New LinkedIn Group

If you are using the Networking tool LinkedIn, I have created a group for Oracle Business Intellegence professionals. Look out for the group on my profile, and join in if you think it is appropriate for you.
I will connect anyone who is working in OBIEE, Siebel Analytics, Oracle Business Intelgence (such as OWB).

http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/43109/526A0219C124

OBI EE Consultants Needed

The OBIEE world is still going strong and demand is high. We need a couple more consultants - one experienced contractor for a project in Germany where we are the technical leaders, and one junior (on a decent salary).

If you are ready for a new project/consultancy then do get in touch.

Remembrance Day petition

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/remembermonday/

A petition has been launched requesting a new public holiday falling on the Monday after Rembrance Sunday in November each year.

To be known as the National Remembrance Holiday, it's purpose is threefold:

1. To emphasise the remembrance of those servicemen and women who have given, and continue to give, their lives for Britain.
2. To remind people of the importance of protecting our Nation and what it stands for.
3. To break that 3 month period between the August Public Holiday and Christmas when there are currently no long weekends, especially as the UK has fewer public holidays than most European Countries.

If you are in agreement, please sign up to the petition
- it only takes a few moments - and it would be great if you were minded to forward the link to other people as well.


Thank you for your time.

Using Catalog Manager

If you want to have a consistent Header or Footer on each page of your dashboards then you can add the default settings to your custom messages file and all NEW reports will have the same settings. You can edit these settings per page afterwards. However, if you have built loads of pages on various dashboards and the Business Analyst comes along and says, 'oh I forgot to say we need a confidentiallity clause at the bottom of each page' you smile through gritted teeth and are faced with a large task of opening each page and editing the print formatting. If you have lots of formats to make this can take some time. The alternative is to dig into the Catalog manager and edit the xml for each page directly. This takes half the time to go through each page. Open the Catalog Manager and navigate to the _portals folder.







Now select the properties for the page (make sure you don't pick the dashboard layout).























Edit the page xml.





The trick here is not to write your own xml!! Copy the xml from one you set up manually in the dashboard editor.

Here I copied in a message about the system being restricted and a nice green message!

The tag added is saw:pageProps

notice saw:pageHeader show="false" / and saw:showFooter showondashboard="true" show="true"

simple really.

UI Messages

The most popular customisation for OBIEE is the colour scheme, which you will know is done by Skin/Schema.
This is great but you then come to change the wording and it is not done by skin/schema.
You can update the file uimessages.xml to change the links on the menu, so for example Dashboards could be replaced with 'Sailing' and the link can be changed (in the controlmessages.xml file), but this covers all skins being presented. On of the forum responses recently suggested that the javascript can be altered on a skin by skin basis but I can't find any reference to the messages being presented. I'll keep looking but if you know send a quick reply :)

The normal method for updating messages is to create an entry in your custom messages file, but htis requires you to know which message table the message relates to. This would be fine but this area is not fully documented (in the public domain at least:).

I'll experiment and let you know if I can find the relevent massage table setting to use. In the meantime this type of message customisation has to take place in the original files (which you hopfully have a backup of!)

New Version of OBIEE

Version 10.1.3.3.3.1..3.1.1.2..3.1..3. of OBI Enterprise Edition is now released.

It's got some new stuff in.

How exciting!

Ex-Oracle

NOT quite sure why it exists, but I just found a forum for ex-Oracle employees. Probably useful for networking with people who left to earn a decent wage contracting.
It was listed in the LinkedIn groups section.
Have a look at http://www.ex-oracle.org/html/index.php

Act as

Nicholas De Brabanter has a good article on this.

http://www.be-ice.eu/2007/10/04/how-enabling-and-configuring-the-obiee-proxy-act-as-functionality

I found this link the other day. It lists the average rate for OBI consultants in the USA.

http://www.hotgigs.com/rates/skill/Oracle-Business-Intelligence-hourly-consultant-bill-rates/

At 137 dollars for an average consultant and on a straight conversion these look slightly lower than the UK, but the cost of living over there is lower.

Foreign Travel

So lets recap....


Ireland - Two OBI/Analytics required
Amsterdam - One senior OBIEE
Midlands - One OBIEE expert
France - 2 month contract for Siebel Analytics
London - Training x 2

then along comes Australia !!!! Anyone fancy going to Sydney for the winter?

Where's my suitcase.

Seriously, there is more work than I can handle, but rates are still tight. If you fancy trying out contracting then get in touch and I'll point you in the right direction

- Adrian
adrian.ward@majendi.com

Sign up for the Arrows

Speechless...

