketImpl.java:333) at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connectToAddress(PlainSocketImpl.java:195) at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connect(PlainSocketImpl.java:182) at java.net.SocksSocketImpl.connect(SocksSocketImpl.java:366) at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:517) at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:467) at java.net.Socket.(Socket.java:364) at java.net.Socket.(Socket.java:178) at com.siebel.analytics.web.sawconnect.ConnectionPoolSocketFactoryImpl.createSocket(ConnectionPoolSocketFactoryImpl.java:63) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:585) at com.siebel.analytics.web.sawconnect.ConnectionPoolSocketFactoryImpl.createSocket(ConnectionPoolSocketFactoryImpl.java:70) at com.siebel.analytics.web.sawconnect.ConnectionPool.createNewConnection(ConnectionPool.java:314) at com.siebel.analytics.web.sawconnect.ConnectionPool.getConnection(ConnectionPool.java:133) at com.siebel.analytics.web.SAWBridge.processRequest(SAWBridge.java:299) at com.siebel.analytics.web.SAWBridge.doGet(SAWBridge.java:325) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:743) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:856) at com.evermind[Oracle Containers for J2EE 10g (10.

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