OBIEE Catalog for large organisations part 2

In OBIEE Catalog for large organisations part 1 I showed you how to set up a catalog for large organisation following the OBIEE documentation. But still you might run into trouble.

Take a large energy firm which supplies there customers with some reporting on there energy consumption. They serve about 90.000 homes. Each home is an account, each account is based on the Dutch postal code system. >>zip_code+house_number<< (fi: 5721XW002).

The code is roughly divided into 4 part; The first 2 numbers are the post district area, the next 2 are the city area, the 2 letters are the street(side), the 3 number indicated the house number (optionally there might be a suffix)

If we only ‘hash’ the catalog by the first 2 characters you still run into trouble since there are roughly 20.000 houses in the 57xx postal code area.

A solution might be to change the 2 into a 5. This will ‘hash’ the first 5 characters. (yes, theoretically you might still run into trouble, but luckily not every possible postal code is issued and not every street has a 999 houses )

Remember this setting has to be made BEFORE the first user log on to the catalog!

Till Next Time

OBIEE Catalog for large organisations part 1

Organisations tend to grow… The chance that an organisation of 50 persons will be 4000 in the next 5 years is small but it’s there. The chance that 3.500 persons will become 4.000 can be called reasonable.

Plan your catalog for growth! This needs to be done from the moment you start with OBIEE. If you think that the number of users of the system will become more then 4.000 in the next 5 years (debatable the typical live span of a BI system), you need to tell the system know! The magical number 4.000 is caused by (inherited) limitations of disk file systems.

First bring down the presentation server (if it’s up…):

EM > Business Intelligence > coreapplication > capacity management > Availiabilty

Next open the instanceconfig.xml in a text editor (<<BI_HOME>>\instances\instance1\config\OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent\coreapplication_obips1)

locate the catalog tags and add :        <HashUserHomeDirectories>2</HashUserHomeDirectories>

NOTE: sometimes this number needs to be higher:

see: OBIEE Catalog for large organisations part 2 (published soon..) ==> http://obiee101.blogspot.com/2011/08/obiee-catalog-for-large-organisations.html

Goto the BI deplyment directory in the enteprise manager:

 

Press lock and edit configuration:

Enter a new for your NEW catalog:

Press Apply:

Press Activate Changes:

Go back to capacity management and start the presentation server:

(you might need to reboot the whole system, due to cache settings):

 

Till Next Time.

OBIEE11g Multi Language Catalog

Open the catalog manager and browse to the catalog you want to translate:

Select the shared folder:

From tools select export captions

Navigate to the export folder:

Make a copy of the folder for each language

Edit/Translate the XML files:

Navigate to <<OBIEE_HOME>>\instances\instance1\bifoundation\OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent\coreapplication_obips1\msgdb

Add a sub folder for each language l_xx if it doesn’t exists:

in each folder add a subfolder captions:

Add the translated XML to the respected folder:

Restart the presentation server and log in for each language to check:

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OBIEE Which report uses which column

With regular intervals you see this question on the forums. Seems that at lot of people are unaware of the possibilities of the catalog manager.

First let’s op a catalog in off-line read only mode:

 

select the catalog top level:

Next goto Tools > Create Report (or use CTRL-R):

Select The Info you need:

enter a file location:

It’s saved as a tab delimited file.

you can do the same for dashboards:

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OBIEE Editing system wide defaults

Setting a system wide default can be very handy but also completely F@#$K up your system. For instance changes to CSS files don't seem to work. Most catalog administrators forget to retract this privileges until it's to late.

Anyway here is how you can undo the damage.

As always be careful when editing directly into the catalog XML.. Backup!

Open the catalog in a off line mode:

Navigate to /system/metadata

Press Edit XML

Press again Edit

Carefully Delete edit the XML  !

Press save, close catalog manager, restart presentation service.

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OBIEE Keep a clean desk

When developing a repository the screen can be pretty crowded:

Since you are usually only working in one area at a time, why don't "switch off" the others to get more working space:

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OBIEE error saving security account

My colleague Rene Kuipers encountered this error while trying to copy reports using the catalog manager over a network share.

This was caused by the fact that the catalog manager didn't have full control over the catalog folder (read,write,create and delete).
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