Upgrade OBIEE from 10.1.3.4.0 to 10.1.3.4.1 !! - Issues and Resolution

Hi All,

It was a long time since we posted on this blog !! Many things changed in life since my last post !! Changa moved to India recently leaving rest of the team alone !! We had a great time with him and badly missing his company in office and especially during long weekend trips !! :)

In the last 2 months, our team upgraded 16 OBIEE Environments from 10.1.3.4.0 to 10.1.3.4.1. Lets have a short discussion on the approach and achievements :

Why we took the decision to upgrade when there are no issues with 10.1.3.4.0?

OBIEE 10.1.3.4.0 is the most stable product with absolutely no issues when it comes to usage of Dashboards and Delivers. You will come across many issues when you want to implement BI Publisher on 10.1.3.4.0 especially when you are on Solaris platform and using IBM Websphere instead of OC4J. After an extended follow up with Oracle on the BI Publisher issues on 10.1.3.4.0, Oracle suggested to upgrade OBIEE to 10.1.3.4.1 which will fix maximum BI Publisher issues.

Also Oracle claimed that only BI Publisher issues are fixed in 10.1.3.4.1 and no improvement / issues in Dashboards.

So, we finally made a decision to upgrade OBIEE environments to 10.1.3.4.1.

Are there any issues identified in 10.1.3.4.1 post upgrade ?

There are 3 issues identified in 10.1.3.4.1

Multi Select Prompts : If you select multiple values in prompts and click on 'Go', it will wipe off all the values selected and report won't run.

Date Prompt : If you select a date in the date prompt and the format is 'mm-dd-yyyy', it will fire the query to database in the format 'yyyy-mm-dd' which will result in 'Not a valid month' error.

Refresh Link : If you click on the 'Refresh' button down to any report, it will not refresh the report. (This issue is first identified by our team. If you already upgraded to 10.1.3.4.1, dig for this issue and apply patch as mentioned below)

What are the patches to fix this issue ?

Oracle provided one single patch for all these. Patch # 9394038 did the magic. We got all the above issues fixed.

How about BI Publisher, the major target ?

The issues are still open and all the 10.1.3.4.0 issues exist in 10.1.3.4.1 too. We are currently working with Oracle to fix those issues and will come up with some fix soon.

That's it for now !! Will come up with a continuation for this post soon once we progress in implementation of BI Publisher.

Hope this will help OBIEE Administrators creating / upgrading to 10.1.3.4.1 environments. While discussing with Admin's I found that these issues are not identified (post testing) and asked for the related Patch. So this will help them.

Also in parallel we are implementing BI Management Pack which will be out of validation soon. Will share those details as well !!

Bye for now,

Aneel Kanuri