obiee presentation service in hanging state - troubleshoot

After starting obeii service it was hanging and never went to started state. On Analysis nothing notable found in SAWlog.log. On futher digging found following message in the event viewer..
" The description for Event ID[21] in source[oracle BI Utility ] cannot be found. The local computer may not have the neccessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. The following information is part of the event . Invalid error message catalog d:\Apps\OracleBI\server\Locale\NQErrorMsg.cat"

Troubleshooting : NQErrorMsg.cat is in corrupted state(instead of NQErrorMsg found NQErrorMsg_L_en.cat). Replace the files from install setup.

Unable to open Admin tool in OBIEE / siebal analytics

I am unable to open Admin tool in OBIEE/ siebel analytics
- check the NQSConfig
- check with nqsconfig which came along with installation
- if it works fine with original config file, then the problem should be with your NQSConfig.
- in such scenarios, even your OBI server service won't start.

I am getting 'no ocijdbc10 in java.library.path when I try to login thro' DAC client

For DAC, Oracle client 10i is pre-requisite. You won't get this error once you
install 10i.

ibot not delivering mails

this is one of the ibot issue which we face very often.
Scenario: The ibot was delivering mail if the report is in text format. it fails if it's in mhtml/pdf format.
on analysing we found it related to setting in SMTP server. the SMTP server was allowing only 3MB size of mail.

iBot running only one time upon scheduling

Sometime back we come across an issue in ibot. the ibot was running only once.
on analysing, we found that the next schedule time is getting update with randon date.
on further digging we found that, one more scheduler in different time zone was accessing this nq_job table.

Upon fixing it, ibot started running without any issue.

how to run DAC server in background?

DAC server is a program so as soon as you log off, the program also will be killed.
In order to run DAC server continuously, it should run in background.

this is achieble by running it under windows scheduler, using PSexec and running thro' remote login
In Unix , nohup can be used so that the program runs in back ground

Excel Issue in Analytics

This issue was reported by one of corporate user when he downloaded a report in siebel analytics in excel format. The issue is in the report he could see few values in date format but when he downloaded, all the values in date column become null.
This issue is only reproduced excel download.

On investigation, i found that the one of the column of the report was having values starting with'-' sign and whenever we have this value in the report, we were facing this issue. In excel, any value with '-' is treated for reference value.

So analytics could not identify the reference when it tried write the report in excel format.

it's resolved by truncating the '-' sign or users were asked to correct it while entering the decription.

let me know if you need more clarification.
- Nhanna

Write Back feature in OBIEE

Write back is a new feature introduced by oracle for improving performance.
In this article i will take you thro' one of the use of write back functionality.

Scenario:
Consider a scenario where in you want to use the output of another report as filter condition to main report.
In analytics, it's passed as IN clause. Now, when i talk about IN cluse, in TOAD you can pass only 1000 values in IN clause In analytics it's handled thro' Global setting defined in NQSConfig file. Default is 2^13.
If i pass that many value in IN clause, analytics services will go for a toss and most of the time it goes in timeout state.
to over come this, you can use Write back feature in OBIEE and store the outputs in temp tables. Analytics drops this table when the transaction is complete. the advantage of this feature is that you can pass even a million value in filter condition.
This feature well utilised in Marketing part of OBIEE.

To implement this feature, the schema should have write access to it's space.

Bog me more info............
-Nhanna