Showing posts with label obiee. Show all posts
Showing posts with label obiee. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Configuring Agents with OBIA and EBS Cookie Integration


Where I am currently working, we are using EBS and OBIEE in a setup with EBS Cookie Authentication (blog post on this soon). This has some draw backs. One draw back is Agents can not be used. When trying to run an agent under this setup, as a user authenticated via EBS Cookie, you will get the following error:

[OBI-SEC-00015] Unable to find user in identity store

I opened an SR at the time, and the response back was a reference to an existing Bug (Bug 10632223: AGENTS NOT WORKING IN EBS SSO ENVIRONMENT WITH OBIEE 11G) and an enhancement (Bug 8326835: INTRODUCE SUPPORT FOR DELIVERS WITH EBS ICX_COOKIE).

According to the Oracle Support person, neither has been implemented. Apparently, Agents were never intended to be used with EBS cookie users, but only with users contained directly in usable authentication systems (ie OID/OAM/LDAP, etc).

Obviously, this is not acceptable, so I went to work to find a solution to get Agents up and running. We are pretty lucky here, in that every user whom can access OBIEE can access all subject areas in OBIEE. This might be different for you, so the end result might require you to do additional work.

Continue on to read for an explanation of what I did to get Agents up and running.

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

How to Unit Test OBIA Informatica Changes

I've started getting into doing a bit of development with Informatica on our OBIA install (for reference, we are using OBIA 7.9.6.3 + Extension pack). Part of the "best practices" setup by our Oracle Consultant was to create a separate sandbox folder anytime we were making a change to an Infomratica mapping. The difficulty I had was how to test the workflow after I made my changes, as I can't run my change via DAC, without creating a separate execution plan, and I can't test directly in Infomratica, as it references a parameter file that exists on the server.

The solution was to extract the command that DAC would run (pmcmd), create a temporary parameter file, and then run my new mapping from my sandbox folder. And as always, I've created a helpful script to automate this!

Continue on to read for an explanation of what my script does, and a copy of said script.

Friday, May 24, 2013

Setting up SSL for Weblogic

We recently needed to setup SSL for OBIEE so that we could accept the EBS cookie for single sign on between EBS and OBIEE (post to come soon on how to get that all wired up). Unfortunatly I don't have all of the steps, as someone else on the team handles the making of the actual cert, but I can provide all steps around the process.

Continue on to read what I did to create a private key, create a certificate request (CSR), and configure WebLogic to enable the SSL port for OBIEE.

Thursday, May 23, 2013

Missing "Treat Text As" options in OBIEE 11g

Something I used to use back in OBIEE 10g was the Override Default Data Format for text to do things with HTML in my Answers Requests. I had assumed this would be available the same way out of the box with 11g, but alas it is not.

What I get: What I want:


So as always, I did a little digging, and found that in order to have all options show, you need to have the privilege: Save System-Wide Column Formats. What's even better is that out of the box, this privilege is assigned to no one, so you can't even set it!

Continue on to read what I did to allow me to enable the setting for BI Administrators, and finally gain access to all the treat text as options.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Fix "Configuration Error" on 64-bit OBIEE 11.1.1.6.5 Client Tools

Ever since upgrading to 11.1.1.6.5, I was unable to use the 64bit version of the newly installed client tools. The program would always error out on launch. Oddly enough, if I installed the 32bit version, things would work *mostly* fine, well at least no errors on start-up. But then I had to update the 32bit ODBC entries, and it overall was just a hassle to manage.

So I did a little digging, and found that because it installs into Program Files, it creates it's own bi_init.bat file, which sets up it's own ORACLE_HOME, ORACLE_INSTANCE, etc.

And guess what, this doesn't work!

Continue on to read what I did to change both the bi_init.bat and adjust some of my environment variables.

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Quickly open OBIEE Admin Client in Online Mode

Something I have found myself doing quite often is checking who is connected in OBIEE prior to doing a deployment. The quickest/easiest means I have found is to fire up the Admin Client, and look at the sessions. This allows me to know if I need to notify anyone (and who), prior to taking down the server.

What was always a pain was to go through the multiple steps to open the client, choose Open in Online mode, and select my connection, across multiple environments. Luckily this can be scripted!

