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.
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. Read the full story
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.
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.
One of the best features of OBI iBots (see previous post for iBot acronym) is that a user can perform a seeding cache against reports deemed to exceed a baseline query retrieval time. This would be only a portion of a full-blown OBI Caching Strategy but one that is often left out due to either the OBI Server Cache being turned off, global restriction of an iBot destination, or not being educated about the seeding cache.
Scenario & Solution
For example, if a dashboard contains two reports that take 10 minutes each to return their query and display their respective views this would be unacceptable query performance. If the reports have an SLA of 8am for when the executives arrive and view the dashboards each morning this is really a problem if the executives must wait 10+ minutes to see their dashboards. One immediate solution to this common scenario is to create an iBot using the Oracle BI Server Cache “Seeding Cache” destination option and schedule it to run an hour or so before nearing the breach of the SLA but clearly after any ETL/DW processes have run on the back-end which allow the dashboard reports to be update-to-date. If this iBot is created and scheduled to run at 4am then the report will execute in the background (10+ minutes) and the cache for that report will be saved to the server. Now when your executives arrive at 8am the dashboard will fire-up immediately as it will hit the cache and not need do a full retrieval against the source. Executives will be happy and you not only get to keep your job but there is talk of promotion. Yeah!
Drawbacks
Per the Oracle BI Documentation, the Seeding Cache functionality is that only of the OBI Server Cache. It abides by all configuration settings established for the OBI Server Cache. Therefore, if the OBI Server Cache is turned off your iBots attempting to use the Seeding Cache will not function properly. That is server caching just won’t work. In addition, the Seeding Cache functionality of an iBot is not directly related to the Presentation Server cache. Therefore, the Presentation Server cache provides zero bearing on the Seeding Cache destination method.
The OBI Server cache also take up disk space. The default path in the NQSConfig.ini file for the cache file system storage is set to [Installation Drive]:\OracleBIData\cache. A default maximum of 500MB disk allocation is also set. 1/2 a Gig isn’t much on an enterprise server but you must remember that the processor has to write and read that physical space so you will take a hit there. I could go on about this topic and I just may in another blog post but for now your should get the point and see how there is room for more discussion there.
Security
Since iBots are created via Presentation Services, providing users with the ability to create, publish, schedule an iBot may be a group permissions security model that a company already has in place. However, typically only a handful of users should have access to create an iBot using the “Seeding Cache” destination method. Mainly this is already pre-structured for you as by investigation only Presentation Services Administrators have the ability to set the System Services destinations for an iBot. There is no other option available in the Administration panel to set the System Services permission of Delivers.
Conclusion
There are several approaches to building a caching strategy within OBI. It varies from organization to organization as do most technical strategies of this nature. However, the pros of using the Seeding Cache destination method of OBI far out weigh the the cons. Just be sure to fully vet out the rational behind using this strategy.
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.
My name is Christian Screen, a Business Intelligence mastermind working with mainly Oracle and Microsoft technologies. The views expressed here are my own and do not reflect the views of Oracle, Microsoft, or my employer.
