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John Minkjan has won the race for the first post on 10.1.3.4.1!

http://obiee101.blogspot.com/2009/04/obiee-10341-is-out.html
http://obiee101.blogspot.com/2009/04/obiee-10341-first-impressions.html

You just gotta love the little things he immediately found.

  • 100% installation
  • old samplesales
  • BIP still not working OOB

Well let’s hope that the background looks better and all the bugs have been fixed that plagued us in the base release. Off to searching for a list of fixed bugs and patches included.

Cheers,
Christi@n

blog, various

No use hiding, folks. I see that there’s people from CH browsing my blog. Yes, and I’ve also seen the connection from Baden and the Oracle CH offices 😉

So please leave a comment. I’d like to see who’s actually interested in this here in Switzerland.

Cheers,
Christi@n

Uncategorized

No use hiding, folks. I see that there’s people from CH browsing my blog. Yes, and I’ve also seen the connection from Baden and the Oracle CH offices 😉

So please leave a comment. I’d like to see who’s actually interested in this here in Switzerland.

Cheers,
Christi@n

obiee, patch

Greetings, programs!

Back on April 3rd, when I initially wanted to get patch #8293083, I hit a wall.

Description OBIEE GENERATED MDX CAUSES PERFORMANCE ISSUE
Product Oracle BI Suite EE
Release 10.1.3.4.0
Last Updated 18-MAR-2009

The patch had been made obsolete over night. So I raised an SR with Oracle. First response on the 14th:

“Bug 8293083 is a duplicate of Bug 8332167.

Bug 8332167 is fixed in 10.1.3.4.410
Also in patch for Linux ARU 11105211
No patch for Windows.”

Sweet. So because it was a duplicate of a Linux patch the Windows patch was made obsolete? My mind boggles trying to understand that logic, but anyways I insisted on getting the patch and voilĂ ! The patch exists again for Windows since the 17th.

Sounds good? No, not really.

8293083 is actually QF420 and in order to install it, you need to replace your whole OracleBIserverbin folder. In itself, not an issue, but there’s also patch 8290868 (QF410), which is a patch for 7482937 which resolves a rather serious issue for MDX generation for and/or filters.

The issue being that 8290868 – like 8293083 – replaces the whole bin folder. And Oracle still can’t confirm that 8293083 is an incremental patch and includes all of 8290868.

So right now there’s a choice.
a) Use 8293083, but not be sure that 8290868 and 7482937 function correctly

or

b) Use 8290868and 7482937 and wait for a final statement from Oracle.

I’ve gone for b) since it’s extremely difficult to track down each and every weird behaviour in the MDX generation for all filters, EVALUATE statements, unions etc etc.

Of course I will keep you guys updated with my latest findings and Oracles statements.

End of line.

Uncategorized

Greetings, programs!

Back on April 3rd, when I initially wanted to get patch #8293083, I hit a wall.

Description OBIEE GENERATED MDX CAUSES PERFORMANCE ISSUE
Product Oracle BI Suite EE
Release 10.1.3.4.0
Last Updated 18-MAR-2009

The patch had been made obsolete over night. So I raised an SR with Oracle. First response on the 14th:

“Bug 8293083 is a duplicate of Bug 8332167.

Bug 8332167 is fixed in 10.1.3.4.410
Also in patch for Linux ARU 11105211
No patch for Windows.”

Sweet. So because it was a duplicate of a Linux patch the Windows patch was made obsolete? My mind boggles trying to understand that logic, but anyways I insisted on getting the patch and voilĂ ! The patch exists again for Windows since the 17th.

Sounds good? No, not really.

8293083 is actually QF420 and in order to install it, you need to replace your whole OracleBIserverbin folder. In itself, not an issue, but there’s also patch 8290868 (QF410), which is a patch for 7482937 which resolves a rather serious issue for MDX generation for and/or filters.

The issue being that 8290868 – like 8293083 – replaces the whole bin folder. And Oracle still can’t confirm that 8293083 is an incremental patch and includes all of 8290868.

So right now there’s a choice.
a) Use 8293083, but not be sure that 8290868 and 7482937 function correctly

or

b) Use 8290868and 7482937 and wait for a final statement from Oracle.

I’ve gone for b) since it’s extremely difficult to track down each and every weird behaviour in the MDX generation for all filters, EVALUATE statements, unions etc etc.

Of course I will keep you guys updated with my latest findings and Oracles statements.

End of line.

Uncategorized

Greetings, programs!

