A quotation to print out and stick on your wall

Here’s a quotation that I’ve just read and wanted to share. It is all part of a BAAG approach to troubleshooting problems, performance in particular.

From Greg Rahn (web|twitter) on oracle-l:

There are always exceptions, but exceptions can be justified and supported with data. Just beware of the the silver bullet syndrome…

The unfortunate part […] is that rarely anyone goes back and does the root cause analysis. It tends to fall into the bucket of “problem…solved”.

(Source)

New blog from Oracle – OBI Product Assurance

Blogging from Oracle itself about OBIEE has always been a bit sparse, certainly in comparison to that which there is for core RDBMS.

It’s good to see a new blog emerge in the last couple of months from OBI Product Assurance, including some nice ‘n spicy detailed config/tuning info.

Find it here: http://blogs.oracle.com/pa/.

There’s a couple more OBI blogs from Oracle, but both are fairly stale:

• Implementing Oracle BI & EPM Solutions – Rob Reynolds
• OBIEE Ramblings
• Oracle BI Foundation (thanks Daan for pointing this one out)

OBIEE 10.1.3.4.2 released

A new version of OBI 10g (remember that?) has just been released, the Oracle twitter machine announced:

Along with presumably a bunch of bugfixes, the release notes list new functionality in catalog manager:

Download 10.1.3.4.2 from here

Did you hear that thunk? That was me falling off my chair in shock

OK, a bit tired on a Monday morning, and so a bit sarcastic.

I’ve not really fallen off my chair, but I am shocked. I honestly didn’t think it would happen.

Oracle have finally released OBI 11g for HP-UX Itanium:

Change notes for the OBI 11g certification doc

In other news, patchset 10.1.3.4.2 for OBI 10g was released today, I wonder if/when we’ll get an HP-UX Itanium version? The download page has it conspicuous by its absence even from “Coming Soon”:

Have you defined CLIENT_ID in OBIEE yet?

Have you defined CLIENT_ID in your OBIEE RPD yet?
You really ought to.

As well as helping track down users of troublesome queries, it also tags dump files with the OBIEE user of an offending query should the worst occur:

And the culprit is ...

For details, see:

• Identify your OBIEE users by setting Client ID in Oracle connection
• Instrumenting OBIEE for tracing Oracle DB calls

ODI 10g connectivity problem with OCI

Trying to connect to a repository in ODI using OCI. Target database is Oracle 11.1.0.7.

ODI Repository connection configuration - using OCI, not thin jdbc

Throws this error:

com.sunopsis.sql.l: Oracle Data Integrator Timeout: connection with URL jdbc:oracle:oci8:@ODIPRD and user ODI_USER.
	at com.sunopsis.sql.SnpsConnection.a(SnpsConnection.java)
	at com.sunopsis.sql.SnpsConnection.t(SnpsConnection.java)
	at com.sunopsis.sql.SnpsConnection.connect(SnpsConnection.java)
	at com.sunopsis.tools.connection.DwgRepositoryConnectionsCreator.a(DwgRepositoryConnectionsCreator.java)
	at com.sunopsis.tools.connection.DwgRepositoryConnectionsCreator.a(DwgRepositoryConnectionsCreator.java)
	at com.sunopsis.graphical.l.oi.a(oi.java)
[...]

Normally this error would be caused by a misconfigured Oracle client. For example, a missing or incorrect tnsnames.ora entry. I validated these and got a successful response using tnsping.

It turns out that there are two versions of the /drivers/ojdbc5.jar file, and only one of them would work. The difference in files is this:

Bytes    Date modified  File
-------  -------------  ------------------
2030460  Mar 11 00:22   ojdbc5.notwork.jar
1879924  Jul 25  2007   ojdbc5.works.jar

Extracting the jar files and examining META-INF/manifest shows the difference:

Comparison of manifest files for conflicting versions of ojdbc5.jar

Solution

Use the correct version of ojdbc5.jar.

Looking at the downloads for ojdbc5.jar, there are different versions of ojdbc5.jar for different versions of the database.

The version that worked for me was for 11.1.0.6 (1,879,860 bytes). The version that doesn’t work for me is presumably one for 11.2. I’ve not tested with the 11.1.0.7 one.

Security issue on OBIEE 10.1.3.4.1, 11.1.1.3

July’s Critical Patch Update from Oracle includes CVE-2011-2241, which affects OBIEE versions 10.1.3.4.1 and 11.1.1.3.
No details of the exploit other than it “allows remote attackers to affect availability via unknown vectors related to Analytics Server.”

It is categorised with a CVSS score of 5 (on a scale of 10), with no impact on Authentication, Confidentiality, or Integrity, and “Partial+” impact on Availability. So to a security-unqualified layman (me), it sounds like someone could remotely crash your NQSServer process, but not do any more damage than that.

Patches 11833743 and 11833750 for 10.1.3.4.1 and 11.1.1.3 respectively.