The latest version of the Oracle BI Applications, 7.9.6 and 7.9.6.1 have not been out for that long.  That goes as well for the newest version of the DAC clearly. And, perhaps it is that this release is so new and there are just enough changes that several bugs still got out in this release.  Although these bugs are subtle and minor, they will pop-up on you in the damnedest of places, just when you thought you were sailing along swimmingly.

Now, if you read the systems requirements documentation word-for-word upon each and every OBI Apps release, no matter how minor the release, you may not need this information.  But, if you are human, you may have missed the tiny section on page 12 of the related release document, http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E14847_01/bia.796/e14221.pdf. This page briefly highlights the fact that a DAC patch, 8760212, is required for this release of OBI Apps. It’s a DAC patch.
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I’ve been integrating SalesForce.com with OBIEE and some other data warehousing projects for clients for some time now and had a moment to throw this tutorial together.  Also, I mentioned earlier in the year that I would definitely be providing a few blog posts on this topic of SalesForce.com integration.  And, What better way to start off than by explaining with another tutorial video? Since the Informatica Video series is the most viewed post on http://www.artofbi.com right now, I figured I’d keep that trend going.

Below is the video tutorial which will be a precursor to the full OBIEE / SalesForce.com integration.  Today I am showing the quick and dirty ability to connect to SalesForce.com via Informatica 8.6 PowerCenter in order to push up some new account data. I’ll get into the weeds sometime down the road.

Integrating OBIEE and SalesForce.com from ArtOf BI on Vimeo.

Conclusion

Informatica is a great tool for ETL and clearly the only way to fly with the OBIEE pre-builts. This video tutorial shows one how to get rolling with their own base integration using one of the many SalesForce.com objects, Account. If you have any questions, or comments, post them as usual and I’ll try to get back to you as soon as I can.

Working on a OBI Apps project, I was getting the DAC configurations ready and bumped into the following error message, stating “Error whle calculating build information!”.  The message stated “MESSAGE:::No physical folder information found for PLP”.   This occured when I was trying to build my newly created execution plan.

Solution

I had created a new execution plan and added my subject area(s) but forgot to click the “Generate” button on the Parameters sub-tab after I had selected the subject areas that I wanted built for that particular execution plan.  To fix the error, I just highlighted the newly created execution plan, clicked the Parameters sub-tab and clicked “Generate ”

This is a very low level issue for the DAC but the issue and solution were worth mentioning.  This occured on the DAC Windows client version 10.1.3.4.1.

In the spring of  2009 Sun Microsystems went live with their implementation of OBIEE and presented at the North California Oracle Applications User Group.  The original document is found here,

http://www.norcaloaug.com/seminar_archive/2009_05/Sun_Microsystem_OBIEE_Implementation.pdf

but I have also mirrored the file here,

http://www.artofbi.com/docs/Sun_Microsystem_OBIEE_Implementation.pdf

The document highlights some of the benefits of  bringing OBIEE into the organization along with pros and cons and usage of the BI Meta Data Repository.  At a minimum there are some great bullet-points here that could be leveraged for your next OBIEE presentation.

Searching for some answers to an OBIEE issue a client was having led me through an extremely detailed excursion through the OracleBI andOracleBIData file system folder structures.  I bumped into the folder /OracleBI/Corda50/ which I hadn’t paid much attention to in the past.  This is where things got interesting.  Spelunking through that directory led me to http://www.corda.com, which low and behold is the owner of the PopChart software technology that OBIEE uses to render its charting graphics - all formats of all charts and graphs.

This PopChart technology is the core reason we have the seemingly superfluous Oracle BI Java Host service that we have all come to love/hate.  It is Java based and clearly fits directly into OBIEE’s infrastructure model.  Okay, so now that you now have that tid-bit in your arsenal, here are few questions that one could ask of their dev skills or conjecturing minds:

1. Why do the charts that PopChart show on their website look cooler than what OBIEE offers?  Could one download a trial, rip the new PopChart version binaries, and swap them in the /Corda50/ folder?
2. Why didn’t Oracle throw in the cool Corda mapping chart?  It would beat MapViewer any day.
3. Is PopChart the engine that we should expect to run graphs/charts in OBIEE 11G?
4. What licensing deal did Oracle set-up to get Corda PopChart in OBIEE?  It had to be a sweet deal for Corda.

Next up in the third party tool battery is a tool that Oracle BI leverages in a more ancillary fashion, SQLAnywhere.  If you haven’t heard of it before don’t worry, there’s only 10 Million or so copies in use  : ) .  SQLAnywhere is owned by Sybase. And as far as I know, even though Sybase had a stellar year in 2008 they have not yet been acquired by an larger firm like let’s say…Oracle.  Although Oracle did have Sybase on their acquisition list back in 2004 during the PeopleSoft takeover helmed by a younger Ellison.

For those of us that have actually completed a Oracle BI Disconnected Analytics implementation you will immediately know (well, you should) that SQLAnywhere is the database for disconnected analytics.  When installing Disconnected Anlaytics as part of a client tools install you get a folder within the OracleBI folder structure called SQLAnywhere.  I eventually plan on doing a Disconnected Analytics Tutorial just to show how it works from a client’s laptop, using Briefing Books, connecting to a local dashboard, etc in a later post.  BTW, SQLAnywhere looks for a “.db” extension for its database file. Without the .db file there is nothing in that default folder to query.

Conclusion

This post is about more that just rambling tid-bits.  It seeks to gain insight into the inner workings of OBIEE.  Let’s face the facts, the cost per license seat for Corda PopChart and SQLAnywhere are not cheap.  You can look it up yourself.   What’s more interesting is Oracle’s no to long ago purchase of Sun Microsystems who had purchased MySQL not to long before that.  Will MySQL replace Oracle BI’s use of SQLAnywhere?  I belive so.  MySQL is much more widely adopted and it is still open-source.  And, what about Corda PopChart?  We’ll soon see who gets the chart and graphs rendering job in Oracle BI 11G but I suspect that it won’t be Corda.  Why my suspicion? Just look at the screenshots from the upcoming 11G Answers preview and look at the Corda PopCharts website, if they did get the gig, they must have done some custom work which I would have brought in-house if I was Oracle BI development management.  Plus, there are some nice open source graphing tools out there, just do a Google search to find them.

All in all I think 11G will make us re-think what we know about OBIEE.  It is going to give us bloggers a lot more content to write about that’s for sure.

Credits

Screenshot for OBIEE 11G

• http://debaatobiee.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/obiee-11g-a-gospel-about-whirlpool-in-bi-space/