Book review - Oracle BI Publisher 11g: A Practical Guide to Enterprise Reporting

Below is a review of Oracle BI Publisher 11g-A Practical Guide to Enterprise Reporting, written by Daniela Bozdoc and published by Packt Publishing. More information about the book can be found at here

Making OBIEE web service friendly

I know that I am obsessed with web services, but this is my final article in the series dealing with web services.

BPEL tasklist in OBIEE and APEX

We have seen the process of creating a BPEL process with human work flows in my previous article. We have also seen the process of shifting a task from the work list of one user to the other.

Now let’s put this now info to use. 

BPEL Human Workflows

Let's talk about Human workflows. I have given an introduction to Human workflows in one of my previous posts and I will like to start from where I had left there.

Bouquet of BI functions

I thought of putting OBIEE, BI Publisher, APEX and BPEL together.

Using BPEL in APEX

BPEL is a tool used to define web services. We can use it to invoke web service of a certain application or tool and then transform the output of this service into something that can be used by the web service of another tool. The web service of the 2^nd tool can then be invoked to get the desired results.

Query to get a character separated list from a result set

I wouldn’t take the credit of this but I found a very cool way of converting an array to a string using hierarchical queries. I found this mechanism in one of my projects and I think it is good enough to be shared

The performance enhancing drug called Table function

Finally a post on APEX :)

I have seen a number of situations in development of both Oracle APEX (Interactive reports) and in Oracle BI Publisher where the developer has to implement complex functionality but he only has the freedom to write SQL statements and not PL SQL logic. Due to this he ends up writing the complex logic using ‘and clause’ and ‘or clause’.

Siebel database (OLTP) blocking

A few days back, I was working on a Siebel application which had the issue of a lot of database blockings and the running tasks frequently reached max tasks.

We took the below steps to pin the problem

Siebel architecture high level overview

Siebel has many components and the one which is extensively used is ecommunications_enu.
The following is a good view of the general architecture of Siebel 

Multiple BI Publisher on a server and its URL change

Building on the concept of changing files in the war (web archive) and hosting multiple applications, we will now try to host multiple BI Publisher applications on the same server. This process of changing files in war package and deploying it has been discussed in the following post

Changing the default URL of OBIEE

We have a limitation that we can only install one OBIEE server and 1 presentation server on a machine

Installing OBIEE on a Solaris box

There are 2 kinds of possible installations

a.       Basic

b.      Advanced

Oracle Business Intelligence Repository Tuning

I am trying to collect the few steps that might help in repository tuning. The benefits of tuning something up the ladder will be less than the benefits of fixing things at the base of the ladder