If you haven’t explored the full depth of OBIEE and all of its majestic glory then you may have not yet seen the 10.1.3.4 sample RPD and web catalog which can integrate with your RPD to track user access statistics, longest running queries, etc. By the way Oracle aptly named this Usage Tracking. This is a fantastic tool and below I have put together the web’s first video tutorial on how to install and configure the basics of the Usage Tracking RPD. In subsequent posts I look to explore Usage Tracking in more detail as well as to show you how to migrate the schema from the basic, dare I say lonely Usage Tracking RPD, and integrate it with a more real world scenario RPD like the one your company runs its supply chain analytics from. The video is below - enjoy.
Remember, the toll for watching this video is simply to leave a comment. If you learn anything from the video then you must leave a comment and praise it heavily. : )
In my previous post on Essbase Studio Server & OC4J as a Windows Service I mainly tailored that information to Essbase Studio. I received a bit of feedback on making sure I added the OC4J component in a similar fashion and here it is. Don’t forget to watch the video tutorial for full disclosure.
I recommend extracting the Zip file to the following root path, ORACLEBI_HOME\server\.
Similar to the Essbase Studio windows service files you will need to update the RegisterService.bat and ServiceRegistration.reg files to point to your installation’s correct OC4J file paths. Once that has been confirmed execute the _init_BuildAppAsWinServiceWrapper.bat to launch the process. Click ‘OK’ for all registry update prompts.
Gotchas
There are no gotchas to this solution that I have yet found. If you spy any please leave a comment and I will seek to provide an update. The main thing to note is that this solution was developed for the 10.1.3.4 release of OBIEE which is the 10.1.3.1.0 release of OC4J and the Embedded Java Containers. If you run the following command in a command window you will be able to see the version of OC4J that your machine is running:
ORACLEBI_HOME\oc4j_bi\bin\oc4j.cmd -version
Conclusion
Again, once one knows how to use the inherent code for Windows Servers it is actually quite straightforward to implement this type of solution.
As promised, based on my previous post regarding setting up Essbase Studio Server and OC4J to run as a Windows Service, I have provided a video to visually assist you with your integration.
As you know, the Hyperion 11.1.1.3 release of Essbase Studio Server was not release as a windows service. After my last Essbase Studio implementation project, and being repeatedly asked, “How do we run Essbase Studio as a Windows Service?”, I decided to dig deep into the details and deliver a concrete answer to those that care to read on. Of course, I was successful in my endeavor, hence this post. Now, I ask, Do you want to see Essbase Studio Server launchable in your services panel like this…?
I keep getting asked “Was the Essbase Studio installation ever provided as a windows service?”. My reply to that now is “Who cares?”. If the Oracle think-tank decided not to make life easier for us with a Windows Service for Essbase Studio upon install then so be it. At least now, I’ve got a great rebuttal and a top-notch solution. Now, no longer must this one piece of the Hyperion BI suite be the outcast with only the startServer.bat file to launch the server. Read the full story
I’ve noticed that some OBIEE developers are still used to the old school methods of moving catalog data from environment to environment with copy and paste tactics, so I thought it would be good to begin a series on the OBIEE Content Accelerator Framework (CAF) that Oracle has provided for about a year now. The CAF provides a means to clone catalog data (via Catalog Manager) from a source and push it to a destination environment (target) using only a few quick steps. It also has the ability to sync up requests, etc. based on a changed Presentation Layer so that manually identifying changes in reports, etc. now becomes much less of a pain-staking process.
This is the first in what I hope to be a more elaborate deep-dive on the topic. For now, here are the steps (see video) on how to conduct the installation of CAF in your base client environment taken right from the installation guide. So far the installation of the tool is only certified in Windows XP, however, I have conducted the install in Windows Server 2003 and it functions as designed.
Below, the is the install video from a Windows Server 2003 installation. Below that are links to get 100% up-to-speed on making your life easier with CAF. Enjoy. Read the full story
By now every knows that the release of Hyperion 11x has provided us with the latest and greatest Essbase modeling application, Essbase Studio. A lot of us are familiar with Essbase Integration Services and have been looking at Essbase Studio like a two-headed dog. They either are scared and don’t want to go near it or they are so used to their purse-dog, i.e: EIS, that they stick with what they know best and haven’t unwrapped Essbase Studio yet.
This blog post should put and end to any reluctancy. I introduce to you the first Essbase Studio tutorial on the web.
You can download the PDF here. (I’ll eventually move this to a CDN if the downloads get to big, so please link to this post and not the document itself.)
