OBIEE11g Launch

So, just back from the launch day for OBIEE 11g, lots of good stuff there, although I have to say that after this long in development I was hoping for a bit more, especially for developers.  When one of the people giving a session opened the Admin tool and I saw that it was pretty much exactly the same with new icons my heart did sink a little bit.

Anyway, here are the notes I made, and a few blurry pictures from my iPhone, sorry still getting used to it ...

Visualisation:

- Geospatial support, ie results shown on map without any extra config, probably separately licensed says my sceptical self.
- Scorecards, kpi watchlist , strategy trees etc; these are all new and look very powerful, again the implication was separate licensing.
- Complete integration of bi publisher and
- Complete control of the whole from enterprise manager
- Pivot tables can be re- pivoted in place by the user; huge win in my mind
- Comments against the strategy tree explaining problems etc, collaboration, not so sure about this one.

From insight to action:

- Action links have the traditional navigate etc options but also allow custom actions. These actions can be all sorts of navigation, call web service, java method, browser script or http method. Guided navigation still available on these links.

- Can have saved actions which we then just pick out as action for link. So actions are now first class objects that are saved and shared.

- Can add commentaries to dashboards etc for collaboration, maybe useful if going to sharepoint or something.

Dashboard editor is much prettier.

iBots now called Agents. Other than that not very different for delivers section except for actions which now allows the full list as above and use of the action library. Also have invoke per row so that action is triggered for each row in the report instead of for the whole result set.

Systems management and deployment:

- Centralised performance management.
- Pull logs from all components on all servers to one log and trace an error or query all the way through it.
- Usage tracking and delivers etc schemas are created at point of installation with repository creation utility. 

- Oracle Process Management Notification now used for controlling non j2ee comps i.e. BI server etc. All j2ee comps now controlled via weblogic which is included in the installation. EM can be used to configure everything now for 11g.

Security things: pluggable SSO and ID management. SSL everywhere can be configured in one place and then starts working between all components just like that.

3 install options, simple, enterprise (pick ports network install etc) and software only for just lying out software and not doing the configuration.

Very simple 10g to 11g upgrade experience multipass so that you can check what is going to happen etc before doing it. Upgrades data and schema and all pieces eg webcat.

EM is very good now. No more searching for logs etc all in one place no more configuration files either.

Can also see performance metrics for the environment e.g. Number of queries, new logins by time.

6 weeks till GA of OBIEE11G

DAC server as service in 10.1.3.4.1

Today I had to create the DAC server as a service again, this time in a later version of the DAC and found that the libraries have changed.  To get the DAC server working in this version:

I had to use this command (you'd need to change this to point to your location for the jdk and the dac root directory):

javaservice -install "Oracle BI: DAC Service" "E:\Java\jdk1.6.0_13\jre\bin\client\jvm.dll" -Xms256m -Xmx1024m "-Djava.class.path=E:\OracleBI\DAC\bifoundation\dac\lib\msbase.jar;E:\OracleBI\DAC\bifoundation\dac\lib\mssqlserver.jar;E:\OracleBI\DAC\bifoundation\dac\lib\msutil.jar;E:\OracleBI\DAC\bifoundation\dac\lib\sqljdbc.jar;E:\OracleBI\DAC\bifoundation\dac\lib\ojdbc6.jar;E:\OracleBI\DAC\bifoundation\dac\lib\ojdbc5.jar;E:\OracleBI\DAC\bifoundation\dac\lib\ojdbc14.jar;E:\OracleBI\DAC\bifoundation\dac\lib\db2java.zip;E:\OracleBI\DAC\bifoundation\dac\lib\terajdbc4.jar;E:\OracleBI\DAC\bifoundation\dac\lib\log4j.jar;E:\OracleBI\DAC\bifoundation\dac\lib\teradata.jar;E:\OracleBI\DAC\bifoundation\dac\lib\tdgssjava.jar;E:\OracleBI\DAC\bifoundation\dac\lib\tdgssconfig.jar;E:\OracleBI\DAC\bifoundation\dac\DAWSystem.jar;E:\OracleBI\DAC\bifoundation\dac" "-Duser.dir=E:\OracleBI\DAC\bifoundation\dac" -start  com.siebel.etl.net.QServer -description "Oracle BI DAC Server Service" -current "E:\OracleBI\DAC\bifoundation\dac"

As you can see the libraries are completely different compared to my earlier post.

You must include the -current parameter, as otherwise the relative references to files will not work and so features such as integration with Informatica will not work correctly.

SA System Subject Area

I have seen a few posts on various blogs which have info on the SA System area, but none of them seemed complete so here's my attempt :-)

The SA System area allows you to set up delivery devices for users of Siebel Delivers automatically, so that it isn't necessary for each user to fill in My Account with appropriate delivery devices and profiles etc.

