Rittman Mead Blog - Oracle BI Suite EE

Introducing the Updated Oracle / Rittman Mead Information Management Reference Architecture Pt2. - Delivering the Data Factory

In my previous post on our updated Oracle Information Management Reference Architecture [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2014/06/introducing-the-updated-oracle-rittman-mead-information-management-reference-architecture-pt1-information-architecture-and-the-data-factory/] , jointly-developed with Oracle’s Enterprise Architecture team, we went through a conceptual and logical view of the information architecture, introducing new concepts like the Raw Data Reservoir, the Data Factory

Technical

Introducing the Updated Oracle / Rittman Mead Information Management Reference Architecture Pt1. - Information Architecture and the "Data Factory"

One of the things at Rittman Mead that we’re really interested in, is the architecture of “information management” systems and how these change over time as thinking, and product capabilities, evolve. In fact we often collaborate with the Enterprise Architecture team within Oracle, giving input into the architecture designs

Technical

The BI Survey 14 - Have Your Voice Heard!

Long-term readers of this blog will know that we’ve supported for many years the BI Survey, an independent survey of BI tools customers and implementors. Rittman Mead have no (financial or other) interest in the BI Survey or its organisers, but we like the way it gathers in detailed

Technical

How We Deliver Agile OBIEE Projects - Introducing ExtremeBI

Most OBIEE projects that we see are delivered through some sort of “waterfall” method, where requirements are defined up-front, there’s several stages of development, one or more major releases at the end, and any revision to requirements takes the form of a change request. These work well where requirements

Technical

Visual Regression Testing of OBIEE with PhantomCSS

Earlier this year I wrote a couple of blogs posts (here [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2014/01/obiee-regression-testing-an-introduction/] and here [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2014/01/automated-regression-testing-for-obiee/]) discussing the topic of automated Regression Testing and OBIEE. One of the points that I was keen make was that OBIEE

Technical

Mobile App Designer mis-configuration error

I've been doing some work recently with OBIEE's new Mobile App Designer [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2013/08/a-first-look-at-the-obiee11g-mobile-app-designer/](MAD). It's a great bit of software that I'm genuinely impressed with, but it's got its little v1 quirks, and

Technical

The State of the OBIEE11g World as of May 2014

I’m conscious I’ve posted a lot on this blog over the past few months about hot new topics like big data, Hadoop and Oracle Advanced Analytics, and not so much about OBIEE, which traditionally has been the core of Rittman Mead’s business and what we’ve written

Technical

RM BI Forum 2014 Brighton is a Wrap - Now on to Atlanta!

I’m writing this sitting in my hotel room in Atlanta, having flown over from the UK on Saturday following the end of the Rittman Mead BI Forum 2014 [http://www.rittmanmead.com/biforum2014] in Brighton. I think it’s probably true to say that this year was our best

Technical

Extended Visualisation of OBIEE Performance Data with Grafana

Recently I wrote about the new obi-metrics-agent [http://ritt.md/oma-intro] tool and how it enables easy collection of DMS data from OBIEE into whisper, the time-series based database behind graphite. In this post I’m going to show two things that take this idea further: 1. How easy it

Technical

Previewing Three Oracle Data Visualization Sessions at the Atlanta US BI Forum 2014

Many of the sessions at the UK and US Rittman Mead BI Forum 2014 [http://www.rittmanmead.com/biforum2014/] events in May focus on the back-end of BI and data warehousing, with for example Chris Jenkins’ session on TimesTen giving us some tips and tricks from TimeTen product development, and

Technical

Preview of Maria Colgan, and Andrew Bond/Stewart Bryson Sessions at RM BI Forum 2014

We’ve got a great selection of presentations at the two upcoming Rittman Mead BI Forum 2014 [http://www.rittmanmead.com/biforum2014] events in Brighton and Atlanta, including sessions on Endeca, TimesTen, OBIEE (of course), ODI, GoldenGate, Essbase and Big Data (full timetable for both events here [https://www.rittmanmead.

Technical

Final Timetable and Agenda for the Brighton and Atlanta BI Forums, May 2014

It’s just a few weeks now until the Rittman Mead BI Forum 2014 events in Brighton and Atlanta, and there’s still a few spaces left at both events if you’d still like to come - check out the main BI Forum 2014 event page [http://www.rittmanmead.

