[nQSError: 43001] Authentication failed for ADMINISTRATOR in repository Star: invalid user/password.

The problem was that our Administrator password contained a special character, an asterisk ( * ).  So if you’re experiencing similar difficulties setting up BI Publisher in your environment, double check your Administrator password for characters such as *, #, $, etc.

If anyone has suggestions for topics to write about, or questions about OBIEE or BI, send me an email (hit the Contact Me link at the top of this page), and I’ll try to address them.

As always, thanks for reading!

After going through many rounds of trying to figure this problem out, we filed a ticket with Oracle Support.  About 3-4 weeks later our problem was solved - we needed to set the environment variable LD_PRELOAD.  Apparently this was not being set after our attempted upgrades to 10.1.3.4.

LD_PRELOAD is a way of setting the priority of certain libraries, it loads the specified library first.  This is called interposing libraries.  Suppose you have an application that makes a call to some function that exists in multiple libraries.  If you use LD_PRELOAD to load a particular library first, then the application will go to that library and use its functions, instead of some other library.  LD_PRELOAD essentially replaces the functionality of another library.

So the actual problem was traced back to a possible symbol clash that occurs between libraries called by the application (OBIEE), and other 3rd party libraries.  Our LDAP user logins are in the format of an email address, so it’s possible the ‘@’ symbol could causing the issue - I’m really not sure.

We ran the command:

export LD_PRELOAD=/path/to/libibmldap.so

Then we restarted the BI Server and Presentation services, and the problem went away!

Update: Do not use spaces in your System DSN names.  You will get an error when trying to connect to that server.

This article has quite a few screenshots, so continue reading by clicking below:

All you need to do is create a new System DSN:  Go to Start > Run…, and type odbcad32, then press enter (or open ODBC Data Sources from Administrator Tools).

Click the System DSN tab and click Add:

Choose Oracle BI Server as the Driver:

Give the DSN a Name (no spaces) and optionally a Description, and specify the hostname of your BI server, then click Next:

Type a login ID and Password for your repository, and specify the BI Server Port.  Check the option “Connect to Oracle BI Server to obtain default settings…” to make life easier, and click Next:

Accept the defaults if you’re happy with them, and click Finish:

You’ve now added a new System DSN to your local machine and are ready to open the repository in Online mode:

In the Administrator tool, choose the blue folder to open in online mode, and choose the DSN you just created from the list below the login prompt.  Enter your login details and click Open to work on your repository in Online mode:

Of course, as the OBIEE documentation recommends, I would only use Online mode for making small changes to your repository.  Any significant amount of work should be done in offline mode.

Consider the following report:

In this report, Amount A and Amount B are standard columns in a database table, and Variance is a calculated column in the repository.  The calculation for Variance is 100 * (Amount B - Amount A) / Amount A.  So, going by the Grand Total amounts in the report above, 100 * (696 - 550) / 550 = 26.55.

Suppose you want to filter the results of this request so that it only shows items having a Variance greater than 30:

Note the Grand Total for Amount A and Amount B are summed correctly for the filter, but the Variance still shows 26.55.  Obviously, this is incorrect, so what’s going on here?  The filtered amount should be reported as 100 * (220 - 130) / 130 = 69.23.

If you want to show the correct variance for the filtered Grand Total amounts, you need to enable an option in your instanceconfig.xml file.  Open the file $OracleBIData/web/config/instanceconfig.xml, and add the following line somewhere inside your <ServerInstance> and </ServerInstance> section:

<ReportAggregateEnabled>true</ReportAggregateEnabled>

Make sure you don’t accidentally put this inside an element nested inside <ServerInstance>, or it won’t work.

Save instanceconfig.xml, and restart your BI Server and Presentation service.

Now, the correct amount should be shown for the filtered Grand Total variance:

This was previously a bug in OBIEE that was addressed by adding the ReportAggregateEnabled option.  It’s not really documented anywhere other than on Metalink, so hopefully this will be helpful to someone.

