The term patching is going to get used quite a bit with the new Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Suite that Oracle has established as a pivotal software release towards their Fusion Middleware brand and BI dominance.  Specifically withing Oracle Business Intelligence 11g, the term patching will get to be ambiguous.  First there is OPatch, which for those who are familiar with Oracle RDBMS, this has been around for some time. The other patching utilities are around the OBI Repository (RPD) and the web catalog.  Yah, Finally!
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Is there a right way to architect a Hyperion EPM infrastructure?  I think the answer to that is yes, and when provided with some straightforward examples, and architectural guidelines by the software creator themselves, Oracle, we can at least gain some semblance of what that looks like.

I tracked these down a while ago and I am posting them here for reference but I also thought that others might find these documents useful.  If not for actual architectural layout and planning, the images contained there-in are definitely helpful for your next presentation slide deck.
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OBI 11g has the cool new feature for patching an RPD.  Patching requires calling one of the OBI XML APIs which is all fine and dandy when it works.  Out of the Box on windows (don’t get me started) there shouldn’t be a problem but on Linux running any of the XML API commands such as biserverxmlgen will bump you into a library missing or version incompatible error.  A common error would be a complaint about libSEicu23so.

To avoid this, during configuration update a user’s profile file (bash_profile, etc.) with the additional LD_LIBRARY_PATH value path of [FMW_HOME]/Oracle_BI1/bifoundation/server/bin.

If you look in this directory there are a lot of shared library (.so) files hanging out.  Several are required by these API command executions and clearly must have the proper reference.  Additionally, duplicate shared libraries may exist already on the Operating System so you may wish to find a way not to confuse these libraries required by the OBI XML API’s to those that are innate to the OS.  You’ll see what I’m talking about as you attempt patching but initially our LD_LIBRARY_PATH contained the first two values of /lib:/usr/lib which was causing a problem.  So, for the OBI user’s bash_profile we move those value paths to follow the OBI 11g library path as seen in the screenshot below.  This fixed the issue and we were able to patch the RPD successfully via command-line API.

Don’t forget that if you are mid-stride when you get this error and fix the LD_LIBRARY_PATH you will need to revitalize your profile by running, >./ ~/.bash_profile, or the like from the terminal window you are in then run the command after that to see your XML API call work.