A little excursion into the little-known world of Marketing Analytics. Namely sampling tables for target levels. Here’s some tips for getting them to work correctly:

I.) Check that there is a physical table mapped that to the W_ table defined as SAMPLE_W_ has Object Type “None”
otherwise you can’t select a dynamic name for the table. “General” tab:

II.) Check that the correct Sampling Table identifier is associated with the physical table in the “Dynamic Name” tab:

III.) Creating new target levels in Siebel Analytics:

  • After creating new target levels for marketing segmentation, it is necessary to administer them correctly in the Presentation Server
  • Start the BI Server with the new rpd
  • Go to “Admin”
  • Go to “Manage Marketing Defaults”
  • Choose the “Default Campaign Load File Format”, the “Default Global Audience Segment” and the “Profile Dashboard” for each Target Level
  • If you don’t yet have these items, create them

IV.) Creating an Answer request as “Profile Dashboard” for a target level:

  • Create the request as usual with the columns you want to have displayed.
  • To make it work for the drill down on the segment count, add a filter that prompts for the ID. E.g.: “ROW_ID is prompted”

End of line.

Uncategorized

Greetings, programs!

Something I ran into recently is a little bug in the way OBIEE 10.1.3.4.0 produces MDX out of an EVALUATE wrapper when the MDX contains special characters. (yes, it is a bug)

Let’s start with a basic and pure OBIEE report. We want to see the average coverage % by the 3rd generation of our product hierarchy:


Now let’s switch out the presentation column for an EVALUATE function with MDX as what we really want is the average coverage % for the scenario “Actual”:

EVALUATE(‘(%1.dimension.currentmember, [Scenario].[Actual],[Account].[Coverage % Avg]).value’ as INTEGER, Product.”Gen3,Product”)

Let’s run it.

“Unknown Member Coverage % Avg”? Liar. I see it directly in front of me. Off to checking the log:

With
set [Product3] as ‘Generate([Product].Generations(2).members, Descendants([Product].currentmember, [Product].Generations(3), leaves))’
member [Account].[MS1] as ‘([Product].Generations(3).dimension.currentmember,[Scenario].[Actual],[Account].[Coverage % Avg])).value’
member [Account].[MS2] as ‘RANK([Product].Generations(3).dimension.currentmember,[Product].Generations(3).members)’

select
{MS1,
MS2} on columns,
{{[Product3]}} properties ANCESTOR_NAMES, GEN_NUMBER on rows
from [MyCube.Ess931_ASO]

——————– Query Status: Query Failed: Essbase Error: Unknown Member Coverage % Avg used in query

Do you see the difference? While on the guy, it states “Coverage % Avg”, the log and the MDX which is actually fired, reference “Coverage % Avg”. TWO spaces!
So let’s work around this by changing the EVALUATE to include the “StrToMbr” function:

EVALUATE(‘(%1.dimension.currentmember, [Scenario].[Actual],StrToMbr(“[Account].[Coverage % Avg]”)).value’ as INTEGER, Product.”Gen3,Product”)

When running this, we get the correct results again:

So if you want to reference members containing special characters, use StrToMbr since otherwise you will get a non-functioning MDX from the BI server.

End of line.

Uncategorized

Larry definitely has got too much money:

http://www.oracle.com/sun/index.html

I vote for naming his next yacht “Ra”…or even cooler. “Sol Invictus” ;-))

Uncategorized

Ha…ha…ha… very funny.

Ok all. CAF is really ONLY supported with 10.1.3.4.1 right now and that’s not out yet. Sorry to have gotten you all exited.

Cheers,
Christian

Uncategorized

When going on OTN this morning, I saw something that I hadn’t seen before in the download section of the OBIEE site. CAF?! Hmmm…

Of course I downloaded it (what a question!)…and I couldn’t have had a nicer start for my day! The thing’s called Content Accelerator Framework or in short: “CAF”. Please update your geek brains, section acronyms, accordingly. It basically is a tool for facilitating migration of rpd and webcat objects between environments. Ace!

Direct links to the zip and the pdf documentation here:
http://download.oracle.com/technology/products/bi/files/OracleBIEE_CAFV1_Setup.zip
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bi/pdf/oraclebiee-cafv1-usage-instructions.pdf

Here’s two quick screenshots from the pdf to give you an overview:

Off to trying it out!

Update:
Venkat beat me to it…hehe.

Update 2:
10.1.3.4.1? Really? Guys, we’re not like you and have access to patches before they’re released. 😉

Cheers,
Christi@n