Recently I dusted off an old laptop of mine that was peforming terribly with Windows XP since it only had 1/2 GB RAM and the machine is about 4 years old.  So, I wanted to throw a Linux distribution on it.  I was going to wipe the hard drive and then thought to myself that I may actually want to keep the Windows OS as well and just run a dual-boot system.  I’ve done this before when I have installed both OS’s on on fresh HD and had no problems.

I thought this endeavor would also be no problem until I saw that the only volume on the laptop was set as the system partition - Basically only a C: drive consuming all 80GB of hard drive space.  I looked in WIndows Disk Management and there is no tool for reducing a partitioned space.  What?? You can’t shink a partition via Windows?

Then long and short of it is that I was not going to spend money on any Disk Management software like PartitionMagic, etc.  I called a Linux guru buddy of mine and he pointed me to a killer open source bit of software that runs on the Linux Kernel from boot via ISO download to CD burn.  The software is called GParted.  Just download the ISO, burn it to CD (or USB if so skilled), place the CD in the tray and reboot the machine.  GParted will start up (3 minutes or less) and the GUI is really intuitive.  Some user of GParted even wrote a nice detailed post with a checklist and warnings before partitioning a Windows environment, here.

Using GParted I was able to Shrink my parition (clearly I was not using the full HD on the laptop) by a substantial amount making room for a new parition which gets marked as “unallocated”. It took about 30 minutes to go from a full 80GB partition to a 40GB/40GB split.   I think the speed was due to the low RAM.  Once finished GParted reboots the machine and pops out the CD tray on exit.

I popped in my ISO download to CD burn version of Linux Mint 8, installed it and presto, a perfect dual-boot install.  Linux runs fast on this low RAM machine.  Time to install some BI stuff.

If you haven’t explored the full depth of OBIEE and all of its majestic glory then you may have not yet seen the 10.1.3.4 sample RPD and web catalog which can integrate with your RPD to track user access statistics, longest running queries, etc. By the way Oracle aptly named this Usage Tracking. This is a fantastic tool and below I have put together the web’s first video tutorial on how to install and configure the basics of the Usage Tracking RPD. In subsequent posts I look to explore Usage Tracking in more detail as well as to show you how to migrate the schema from the basic, dare I say lonely Usage Tracking RPD, and integrate it with a more real world scenario RPD like the one your company runs its supply chain analytics from. The video is below - enjoy.

Remember, the toll for watching this video is simply to leave a comment. If you learn anything from the video then you must leave a comment and praise it heavily. : )

How to Install OBIEE Usage Tracking < 20 min from ArtOf BI on Vimeo.

As promised, based on my previous post regarding setting up Essbase Studio Server and OC4J to run as a Windows Service, I have provided a video to visually assist you with your integration.

Essbase Studio Server & OC4J As a Windows Service from ArtOf BI on Vimeo.

If you have any questions or comments please post them so that everyone can benefit from them.

I’ve noticed that some OBIEE developers are still used to the old school methods of moving catalog data from environment to environment with copy and paste tactics, so I thought it would be good to begin a series on the OBIEE Content Accelerator Framework (CAF) that Oracle has provided for about a year now. The CAF provides a means to clone catalog data (via Catalog Manager) from a source and push it to a destination environment (target) using only a few quick steps. It also has the ability to sync up requests, etc. based on a changed Presentation Layer so that manually identifying changes in reports, etc. now becomes much less of a pain-staking process.

This is the first in what I hope to be a more elaborate deep-dive on the topic.  For now, here are the steps (see video) on how to conduct the installation of CAF in your base client environment taken right from the installation guide.  So far the installation of the tool is only certified in Windows XP, however, I have conducted the install in Windows Server 2003 and it functions as designed.

Below, the is the install video from a Windows Server 2003 installation.  Below that are links to get 100% up-to-speed on making your life easier with CAF. Enjoy.
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So we at The Art of BI decided it was time to stand-up a sandbox version of Oracle Hyperion System 11 (11.1.1) since we were tired of using our client’s boxes for research, training, fun development stuff, etc.  : )

 The idea here is to get a nice single server instance of the EPM suite up with the core Shared Services, EPM, Essbase, and Planning.  In so many ways we are doing it both to see if it can be done and what will happen when we do. Other questions we’ll ask is How does it perform? What are the limitations? And, What are our disk space and memory issues, If any?

By the way we will do this on a Parallels VM using Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Addition.  Should we use MySQL now that they are under the Oracle umbrella? We’ll see about that one. : )

To aid our installations we are going to reference both of the following installation docs and contrast and compare the two:

• from Applied OLAP
• from Oracle Technology Network

We’ll provide some feedback and maybe some screenshots during the next couple of days and let you know how it went and what our findings were.

See Part 2 of this series >>