I am also breaking the tutorial into a series with this being part 1. There are a lot of cool new functions with Essbase Studio and you will immediately see the benefits it has over EIS. Soon, you’ll see other blog post here on Essbase Studio tutorials part 2, 3, etc. so be sure to check back often or subscribe to the RSS.
If this series is good, bad, or indifferent please let me know. I would like to keep these up and with your feedback I can revise and make the documents that much more informative everyone.
Cheers.
Update 8/30/2009
- This should have been posted to the live site last week. I am in the middle of switching hosting providers for my blog and uploaded this post to my test site instead of this one. Sorry for the delay.
I covered in a previous blog post the new addition of Annotations in HFR/FR in the System 11x EPM release. When you create or reply to an annotation one has the option to taxonomize the annotation using the category dropdown. This blog quickly steps you through how to add/remove a category so that the default categories can be augmented or offset. Please note that you may cause referential damange to your HFR/FR system if you modify a category that is already being used in an existing annotation entry. Be careful or you may cause errors in FR and the annotation report viewer resulting from your modification.
When a user creates or replies to an HFR annotation, out-of-the-box the default category list appears in the drop-down with the options seen below:
In order to modify this list (add/change/remove) on must access the “annotations.properties” configuration file located in [%Hyperion_Home%]\products\Foundation\workspace\lib\. This file also stores logging information related to the annotations but we are concerned only with the categories at this point.
Open the file and location the section for “Categories”. It should be above the logging configuration section. There is a comma separated list of values which are set by default. At this point you can add, delete, or modify this list. For testing purposes and the sake of this tutorial I simply appended a new value called “Testing” to the end of the list. Pay attention to follow the structure currently in place before making your change. Notice that there are no spaces between values and that the last value does not contain a trailing comma.
Save the annotations.properties file and close it. At this point your modifications have taken place but they will not be available in FR or anywhere else in the system for use until you restart the Hyperion Annotation Server windows service. Restart the windows service and re-open your HFR/FR report. You will now see that your change has been picked up properly.
Conclusion
In this tutorial we quickly located our annotations config file, made a modification, restarted services, and saw the change reflected as we desired. Just as a reminder this operation should only be done by a high-level administrator. Extra care should be taken to run the annotation report from Workspace first to ensure that no existing annotations are using categories that you seek to modify. Doing so may have undesired results and cause headaches. Enjoy.
Understanding web services in general is a big benefit for anyone using integrated technologies today. That includes any system that integrates a web client on a closed intranet network or open network with access to the world wide web. Because OBIEE presentation services is ultimately a web-based tool using your favorite web browser one would hypothesize that utilization of web services could also be incorporated by bringing in external data or reading from network data sources.
This post will show how to leverage presentation services to pull in a web service and integrate the web service data into our Dashboard. This is a low level example just to get you thinking about the grand possibilities of the integration.
The data we will consume stems from a Yahoo.com web service built inside an Answers report view. It does not require any database integration or schema modifications. We will display it in the dashboard. In the dashboard our final product looks like this:
One of the smartest tools Oracle/Hyperion ever integrated into its product suite was the migration utility. Overtime this has evolved to the LifeCycle Managment utility or LCM for short. Actually Oracle/Hyperion has taken it even one step further by calling its fully integrated migration tool the BI+ Artifact LifeCycle Management utility even though they have retained the same acronym, LCM. I saw a job board posting for a BI+ administrator recently that touted knowledge of LCM as a “must have”. So, between that and a recent client project request, I thought I would shine some light and/or seek to demystify this tool, LCM.
LCM, has actually been incorporated into the Hyperion suite since Hyperion System 9x. I believe starting with 9.3 which is when I started using it. At that point it was really just a command-line tool. It was very much a kluge and in my opinion it still is especially after you do the first migration from dev to prod (or whatever you envrionment structure look like). I’ll go into that later.
Why do we need LCM?
Technically you don’t. You can get along without it like we did in the previous versions of Hyperion by copying objects and migrating them individually. One could still use the Essbase “Copy…” command in EAS to get a database from dev to prod and vice-versa with no problem. The same goes with getting security from one environment to another although that’s usually a bit more work that simply moving Essbase objects around. Read the full story
We’ve been working with Oracle for sometime now with the latest release Oracle EPM release and there has been a lot of demand for some demonstration and quick training on Hyperion Essbase Studio. Since this is new to the 11x release there is not a lot for the general developer or user.
Check out the link to a quick 45 minute training video that was put together. It should help you to get ramped up on the topic.
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.
