Here is a crib-sheet on creating a new Presentation Catalog in OBI 11g.

The Oracle BI Server and WebLogic Server should be up and running.

1. Stop the system component service for Presentation Services.
2. Specify a new web catalog folder location (one that does not exist) for the catalog on the Repository tab of the Deployment main tab page in Fusion Middleware Control Enterprise Manager.
   • Example: <INSTANCE_HOME>/…/catalogs/mynewcatalog
3. Apply Changes.
4. Activate Changes.
5. Restart Presentation Services.

Upon restarting presentation services the new web catalog folder will be  created for you automatically and be set as the active catalog.

References

• Oracle Presentation Services Documentation

Multiuser Development Environments (MUDE, and yes it should technically have the E, I don’t know why everyone wants to stick with MUD) are nothing new to Oracle BI. But as more an more enterprise teams buy or upgrade to the latest version of Oracle BI, Oracle BI 11g, there is little education given to the adjustment of Oracle BI developer workstations required for an optimal development environment.

In Oracle BI versions prior to 11g, a Oracle BI developer (i.e.: architect, metadata developer, OBI Administrator) could do more with less.  They could simply install the full Oracle BI 10g server including client tools on their local machines and develop away.  These developers would run on what would now be considered a commodity workstation running MS Windows XP with weaker processor (< 2GHz) and weak memory (< 3GB) standards and operated in a single psuedo-server environment without much issue.  This was important as 99% of the time, an OBI Developer did not need to upgrade their workstation or laptop to begin developing. They just downloaded, installed, and were off to the races.  The biggest benefit with that legacy system was that each developer could develop, deploy, and immediately see the changes in their local sandbox environment right away and then iterate.

When those same developers were part of a larger team and the Oracle BI multiuser developer environment was configured, they could take their OBI RPD Projects, pulled down to their local sandbox/workstation, and develop away iteratively before publishing their changes back to the master RPD. All of that without conflicting majorly with a team member or worrying too much about overwriting someone else’s work.  So, what is the transformational adjustment that is required in the latest version, Oracle BI 11g?
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The good folks from the Oracle BI development team are still hard at work making Oracle BI ubiquitous to end-users.  I ran across one of the nicely hidden gems which is the updated OBIEE 11g Custom WebPart of Microsoft Sharepoint.  And, although my MCTS certifications for MSSS and MSSP  are still strong, I don’t have the time to test the implementation at the moment.  As you know, I had previously blogged about the OBIEE and Sharepoint integration and all of those integration points still hold true for Oracle BI 11g.

If you decide to implement this please let me know how it goes.  If I find the time, I’ll post back here in detail.

Download OBIEE 11g Sharepoint Custom Webpart

Resources:

• http://www.artofbi.com/index.php/2009/09/integrating-sharepoint-with-obiee/
• http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/indexes/samplecode/bi-sample-522115.html