"Organisers of the event say that the Arrows military background might be "offensive" to other countries taking part in the Games. The display team have performed at more than 4000 events worldwide, but the Department of Culture, Media and Sport have deemed the display team "too militaristically British". Red Arrows pilots were said to be "outraged", as they had hoped to put on a truly world class display for the Games, something which had never been seen before. Being axed from a British-based event for being "too British" is an insult - the Arrows are a symbol of Britain .

The Red Arrows have been excellent ambassadors for British overseas trade, as they display their British-built Hawk aircraft all over the world.

The Arrows performed a short flypast in 2005 when the winning bid was announced, but their flypast at the Games was to have been truly spectacular.

It is to be hoped that common sense prevails"

If you disagree with this decision, sign the petition on the link
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/RedArrows2012/?ref=redArrows2012

Amsterdam anyone?

There is a contract in Amsterdam that is looking for an experienced analytics consultant. Please get in touch with me if you are interested. I can put you in direct contact with the manager there.

Role of Honour

I received lots of good feedback on my recent rantings about the market, so have decided to set-up a role of honour for OBI specialists. We know who the major players are, so I'll set-up a webpage listing consultants, companies, projects, agents and general information.

If you would like to be included just let me know, and send me a profile. If there is anything you specifically want to have included, let me know. If you want, I'll put a link on your profile, so people can make direct contact (via LinkedIn, Xing, facebook, etc).

I don't think I can put it on a page here (can I?) so may hvae to host it on Majendi.com or majendi.net.

Supply and Demand

Spain just called
so did Switzerland
and Sweden
London too (twice)
oh, so did Amsterdam
and of Course there's Munich
not forgetting Wiltshire

There's lot's of work out there

And there's not that many OBI / Siebel Analytics specialists either. A few are catching up, but I know of about 5 truely experienced consultants in the market.

So why, oh why do companies think they can get someone who is skilled for 800 Euros per day??? If you have the skills it's because you have invested in a risky market (come on Oracle SELL MORE), and you have some intelligence.
I am actually beginning to think that companies prefer a cheap rubbish job. Come on prove me wrong.

If you are a consultant. Don't take a low rate, don't let the agency take a huge cut and do Learn the product inside out. The success of OBIEE depends upon succesful implmentations.

If you are a company (or consultancy) looking for someone, let me know and I'll put you in touch with good consultants. I'm not an agency but I can probably give you some good advice and screen out the bluffers.

I know most of the companies that are installing OBIEE so if you are looking for your next contract, let me know and I'll put you in touch with project managers.

In fact, I think I'll put the details of projects in my BizIntel yahoo group. Come on, lets get this market working properly.


and the bad news...
We just had a second rejection for a Work Permit application to bring in a skilled worker from South Africa. Seems the government is happy for our work to disappear offshore, and let the skills shortage in the UK continue to hold back small copanies like ours.

If you know how I can get hold of more decent staff I would love to know!!

Is there a way to get people legally working in this country? How does IBM, Accenture and the offshore copanies do it?

or

Does anyone have any idea how some people are able to buy HSMP tickets?!!!

Cluster ....

It appears that there is a significant change that I had overlooked in the new OBI 10.1.3.2, compared to the Analytics 7.8 version.

I had noticed that there was a new webcat structure, that was easy, but one of our contacts spotted that there is a new way of clustering the new Webcat.

Previously, each Webcat server (BI Presentation server) had it's own copy of the webcat file, held within the Data folder.
If you had two or more webcat servers they would syncronise the contents of the webcat using a utility - something that did not work very well.

Now you have one webcat, irrespective of how many web servers you use. They all point to the same webcat.
This neatly solves the problems you get with Syncoronisation, but introduces one significant flaw - a Single Point of Failure.

What do you do? Put your webcat on a SAN, which has all the RAID you can get. Back up the whole webcat folder every night - obviously!
Now take snapshots of the webcat throughout the day, but be very careful how many you take. Too many will slow the system down.

One thing I have always felt though is that you should cluster for Customers' High Availability requirements NOT for performance.

The majority of performance issues should be dealt with by database design, prudent Caching (with seeding), adequate memory, and ETL design. Only when these have been worked through should you look for that extra 5% from clustered servers.

Long live the King

Siebel Analytics is Dead, long live Analytics.

Actually it's not, it's still a damn good product, but the son of Analytics, OBIEE, is the new King.

Why?

