OBIEE 11g hasn't treated me well!

Every blogger in OBIEE area has posted about the installation steps and quite a few posts on new features, configuration, architecture etc. after the much anticipated and publicized OBIEE 11g launch in July. I have been thinking about getting it installed and review it myself for quiet a bit of time and it took a lot of effort due to poor planning. Anyway, I am here to put all that effort here so that everybody can learn from it.

My system configuration - Dell Studio 1558, Intel i3 CPU M330 @ 2.13 GHz, 4 GB RAM, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

Attempt 1

Couple of weeks back, I was talking to a colleague of mine and heard that any program can be run as if the OS is XP Professional 32-bit by simply changing the compatibility mode in setup.exe properties. I installed OBIEE 11g R2 Database using compatibility mode and was able to connect to it just fine. I also ran rcu and it just ran great. OBIEE 11.1.1.3 installer wasn't doing anything (no changes in log) for hours at step 11 of 12. I checked couple of OTN posts and it became clear that Windows 7 wasn't an option.

Attempt 2

Then came this noble idea of VMware and thought that RedHat would be fun to install. I used to have Windows and Mandrive on my previous Dell Inspiron 700m. Also, RedHat is becoming popular at work and that also contributed for the decision to install RHEL.OBIEE 11g R2 database, RCU and OBIEE 11g got installed successfully except for few rpms missing in RHEL. It was straight forward except few minor issues. But, Administration Tool isn't available on RHEL. So, checked the platform compatibility xls and found that client is available only for Windows based OS.

Attempt 3

My elder brother uses my 6 year old Dell 700m (1.2 GB RAM, XP Professional), which I used over the weekend to install the OBIEE 11g software. The whole install took the whole Saturday night and the monitor went off in the morning before the installation was fully done and the monitor is not powering on anymore. I tested the installation successfully but I took off one entertainment option for my brother.

Attempt 4

I removed RHEL Virtual machine and installed XP Professional with 2 GB memory, 2 processors and 60 GB Hard Disk dedicated for VM. I got all of it installed on the VM successfully and trying to dig through to make sense of everything. It took about 6-7 hours for the installation, which itself is a lot of time.

Here are my first set of comments(not really complaints).

• OBIEE 11g install is a huge footprint. 11-12 weeks were considered enough for simpler OOB Analytics applications such as Service and Order Management where as with this kind of platform install, that kind of timelines cannot be met.
• Documentation is about 1 GB, which is just too much to even carry around.
• Limited Platforms in Release 1 is another thing. When you cannot have software for all platforms, you always get a feeling that it is not stable. Next release is supposed to address this and the next release is expected in early 2011.
• Only application server available to support OBIEE is Weblogic, which is a huge reason for not many upgrades planned.
• Installer cannot install client tools alone. I am surprised how Oracle could let this out without addressing this.
• OBI Presentation looks really great and I liked the way the samples are presented. Users will have to be trained all over on 11g due to significant differences and more complex presentation may loose its USP.

At a time when IT budgets are tightly managed, investments in technology upgrades will be  evaluated  more from value perspective. But, as economy picks up pace heading north east, upgrades will get kick started . I expect next year to be huge in terms of upgrades, trainings and lot more projects in OBIEE 11g. So, it is better to be ahead of the curve for everybody than fall behind.

I would like to hear from people about experiences with RPD and Catalog upgrade. I will certainly take sometime in the next few weeks on the upgrade part and post my observations.

Registering Informatica 8.1.1 Integration Service in DAC

Registering Informatica Integration service in DAC took a lot of time in the evening the other day. The documentation says that the ServerPort variable in Custom Properties in Informatica Admin Console will be the port on which Informatica Integration service will listen to. Refer to section 4.7.3 in Oracle® Business Intelligence Applications Fusion Edition Installation and Configuration Guide Release 7.9.5 document. But, after creating ServerPort variable with value 4006 as a custom property in Repository properties did not help. lsof -i|grep 4006 on Solaris returned nothing on Solaris, which indicates that the port is not in use. After shutting down and restarting of Informatica services multiple times, I thought I missed something in documentation. I was able to connect to Integration serviec and Repository service with pmrep and pmcmd respectively from the command prompt on the machine where DAC client is running.

After lot of unsucessful attempts, I looked at all of the ports in use by the Solaris user and 6009 stood out to be something of interest. Boom!! Here I go. DAC threw a message "connection successful but passwords not verified" when the port changed to 6009 from 4006. I do not think we ever configured 6009 anywhere during or post install of Informatica 8.1.1 OEM. I am wondering what if we want to create another Informatica integration service on the same box with a different user. I will post the answer as I come out of that situation.

Here is the way to fix the Port issue with Informatica Integration Service

After going through the documentation once more, it is clear that the custom property should be created in Informatica Integration Service properties NOT on the repository properties. I restarted Infaservices today and the port is different now. So, Informatica is assigning different port each time for Integration service. After adding the ServerPort variable with value as 6010 in Informatica Integration service custom properties, Informatica integration service is always running on the static port(6010). Now I am confident that we can run multiple Informatica Integration services on a Solaris machine, if required.