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Oracle obiee documentation (obiee 11.1.1.5) is long and does not have have fancy pictures.

Generally my approach is when I have issues to search forum posts and blogs.

Now I am thinking to read all obiee documents to fill any gaps that I have.

I might take a couple of days but the benefits will be much greater. How many times have you used some application for years and at some point find a feature that makes your life so much easier? Vim is a perfect example for this with its many tricks.

Read the documentation thoroughly - sounds so simple and yet almost no one does it.

OBIEE 10g and 11g Analytics Default Passwords

10g
http://hostname:9704/analytics/

Username: Administrator
Password: Administrator

RPD: SADMIN

11g
http://hostname:9704/analytics/

It uses the weblogic username that you have created at installation (if it was a full installation)

Example:

Username: weblogic
Password: welcome1

RPD:Admin123

Merging RPD files

I was thinking to write about merging rpds but the Oracle documentation is pretty good.

I have just added the most useful link on the topic.

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E21764_01/bi.1111/e10540/mngreposfiles.htm

This tutorial is the same but step by step guide.

I have starting reading the Oracle documentation guide by guide. I find it very useful. I discover many things that I have missed - different rpd merges and patches.

Information about the merging rules can be found here.

I recommend this to everyone who is working with Oracle Business Intelligence:

Oracle® Fusion Middleware Metadata Repository Builder's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition11g Release 1 (11.1.1)


Links:
Merge Rpds
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E21764_01/bi.1111/e10540/mngreposfiles.htm
Tutorial
http://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/obe/fmw/bi/bi11115/import_merge/merging_importing_11g.htm
Merge Rules
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E21764_01/bi.1111/e10540/merge.htm
Oracle® Fusion Middleware Metadata Repository Builder's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition11g Release 1 (11.1.1)
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E21764_01/bi.1111/e10540/toc.htm

Oracle JDBC Connection issue

I have been experiencing a JDBC connection issue after I have restarted a performance server. JDBC has issues with /dev/random. Use /dev/urandom instead.


After every restart random should be replaced with urandom:

  rm /dev/random
  ln -s /dev/urandom /dev/random

OBIEE11g Advanced Development with Mark Rittman

Yesterday I took Mark Rittman's OBIEE 11g Advanced Development class. The class was amazing - very informative and practical. It is rare to find someone who has the knowledge and is able to explain it. Mark covered obiee development with practical examples.

He was presenting his slides and then he was showing in the Administration tool and in Enterprise Management. It was very interesting to see how he was using OBIEE. I definitely recommend his class.

Oracle session time out when it trying to drop or create and replace object

If something is locked it can not be dropped or create or replace. The error message make it seem as if it is timed out.

One solution is to wait and eventually the lock might be resolved.
In the past I have resolved this my restarting the instance. I did not know what the real problem was.


A more elegant solution is to provided here

Killing an oracle session to remove a lock

 I will copy the queries in case the post is lost:

Identifying the locks:

1. SELECT  l.inst_id,  
2. SUBSTR(L.ORACLE_USERNAME,1,8) ORA_USER,   
3. SUBSTR(L.SESSION_ID,1,3) SID,  
4. S.serial#,  
5. SUBSTR(O.OWNER||'.'||O.OBJECT_NAME,1,40) OBJECT, P.SPID OS_PID,  
6. DECODE(L.LOCKED_MODE,   0,'NONE',  
7. 1,'NULL',  
8. 2,'ROW SHARE',  
9. 3,'ROW EXCLUSIVE',  
10. 4,'SHARE',  
11. 5,'SHARE ROW EXCLUSIVE',  
12. 6,'EXCLUSIVE',  
13. NULL) LOCK_MODE  
14. FROM    sys.GV_$LOCKED_OBJECT L  
15. , DBA_OBJECTS O  
16. , sys.GV_$SESSION S  
17. , sys.GV_$PROCESS P  
18. WHERE     L.OBJECT_ID = O.OBJECT_ID  
19.   and     l.inst_id = s.inst_id  
20.   AND     L.SESSION_ID = S.SID  
21.   and     s.inst_id = p.inst_id  
22.   AND     S.PADDR = P.ADDR(+)  
23. order by l.inst_id
    

Kill the session:

ALTER SYSTEM KILL SESSION 'sid,serial#' IMMEDIATE; 

The hard part here is to realize to check whether there is a lock.

Create Or Replace ORA-00955: name is already used by an existing object

ORA-00955: name is already used by an existing object

when create or replace is used look at the synonyms to see whether synonym with that name exists.

For example

CREATE OR REPLACE test_synonym ..............

check whether synonym test_synonym already exists.

OBIEE Performance - not relevant

Oracle Business Intelligence needs dev_platform and dev_mds schemas which are created by the rcu tool (Repository Creation Utility). RCU also creates a temporary table space.

During performance testing I was monitoring the space taken by the schemas and the temp tables space and they did not change. Therefore it does not matter where the repository schemas are installed. I generally install OBIEE on a powerful machine at least 4GB of ram. I create the repository schemas on a database on separate machine which does not need to be powerful.