On the Train to Oslo, Issues with EIS and OBIEE

I'm writing this post sitting on the express train going from Oslo Airport to the centre of Oslo, traveling over to Norway for the Norwegian User Group conference this week. I've been invited over as a guest of the user group to do a couple of presentations on Oracle BI, it's been a bit of a hectic weekend up to now as I only got back from Bucharest at Saturday lunchtime. Still, I managed to get all of my stuff unpacked, washed and then packed again, and I'm all set now for three days on a Norwegian cruise liner going from Oslo to Kiel and back.

I'm staying over in central Oslo tonight and getting picked up by Aaron Merry from Bicon, a Norwegian Oracle BI partner who I knew from the UK and met again , to go down to the ship around 9am. This is my second time in Norway - I was over here back in 2007 to run one of my Oracle University seminars - and I've particularly been looking forward to this event, both because Norwegians are a pretty good bunch and because this is my first Oracle conference on a cruise liner. Coincidentally, the Swedish and Finnish User Group event I'm also attending later this year is also on a ship, which I found strange; then I remembered that alcohol is pretty heavily taxed over in Scandinavia, and of course it'll be duty-free on the ship - so I think I can forget any idea of getting any early nights over the next few days.

I'm doing my "Future BI Architecture" presentation tomorrow, I'm going to shuffle the slides around a bit to give a bit more of a lead-in to how we arrived at the architecture and how you can put it together. I'm also working on building an Essbase cube out of the OBIEE logical model and showing it in WebAnalysis - however whenever I try and connect Essbase Analysis Services to the OBIEE ODBC Client to try and read in the data, I get the error message:

"Error 2003000: ODBC Error [NQODBC][SQL_STATE-IM001][nQError-10039]The driver does not support this function"

which to me looks like EIS is sending an ODBC command to the OBIEE ODBC client that it doesn't recognize - if I connect this client to other applications that can work with ODBC - such as BI Administrator - it works fine and the tables are displayed, which makes me think it's some incompatibility between EIS and the OBIEE ODBC client. Has anyone else got EIS to connect to the OBIEE ODBC Client successfully? I'll ask around some people I know as well.

Anyway, I'm just about to pull in to Oslo Central so I need to wrap up now. If there's an internet connection on the ship I'll try and report back on the conference, I might also pull together the WebAnalysis demo using data directly from some Oracle tables just to see how it works.