ORACLE BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE ENTERPRISE EDITION 100: presentation catlog

Showing posts with label presentation catlog. Show all posts

Configuring the Presentation Catalog for More Than 4000 Users

If you have more than 4000 Presentation Catalog users or you intend to have more than 4000 Presentation Catalog users in the future, you need to turn on the hashing of users’ home directories to take care of a file system limitation.

To do so, you set the HashUserHomeDirectories element in the Oracle BI Presentation Services configuration file (instanceconfig.xml) to 2.

The following entry is an example:

http://docs.google.com/View?id=dgh6q53h_126fpwdd4gt

NOTE: This element must be set immediately after installing Oracle BI Presentation Services to be effective

Source:Presentation services admin guide

Presentation Catalog/Services Caching

As we know there are two kind of Caching is available in OBIEE .One of them is most popular and familiar i.e. BI Server Caching and other is BI Web Server caching . Presentation Catalog Caching is rarely used and it rarely take any attraction in performance . However a most significant use of it will be, bypassing the default report level Caching in real-time BI application i.e typical Transactional Application where the back-end data changed in a moment and need to be reflected in the Analytics report (though BI is not built for OLTP query) .In such scenario it would be meaningful for developers to force bypass the web query caching and let analytics hit the database once again to fetch updated data , if any .This could be manually done by pressing Refresh button at the bottom left of Browser window .

However if there are multiple dashboards and say user1 wants dashboard1 data updated on real-time after back-end ETL populates, then rather suggesting user to click on Refresh button each time is not the best option as fickle minded user1 could see stale data and can raise a hue and cry unnecessarily on old data .That could be easily avoided using Bypass Web Server Cache feature in Advanced tab of the corresponding reports .

This feature would not only giving the user flexibilities to customize the set of reports where the real-time data reflection needed but also avoiding a global change in cache config params under instanceconfig.xml which will be applicable for entire platform and possibly that could not be the right choice at right time !

If you are running multiple instances of Oracle BI Presentation Services (either through replication or clustering) you need to add the following entries in the Oracle BI Presentation Services configuration file (instanceconfig.xml) to manage when the Presentation Catalog cache is to be updated from disk .

</Catalog>

Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.3 – Presentation Catalog Captions

There was one question today in the forums here with regard to the procedure for setting up Presentation Catalog Captions. Even though it is pretty much straight forward, i thought i would blog about it here since there have been some confusion with regard to the folders where Captions had to be copied. Let me first start with a brief introduction of what Presentation Catalog Captions actually mean. As you would know, BI EE suppors a variety of languages. The login screen would contain the list box having the list of languages and one can choose language based on his locale/preference. But when you actually login using the various languages you would find that all the Dashboards, Folders, Reports etc would be in Englidh by default. So what presentation catalog captions does is that it provides a procedure for translating all the presentation catalog data to the desired language. In our case, we will see how to go about converting the presentation catalog captions to french.

1. Open the Catalog Manager. Open your presentation catalog in offline mode. The presentation catalog, if you had done a default install, would be under this directory {OracleBIData}/web/catalog/paint. Now go to Tools and click on Export Captions. That would prompt you to save the output XML file. Save this in any folder.

In my case i had copied it to D drive. As you see, the export process will basically create different XML files for different catalogs. The XML file of our interest is the PaintDemoCaptions.XML.

2. Go to {OracleBIData}/web/res and create a folder l_fr(fr denotes the language french. If you are trying to do this for some other language put the corresponding abbr here). Open l_fr folder and under that create another folder called Captions. Now copy the PaintDemoCaptions.XML to this Captions directory.

3. Open this XML file. As you would see this XML file would contain multiple tags and each of the names of Dashboards, Report, Folders etc would be under the Text Tags. Our aim is to translate these text strings to French. Just for demonstration purposes i would be showing the translation of a Dashboard Page Name and a Report name. I have used Babel Fish web site here to do the translation of 2 strings. The 2 strings i translated are