Continue on to read the steps to quickly script opening the Admin Client directly in Online mode.

Sunday, February 24, 2013

How to Enable Usage Tracking on OBIEE 11g (11.1.1.6.5)

A usual requirement is to enable usage tracking to gather statistics about usage of OBIEE, things like performance, which Dashboards/Reports are being utilized, who is logging in, etc. Out of the box, Oracle includes a robust usage tracking capability with OBIEE, and in fact includes a sample RPD with the Usage Tracking Subject area during install.

There are three main components:

  • Changes/configuration in the RPD
  • Configuration in Enterprise Manager
  • SQL to run to setup Usage Tracking schema.

Continue on to read the steps to enable Usage Tracking.

Migrate Enterprise Manager Application Roles and Weblogic Users and Groups between environments

Managing users across environments, when using the built-in Weblogic LDAP was a tedious process. What I have found to work well is create the users once, and then have a script which caries them across to the rest of the environments. This has been very useful in our Development and Test environments when getting the users seeded.

The Enterprise Manager (EM) migration script utilizes a very cool java program that ArtofBI developed and posted to Github. I've tweaked the code a bit for my needs, so attached to this post also includes the modified javasource and complied JAR.

Continue after the break for links to the files, and example scripts for both Enterprise Manager and Weblogic.

Saturday, February 23, 2013

Configure Change Password for Weblogic users in OBIEE 11g

Initially at my current engagement, we were using the inbuilt WebLogic LDAP for controlling user access to OBIEE 11g. We have since switched to using the EBS-ICX cookie SSO method (blog post on how to set this up coming soon), and are currently researching OID integration for SSO.

Side note, the "EBS-ICX" cookie method does not allow for use of Agents or BI Publisher within OBIEE. These are known oracle bugs, but according to the SR I had opened, they are not high on the list to be fixed.

[Update - 10/30/2013: I found a solution to this. Read my post here.]

One of the draw backs to using Weblogic for your Identity Store is that if a user wants to change their password, there is no means of doing so from within OBIEE. I searched the web, and found articles that covered parts, but not the whole thing. Continue on to read step by step instructions to get setup.

Friday, February 22, 2013

Changing password of the MDS and BIPLATFORM schemas used by OBIEE 11g

At my current engagement, we are required to change the passwords for everything every 60 days. After doing some research I found a blog post by someone who showed how to do this from Enterprise Manager, but they only covered three of the four locations to change the password. As I have mentioned previously, I like automation, so I build a script which takes care of all the tasks.

After the jump is an example script, along with the python for WLST, to perform this task.

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Scripted OBIEE 11g Web Catalog deployments using runcat.sh and WLST

I had never looked deeply into automating the OBIEE Web Catalog, as on previous engagements I had a technical architecture team which handled all deployments. They were used to doing a manual process utilizing the Catalog Manager. On my latest engagement, I am the technical architecture team, and I like automation.

After poking around, I found that you can call the catalog manager form the command line, and along with WLST scripting, you can do a fully automated web catalog deployment.

After the jump is a script which can be used to do OBIEE 11g web catalog deployments. This script assumes you have setup ssh keys on the various servers so you can login without typing a password (http://www.linuxproblem.org/art_9.html).

Scripted RPD deployments using UDML and WLST

Automating the RPD deployment in OBIEE 10g was as simple as doing an SCP of the RPD to the OBIEE server, and then bounce the processes. With OBIEE 11g, RPD deployments are now handled through Weblogic, so we need to take some additional steps. Luckily these can be easily scripted thanks to WLST.

After the jump is a script which can be used to do OBIEE 11g RPD deployments. This script assumes you have setup ssh keys on the various servers so you can login without typing a password (http://www.linuxproblem.org/art_9.html).

Creating a UDML file for OBIEE 11g RPD

The ability to use UDML for scripted OBIEE RPD changes has been around since OBIEE 10g. UDML files are very useful in order to do migrations, as they can contain the connection pool information and any variables which are environment specific. I am currently using UDML within our enivonrments to allow for migration of an RPD from Development through to Produciton.

Take a jump to view the steps to create UDML files for your environments, along with a sample UDML file.