Oracle has announced Oracle Exadata, a “database machine”, marking the first ever hardware-based solution in Oracle’s product line.  This thing looks pretty impressive.  It’s basically a server rack that has 8 database servers and 14 storage servers and 4 24-port network switches, running Oracle 11g RAC on Oracle Enterprise Linux.  It supports up to 46 TB of user data, managed by Oracle’s Exadata storage software.  The server hardware is from HP, with some impressive specs:          8 x HP Proliant DL360 Database Servers, each with 2 x quad-core Intel Xeon (E5430) Processors 32gb Memory 4 x 146gb SAS hard drives 14 x HP Proliant DL180 G5 Exadata Storage servers, each with 2 x quad-core Intel Xeon (E5430) Processors 8gb Memory 12 x 1TB SATA hard drives (or 12 x 300gb SAS hard drives)

Altogether that’s 176 cores and 368gb total memory (go ahead, drool )  As usual, Oracle is touting performance (reporting 10x faster Data Warehouse performance), scalability (add Database Machines as needed), and reliability.

Attention OBIEE Interested Parties

Oracle University would like your opinion.  They are in the very preliminary stages of scoping out the viability of an OBIEE certification path.  Please click the link below to fill out a short survey. 

http://education.oracle.com/pls/web_prod-plq-dad/ou_online_display_survey.display_survey?p_survey_no=300&p_preview=N

It would seem Oracle University is considering updating the certification path for OBIEE.  Currently, the only certification path is for the old version of the product (Siebel Analytics 7.7), which requires that you take the corresponding OU Siebel courses to get certified.  I’m all for an updated certification based on the newer, Oracle branded version of the product, so I encourage everyone to fill out the survey (link) to express your interest.

My requirement is to only show data for the past 6 weeks.  I have a base table that has massive amounts of weekly data, designated by a column week_ending.  At first, I thought I could simply add a Top N filter for "Week Ending" in Top 6.  This didn’t work however, since I have multiple rows containing the same date - it only returned data for the latest date in the table (which makes sense, because that date would be the same for each of the Top 6 since it occurs many times).  I also tried using the DISTINCT keyword in various places in the filter formula, as well as in the column definition - still no luck.

What I ended up doing was the following:

1. I decided to turn to SQL to give me the results I need.  I started by building a query that gave me the Top 6 dates in my base table:

   SELECT * FROM (SELECT DISTINCT week_ending
                             FROM base_table
                         ORDER BY week_ending DESC)
    WHERE rownum <= 6;
   
   WEEK_ENDING
   ------------------------- 
   13-JUL-08
   06-JUL-08
   29-JUN-08
   22-JUN-08
   15-JUN-08
   08-JUN-08                 
   
   6 rows selected

2. Next, I used the query above in the WHERE clause for a view:

   CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW top_six_weeks_vw AS
   SELECT *
     FROM base_table bt
    WHERE bt.week_ending IN (SELECT * FROM (SELECT DISTINCT week_ending
                                              FROM base_table
                                          ORDER BY week_ending DESC)
                              WHERE rownum <= 6);

3. Now, simply model this view in the OBIEE Repository, and your Answers reports will only display the latest 6 weeks worth of data.

I’m sure there are many other ways these results could be accomplished, but this was the first thing that came to mind.

The following link provides a few very good posts from John Minkjan’s blog on how the OBIEE cache works, configuration settings, and how to purge the cache(s).

• OBIEE Cache Management

Suppose you want to see the Top 5 results from an Answers report, such as the Top 5 overall customers by revenue:

This can easily be acheived by using a simple “in Top N” filter:

What if you want to see the Top 5 Customers by Revenue for each Product? Using a simple Top N filter won’t work in this case, as it will produce the following results:

To get OBIEE to show the correct results, you need to take the Top N filter into SQL mode. Starting with a normal Top N filter, click Advanced at the bottom of the filter window and select Convert this filter to SQL:

Next, edit the filter with the by clause enclosed in red - unfortunately you’ll have to type the column name in manually, so be sure to use quotes if the column or presentation table contains spaces. The column used here is the field you want to group by (Product, in this example):

Now, the Top N filter will give the desired results - The Top 5 Customers by Product:

The full request criteria (notice the sorting options used to produce the results above):