Recently digging into the strategy and best practice of installing the OBIEE Applications, mainly the DAC and Informatica  components, I see two common issues arise more often that any others.  One has to do with the Informatica Integration Service not matching the correct locale such at UTF-8 or MS Windows Latin, etc. preventing it from starting and the other has to do with the Informatica or DAC user not able to call the core integration tools pmrep and pmcmd.  This issue is common on Linux/Unix environments but not so much on a Windows server environment.

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Here is a really easy way to verify information about an Informatica PowerCenter’s current status.  You need not be an administrator or even logged into any part of the Informatica PowerCenter environment.  Using the default or custom port of Informatica PowerCenter, enter the following URL:

• http://localhost:6001/coreservices/DomainService
  • i.e.: http://<INFA_SERVER>:6001/coreservices/DomainService

The result will be similar to the image below:

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/