Essbase Studio checkModelInSyncExternal Error

This week I am back at one of my favourite clients to assist with some issues since the latest upgrade to 11.1.1.9. These guys are seriously technical and know their stuff, so when issues pop up I'm always ready for an interesting and challenging day in the office.

As with all the recent 11g versions, they had to decide between in-place and out-of-place upgrades, and here they opted for an in-place upgrade because they have a fairly settled configuration using Answers, Publisher and Essbase. They were trying to avoid the need to reconfigure components like:

• SQL Group Providers
• Customisations
• Application Roles used in OBIEE and Essbase Filters

Plus, when reconfiguring the above you also run the risk of missing something and it could take a long time to track down where it went wrong.

The Problem

In the end this was not a very complicated problem or solution but seeing as we couldn't find anything on the web or Oracle Support regarding this error, I thought it might be useful to share in case others run into this same issue.

After performing the upgrade from OBIEE 11.1.1.7.140114 to 11.1.1.9 the client was unable to view or edit the Essbase Model properties in Essbase Studio. In fact, they couldn't even see their Essbase Model at all. Only the Cube Schema was visible.

When we tried to select or edit the Schema the following message appeared:

Error in the external procedure 'checkModelInSyncExternal'. Line = 136.

Oracle Support Came To The Party

After trying several different options to fix it, none of which made any difference, the client raised a P1 query with Oracle Support. After going through the initial standard questions and a few messages between the client and Oracle Support, they came back with a solution. All of this within 24 hours...

The Reason

The Solution

Even thought we couldn't find any reference to this in the post-patching section of the documentation, when you read the Oracle Essbase Studio 11.1.2.4.000 Readme there is a section in there describing the problem and solution.

To fix the problem we followed these simple steps

1. Navigate to

   <ORACLE_BI_HOME>\products\Essbase\EssbaseStudio\Server\scripts.template\

2. Copy startCommandLineClient.bat.template to

   <ORACLE_BI_HOME>\products\Essbase\EssbaseStudio\Server\

3. Rename the new startCommandLineClient.bat.template to startCommandLineClient.bat
4. Edit startCommandLineClient.bat so it looks like this NOTE - Update the paths according to your environment AND use full paths

   @echo off
   set JAVA_HOME=C:\oracle\Oracle_BI1\jdk\jre
   
   "%JAVA_HOME%\bin\java" -Xmx128m %JAVA_OPTIONS% -jar "C:\oracle\Oracle_BI1\products\Essbase\EssbaseStudio\Server\client.jar"
   if %errorlevel% == 0 goto finish
   echo .
   
   echo Press any key to finish the client session
   
   pause > null
   : finish

5. Open a CMD window and start startCommandLineClient.bat
6. Enter the requested information (Host, Username and Password)
7. Enter the following command and wait for it to complete

   reinit

8. Type Exit to leave the script and close the CMD window