Because I'm now having fun without Siebel ;-)

The new world looks like this:

An Apex application is the portal.
Identity management is by OIM (OID), managed by the Apex aplplication.
SSO uses OID to authenticate users.
Links on the portal, to your dashboards and Answer subject areas.
ETL by OWB
Database design by YOU, customise as you like.

Is the grass greener, oh yes.



Of course, Elvis is still the real King

Mad Cowes

All quiet here due to me being on holiday.

We're having a fantastic week in Cowes.

Best of all we are leading the fleet going into the last day.

Overall Results

Help!

Help!, we need somebody, Help, not just anybody, Heelp!!

Can you tell I've been listening to the Beatles tonight?

Anyway, we really do need more Analytics people. We have OBI and Analytics work coming out of our ears, so if you are looking, or know someone with Analytics then please get in touch. Now.

We need all levels, experts who want to contract through to juniors with one project who want to work as a permanent in the UK. (Work permits can be arranged).

Hardly enough time to work on the book. But don't worry it is progressing.

By the way, do you know how how the get totals working in a report that has TopN (or BottomN) in? Just go to the function dialogue for the field and set Totals to 'None'

adrian.ward@majendi.com

Catching up

As I have been in hiding on a secret client site (with no access to the internet) for a while, I thought that I would go for a large blog today.


To start with, there is some new functionality in 10.1 that you should know about. One feature is called a Presentation Variable. Like repository based variables but it is created in the BI Presentation system.

Bascially you set it up from a prompt. Once set it can be used all over the place, but my favorite is the Title of a prompted report, or column of a prompted report.

Try this

On the prompt, set a variable, which can then be accessed in the Title of the report.
For example, if you select a County of 'Wiltshire in a prompt, you set a variable name called VAR_COUNTY,
then in the Title you can display 'Details for Wiltshire' by changing the title to: Details for @{VAR_COUNTY}{All Counties}.

Neat eh?

In the good old days (last year!) we had to rely heavily on False Titles to perform the above. These may still be useful today. These use Narratives in reports to create what loks like a title. The report uses the same dashboard prompt as the report it is presented with. Using the @1 syntax you can present the value in the column, the there have a title which says something like 'Sheep in Wiltshire'. Formatted properly it will look like a title. Place it above the query in the same section. Viola.
Now I just tend to use the Section names as the titles.






I started using some Oracle dev tools this week, and I'm actually beginning to like them. Call me fickle but I have to say that I may be throwing out TOAD and starting to use Oracle SQL Developer instead. The main reason is that it is free!!






Having a quick look through my emails the other day I came across this message.

Someone asked the following question


Hi,
We have a requirement to switch between the DBs based on the user login. We have two identical/similar dbs. But based on the users, the connection should switch.
Ex: user1 should see the data fram DB1 and user2 should see the data from DB2. Our plan is to keep a single stream of Physical, BMM ,Presentation catalogs and Webcat. Is this possible through Session variables. If yes, how?


Puna replied with this excellent answer


1) Create a table "db_details" in any db with the following details:
Login_Name dbname dblogin dbpassword

2) Populate this table as per your requirements. Create a connection pool in Physical layer which connects to this table (via database)

3) Create three Non-System Session Variables: dbname,dblogin,dbpassword. Create an initialization block with the following SQL Query:
select dbname,dbuser,dbpassword from db_details where Login_Name=':User' and polplute the the above created variables.
Set the connection pool of the initialization block which was created in step 2.

4) Now for the connection pool for which dynamicity is required as per the logged in user, in connection pool of that database in physical layer set the the following properties to:
Data Source Name: VALUEOF(NQ_SESSION.dbname)
User Name: VALUEOF(NQ_SESSION.dbuser)
Password:VALUEOF(NQ_SESSION.dbpassword)

Make sure if you are using ODBC or DSN's then DSN's with the name "VALUEOF(NQ_SESSION.dbname)" already exist in the system.
So now you will be able to switch DB's based on the Login_Name.
Hope this helps.


Nice one Puna.

If you read this (or know them) please send me your details and I'll invite you to our OBI Developers Forum.

Urgent Requirement

We need a Siebel Analytics consultant for a contract in the UK - not in the North :)

As usual, we have more work than people. If you are an Analytics consultant (i.e. know all about rpd development) then please get in touch.

There will be a technical interview, so please don't try bluffing me!

For the right candidate we'll pay £550 per day initially, rising to £600 after three months.


Start in mid July

If you know anyone who may be interested please get in touch.

Adrian
07801 480900
adrian.ward@majendi.com