Technical

BI Forum 2014 preview - No Silver Bullets : OBIEE Performance in the Real World

I'm honoured to have been accepted to speak at this year's Rittman Mead BI Forum [http://www.rittmanmead.com/biforum2014/], the sixth year of this expert-level conference that draws some of the best Oracle BI/DW minds together from around the world. It's running

Technical

Visualising OBIEE DMS metrics with Graphite

Assuming you have set up obi-metrics-agent and collectl as described in my previous post [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2014/03/installing-obi-metrics-agent-graphite-and-collectl], you have a wealth of data at your disposal for graphing and exploring in Graphite, including: * OS (CPU, disk, network, memory) * OBIEE's metrics * Metrics about DMS

Technical

Built-In OBIEE Load Testing with nqcmd

nqcmd ships with all installations of OBIEE and includes some very useful hidden functionality - the ability to generate load tests against OBIEE. There are lots of ways of generating load against OBIEE [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2013/03/performance-and-obiee-test-build/], but most require third party tools of varying degrees

Technical

Installing obi-metrics-agent, Graphite, and collectl

In the previous post I introduced obi-metrics-agent [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2014/03/introducing-obi-metrics-agent-an-open-source-obiee-metrics-collector] , an open-source tool from Rittman Mead that can collect DMS metrics from OBIEE and write them to several formats including graphite. Graphite is a tool for storing and graphing time-based metrics. Now in this post

Technical

Introducing obi-metrics-agent - an Open-Source OBIEE Metrics Collector

Understanding what is going on inside OBIEE is important for being able to diagnose issues that arise, monitor its health, and dig deep into its behaviour under stress in a load test. OBIEE exposes a set of metrics through the Dynamic Monitoring Service (DMS) and viewable through Enterprise Manager (EM)

Technical

The Secret Life of Conditional Formatting in OBIEE

When dealing with conditional formatting the GUI allow us to add as many formats as we want, but every single format has a unique and single condition, not more, not less. In this post I am going to show how it is possible in OBIEE to use multiple conditions to

Technical

Rittman Mead BI Forum 2014 Registration Now Open - Don't Miss Out!

Just a quick reminder to say that registration for the Rittman Mead BI Forum 2014 [http://www.rittmanmead.com/biforum2014] is now open, with the speaker and presentation list now up on the event website. As with previous years, the BI Forum runs in Brighton on the first week, and

Oracle BI Suite EE

Rittman Mead BI Forum 2014 Now Open for Registration!

I’m very pleased to announce that the Rittman Mead BI Forum 2014 running in Brighton and Atlanta, May 2014, is now open for registration [http://www.rittmanmead.com/biforum2014/]. Keeping the format as before - a single stream at each event, world-class speakers and expert-level presentations, and a strictly-limited

Oracle BI Suite EE

Using Groovy instead of WLST for OBIEE Systems Management

I remember some years back when Rittman Mead first received the OBIEE 11g beta and I tried installing it for the first time. It was a nightmare. If you think the 11.1.1.3 release was challenging, you should have tried working with any one of the betas. It

Oracle BI Suite EE

OBIEE 11g Presentation Server Catalog Replication Across Redundant Servers

The thing about OBIEE 11g, is that there is no single way to get things "up and running". Over the past year I have performed countless OBIEE installs and almost every one has been different to the last, due to infrastructure challenges, scale requirements or requirements for high-availability

Oracle BI Suite EE

Date formatting in OBIEE 11g - setting the default Locale for users

A short and sweet blog post this one, simply to plug a gap in Google that I found when trying to do achieve this today. How user’s see things like date formats in OBIEE is determined by their locale, which is usually related to language but not always the

Oracle BI Suite EE

Rittman Mead BI Forum 2014 Abstract Scoring Now Live - For 1 Week Only!

The call for papers for the Rittman Mead BI Forum 2014 closed at the end of January, and we’ve had some excellent submissions on topics ranging from OBIEE, Visualizations and data discovery through to in-memory analytics, big data and data integration. As always, we’re now opening up the

Oracle BI Suite EE

Testing Oracle Direct Connector for HDFS as an Alternative to Hive ODBC for OBIEE11g

In a post on the blog a couple of weeks ago, I looked at loading up a set of flight delays data into Apache Hadoop, then analysing it using Apache Hive, Cloudera Impala and OBIEE [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2014/01/obiee-11-1-1-7-cloudera-hadoop-hiveimpala-part-2-load-data-into-hivehcatalog-analyze-using-impala/] . In this scenario, OBIEE connects to the