Oracle Business Intelligence 11g has finally gotten going with a whirlwind release tour that started in early April 2010.  Today’s launch party takes place in one of the largest business cities in world, New York, NY USA.

After much beta testing, and hush-hush, behind the doors secrecy, this clandestine tool can now be seen via a myriad of marketing paraphernalia online as presented by Oracle.  There are a lot of great resources, break-out session videos, keynotes, etc provided on the Oracle site.  One of my favorites is a side link at http://ht.ly/2bADM which provides some great webcasts on the topic.

Get ready to see some great in-depth detail  on ArtOfBI.com.  We are stoked about the EPM/BI integration that now doesn’t have the limitations that 10g had.  Everything is better in this version as one could only expect from the amount of delay and anticipation this release has brought upon the Oracle BI communities.  We are looking forward to sharing more detail on the topic.

Take a look at some heads up resources from Oracle, et al.  I think you’ll find most of the initial collateral most exciting.

• http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/143363
• http://www.oracle.com/oms/businessintelligence11g/index.html
• http://www.oracle.com/oms/businessintelligence11g/business-insight-075567.html (Demo Videos)
• http://blogs.oracle.com/robreynolds/2010/07/reminder_obiee_11g_north_ameri.html
• BICG Twitter Live from OBIEE 11g Launch

Developing and testing I use the windows command prompt quite a bit.

Often during testing my binaries and executables build folder is down a path off of the base root about five or more directories deep.  In the command prompt I have to run the common commands to CD (change directory), etc. before I land on the directory where I can then call my test programs.  The main problem with that is that my command prompt window often wraps around or just looks so busy that it irritates me.

I recently ran into a really cool solution that allows you to quickly shorten the command prompt entry line using the SUBST function.  It basically take a couple of parameters and maps an open drive letter for you based on the directory path that you supply.  The below is an example:

subst R:  “C:\development\tools\programming\testing\project1\code\tsf\runnable\path\node\bin\”

Simply take the above example’s syntax and modify it for your next testing episode.  The quotes around the directory path do not always need to be there, however, if you have a folder in that path that contains a space you will definitely need to use the double-quotes.

In the above example simply type SUBST and for the two parameters enter an open drive letter and then the directory path you wish to use.  Hit enter.

The cmd prompt will return cleanly.

Type R: and hit the return key.

Your prompt should return with the R:\ drive prompt and you can run your code from there.

Good Luck.

If you haven’t had a need for utilizing Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) as an ETL (or E-LT source as ODI advertises itself) then you wouldn’t know that it is actually somewhat of a beast of a ETL tool. The interface leaves a lot to be desired and I could really get picky but again it is a beast - very powerful. I recently read a great review by the good folks at BI Quotient about ODI. They did a 3 part series on the topic and really covered some areas not mentioned in most ODI write-ups.  I consider myself well versed in ODI but these guys threw in some great ancillary discussion with links to awesome tools such as PolePOS and SQuirrel SQL that I did not know about. And, we know that I am a big fan of open-source software so this was a great discovery for me.

Okay, well the article by Uli Bethke might not be the “Best ODI Review…” but it is really solid.  I like how he keeps HyperSQL at the forefront of the article.  Since HyperSQL (HSQLDB) is really at the core of ODI you know that ODI has the potential to be powerful as an ETL tool.  As you know, HyperSQL is at the core of another very well known software suite, OpenOffice.org so clearly it works pretty well.

The article introduced me to PolePOS which a database benchmarking tool.  I’ve yet to get it a go but you can see the possibilities there, especially since it is free.  Could this be used against OBIEE as a source?

Lastly, in part 2 of the article Uli takes an investigative look at the in-memory synopsis memory engine of ODI against one of the Microsoft SysInternals tools to see just how severely the server’s memory gets consumed as an ODI process executes.  For some this is not a common-sense benchmarking approach but subtly suggest strong performance tuning technique when working with such an application.

Just to wrap it up, no the article did not provide an immediate tutorial or a step-by-step solution.  John Goodwin and some others have some killer articles like that.  However, this one seemed to be one of the first ODI articles that I’ve read that touched on the tool as a part of whole not just the whole itself.  Give it read if you have the chance.

References:

http://www.business-intelligence-quotient.com/?p=703

http://hsqldb.org/

http://www.polepos.org/

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 had been looking for a really quick way to diagnose the roles and privileges of users that I created in a test database.

I snagged this code snippet from the web sometime ago (Sorry, I know longer have the reference if any credit is due at all).  I am posting it here mainly for my reference but perhaps it will help someone else as well.

select
lpad(' ', 2*level) || granted_role "User, his roles and privileges"
from
(
/* THE USERS */
select
null     grantee,
username granted_role
from
dba_users
where
username like upper('%&enter_username%')
/* THE ROLES TO ROLES RELATIONS */
union
select
grantee,
granted_role
from
dba_role_privs
/* THE ROLES TO PRIVILEGE RELATIONS */
union
select
grantee,
privilege
from
dba_sys_privs
)
start with grantee is null
connect by grantee = prior granted_role;