The core of the SA System area is a presentation catalog/subject area containing exactly the following tables and columns:

 

As far as I can work out the BMM layer can look pretty much as you want as long as the presentation layer looks like this.  For example, in other examples on blogs I have seen the Group Name on the same logical table as the user name etc; in my BMM I took a leaf out of the OBIA and how the SA System is configured to work with Siebel:

 

So I created a seperate logical table for groups, and then an intersection table to hold the many to many relationship between users and groups, this also mapped to the physical layer:

 

I did this because I wanted each user to be able to have multiple groups, more on this later. 

So, once I had created this rest rpd, I set up my OBIEE server to use it, filled in some data in the DB tables and then started it up.  This is a query showing what I added to the tables:

I then logged in as my test user, went to My Account and got this:

 

Hmm, strange.  So as instructed I  looked at the BI presentation server log:

Authentication Failure.
Odbc driver returned an error (SQLDriverConnectW).
---------------------------------------
Type: Error
Severity: 40
Time: Fri Jan 29 14:20:21 2010
File: project/websubsystems/sasystemsubjectarea.cpp Line: 248
Properties: ThreadID-7256;HttpCommand-UserPreferences;RemoteIP-127.0.0.1;User-Matt
Location:
    saw.httpserver.request
    saw.rpc.server.responder
    saw.rpc.server
    saw.rpc.server.handleConnection
    saw.rpc.server.dispatch
    saw.threadPool
    saw.threads

Error finding  System SA. Authentication Failure.
Error Codes: IHVF6OM7:OPR4ONWY:U9IM8TAC

Odbc driver returned an error (SQLDriverConnectW).
State: 08004.  Code: 10018.  [NQODBC] [SQL_STATE: 08004] [nQSError: 10018] Access for the requested connection is refused.
[nQSError: 43001] Authentication failed for Administrator in repository Star: invalid user/password. (08004)

I had to scratch my head over this one for a while until I wondered if it was something to do with the credential store that Delivers uses to authenticate to the presentation services.  So I decided to try adding Administrator to the store:

C:\OracleBI\web>cd bin

C:\OracleBI\web\bin>cryptotools credstore -add infile c:\OracleBI\web\config\credentialstore.xml
>Credential Store File:
C:\OracleBI\web\bin>cryptotools credstore -add infile c:\OracleBIData\web\config\credentialstore.xml
>Credential Store File:

C:\OracleBI\web\bin>cryptotools credstore -add infile c:\OracleBIData\web\config\credentialstore.xml
>Credential Store File: c:\OracleBIData\web\config\credentialstore.xml
>Credential Alias: admin
>Username: Administrator
>Password: ******
>Do you want to encrypt the password? y/n (y): n
>File "c:\OracleBIData\web\config\credentialstore.xml" exists. Do you want to overwrite it? y/n (y): y

C:\OracleBI\web\bin>

After that I restarted the services and tried again, to my surprise this had worked:

 

Here we can see the devices I added for myself in the database table (the cell phone and pager aren't real examples, they have to be addresses to which texts can be delivered rather than actual phone numbers):

 

  

  

And here is the profile I added:

On playing around with this there appear to be some of the columns which don't do anything:

• Language
• Locale
• Time Zone
• Group Name

As the membership to web groups is handled through the GROUPS session variable, I'm not sure what the Group Name in SA System is supposed to do.  I tested by adding myself to multiple groups but this didn't appear to have any effect anywhere within OBIEE.

Another thing to consider is that a user can still add their own delivery devices and profiles and thus override the SA System ones.  However this can be disabled through the instanceconfig.xml, the tag <IgnoreWebcatDeliveryProfiles> needs to be added inside the Alerts tags and set to true, for example:

<ServerInstance>
...
<Alerts>
...
<IgnoreWebcatDeliveryProfiles>true</IgnoreWebcatDeliveryProfiles>
...
</Alerts>
...
</ServerInstance>

This will mean that users cannot now add their own delivery devices or profiles, the My Account screen looks like this (notice that the links to add new devices and profiles are missing):

By default the user name you log in with and the user name in the database table must exactly match for the SA System area to work.  You can get around this by using the tag <UpperCaseRecipientNames> in the instanceconfig.xml as below:

<ServerInstance>
...
<Alerts>
...
<UpperCaseRecipientNames>true</UpperCaseRecipientNames>
...
</Alerts>
...
</ServerInstance>

If you then ensure that the user names on the database table are in upper case then the user logging in can be in upper, lower or a mix and it will still work.  For example, the username on the database table is 'MATT' but I log in using 'Matt', this will still pick up my delivery devices and profiles if the tag above is set to true.

Finally, it is possible to disable the SA System area completely from the instanceconfig.xml using the tag <SystemSubjectArea> (note that this tag does not go inside Alerts):

<ServerInstance>
...
<SystemSubjectArea>true</SystemSubjectArea>
...
</ServerInstance>