Rittman Mead Blog - Technical Insights

Data Integration Tips: ODI 12c - Varchar2 (CHAR or BYTE)

Continuing with our Data Integration Tips series, here's one that applies to both Oracle Data Integrator 11g and 12c. This "tip" was actually discovered as a part of a larger issue involving GoldenGate, Oracle Datapump, and ODI. Maybe a future post will dive deeper into those

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

Data Integration Tips: ODI 12c - Substitution API GUIDs

With the release of Oracle Data Integrator 12c [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2013/10/oracle-data-integrator-12c-release-part-1/] and Oracle GoldenGate 12c [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2013/10/oracle-goldengate-12c-new-release-new-features/] still fresh in our minds, I thought I would start an ongoing series focused on Data Integration Tips - specifically around the

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

Technical

Using Oracle R Enterprise to Analyze Large In-Database Datasets

The other week I posted an article on the blog about Oracle R Advanced Analytics for Hadoop [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2014/03/running-r-on-hadoop-using-oracle-r-advanced-analytics-for-hadoop/] , part of Oracle’s Big Data Connectors [http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/database-technologies/bdc/big-data-connectors/overview/index.html] and used for running certain types

Technical

Using Sqoop for Loading Oracle Data into Hadoop on the BigDataLite VM

This is old-hat for most Hadoop veterans, but I’ve been meaning to note it on the blog for a while, for anyone who’s first encounter with Hadoop is Oracle’s BigDataLite VM [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2014/01/oracle-bigdatalite-vm-now-available-for-download-on-otn/] . Most people looking to bring external data into

Technical

Oracle Data Integrator 12c Patch - Missing Components

While working with a client this week, I came across an interesting issue, and ultimately a workaround, when patching Oracle Data Integrator 12c. But first, a little background... The client was working through the OWB to ODI 12c migration process, detailed nicely by Stewart Bryson in his OTN article, "

Technical

Running R on Hadoop using Oracle R Advanced Analytics for Hadoop

When most people think about analytics and Hadoop, they tend to think of technologies such as Hive, Pig and Impala as the main tools a data analyst uses. When you talk to data analysts and data scientists though, they’ll usually tell you that their primary tool when working on

Technical

Oracle Enterprise Data Quality Revisited

Recently I have be working with Oracle Enterprise Data Quality (EDQ) combined with Oracle Data Integrator (ODI), we will tell you more about exactly what we have been doing in another blog, but for now I would like to revisit our earlier EDQ blogs. I am going to keep to

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

Technical

Thoughts on Using Amazon Redshift as a Replacement for an Oracle Data Warehouse

Recently, my colleague, Pete Carpenter, described [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2014/02/building-an-amazon-redshift-data-warehouse-using-odi-and-attunity-part-1-configuring-redshift-and-cdc-using-attunity/] a proof of concept we carried out using Amazon Redshift [http://aws.amazon.com/redshift/] as the data warehouse storage layer in a system capturing data from Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) using Attunity CloudBeam [http://www.

Technical

Building an Amazon Redshift Data Warehouse using ODI and Attunity Part 2 : Using ODI and OBIEE with Redshift as a Target/Source

In my post yesterday we stepped through the initial set up and staging load for a data warehouse using Amazon Redshift and Attunity, for eventual use with OBIEE and ODI [http://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2014/02/building-an-amazon-redshift-data-warehouse-using-odi-and-attunity-part-1-configuring-redshift-and-cdc-using-attunity/] . Now that we have our source data in Redshift, let's

Technical

Building an Amazon Redshift Data Warehouse using ODI and Attunity Part 1 : Configuring Redshift, and CDC Using Attunity

One of our longstanding Oracle customers recently asked us to put together a proof-of-concept DW system using Amazon Redshift [http://aws.amazon.com/redshift/] as the data warehouse database, rather than Oracle Database. The main driver for this was the economics of running Redshift in the cloud vs. Oracle on-premise

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

Technical

New OTN Article: Making the Move from Oracle Warehouse Builder to Oracle Data Integrator 12c

One of the reasons I've been silent on the blog lately regarding new Oracle Data Integrator 12c content (even though I promised it some months ago [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2013/10/odi-12c-journey/]) is because I've been writing an article focused on migration options from

Oracle BI Suite EE

Automated RPD Builds with OBIEE

Introduction Some time ago, I wrapped up a four-part series on using MDS XML as a basis for RPD development [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2013/05/mds-xml1/]. Of course... you can (re-) read the blog posts to get up to speed on the concept... but I'll offer

Oracle BI Suite EE

Rittman Mead BI Forum 2014 Call for Papers Closing Soon - And News on This Year's Masterclass

Its a couple of days to go until the call for papers for the Rittman Mead BI Forum 2014 closes [https://docs.google.com/a/rittmanmead.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEdBdDNJb0JUTVBrNTJhaS00MmFjRXc6MA] , with suggested topics this year including OBIEE (of course), Essbase, Endeca, Big Data, Visualizations, In-Memory analysis and data integration.