Are you interested in OBIEE?

While browsing for OBIEE tutorials on YouTube we found this fantastic video on OBIEE.

Click this link if you are interested in knowing more:-OBIEE Tutorial

Profiles of the Future

I've been thinking about the laws of the universe recently and came across a book written by the science fiction master Arthur C. Clarke called Profiles of the Future. Over the course of many years and several revisions he put forward the hypothesis that there are 3 laws for predicting the future.

These are:

Clarke's first law
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Clarke's second law
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Clarke's third law
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The third one has various alternative explanations such as:
Any technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those who don't understand it ,and
Any sufficiently ancient recovered wisdom or artifact is also indistinguishable from magic

There's a couple of variations I like that are particularly related to the field of computing in which I work. 

These are:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo, and
Software tests that inexplicably pass or fail are indistinguishable from voodoo

Over the course of my career I've seen the truth of these last two. Many years ago I had the privilege of being invited to the demo of a new piece of software that was slated to be years ahead of its time. It was being shown to us by an executive of that company and what we saw really was a leap beyond anything any of us had seen before that is, until one of us spotted that what appeared to be buttons being clicked on a screen actually looked suspiciously like a PowerPoint presentation moving from one picture to another. The buttons were not depressing and the positioning of some of the buttons moved ever so slightly from one screen to another.

At one point a question was asked from the audience if we could go back to the previous screen to look and see what one of the other buttons could do. Of course this would have been impossible but the presenter was slick and had anticipated such a request when his reply was that we had so much to cover in a short period of time and would love to show that feature in a separate demo after the main presentation.

When the presentation was over, some of us went to ask about that feature to be told that the link back to the database at head office had gone down and therefore we would not be able to see a demo of that feature after all.

Are you worried about what to do now that Discoverer is almost out of support

Hello everyone
Like me, if you are a big user of Discoverer, you would have been alarmed at the news a few years ago that Oracle was dropping the tool.

Well, once I got over my alarm I started to think about how my clients could maximize their use of the at times millions of dollars of investment.

Oracle Corporation’s statement of direction implies that they will not force you off of Discoverer and on to another tool. It is important for you to understand, however that like all software Discoverer will one day be phased out in order to make way for more modern BI solutions.

You currently have three options: Protect / Extend / Evolve

1. Protect your investment by staying with Discoverer, continuing to receive Oracle’s outstanding support until it runs out, after which you will be on your own
2. Extend you your investment by continuing to use Discoverer while integrating to other Oracle BI tools such as Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (OBIEE)
3. Evolve your investment by formulating a strategy to fully migrate to another tool, perhaps one of Oracle's other BI tools such as OBIEE, or to a third party tool such as SplashBI owned by Eis Technilogies

I will address more on option 3 in upcoming posts.

Are you having trouble starting Weblogic from a Windows service

Are you having trouble starting Weblogic on Windows and thus unable to start the WLS_DISCO service? If so, you can start Wenlogic from the command line.

To start Weblogic from the command line, follow these steps:

1. Open a CMD window
2. Navigate to the bin folder for Weblogic. Mine is located at C:\oracle\Middleware\user_projects\domains\ClassicDomain\bin
3. Run startweblogic.cmd
4. Provide a username - in my case weblogic
5. Provide the password
6. When started, leave the CMD window open

Next, I started the Node Manager manually as follows:

1.  Open a second CMD window
2. Navigate to the bin folder for Node Manager. Mine is located at C:\oracle\Middleware\wlserver_10.3\server\bin
3. Run startnodemanager.cmd
4. Provide a username - in my case weblogic
5. Provide the password
6. When started, leave the CMD window open

Discoverer and Windows 10

Hi everyone
Further to a earlier posting of mine it would appear that Windows 10 and Discoverer are incompatible.

Michael

Might need to use Tunneling with Discoverer 11g

I have noticed a few instances recently of Discoverer 11g Plus failing to open or taking an awful long time to open. In both of the cases where this has been reported to me by my clients, changing the plus communication protocol from Default to Tunneling did the trick.

To enable tunneling for use with Discoverer Plus, use this workflow:

1. Launch Enterprise Manager using something like: http://server.domain.com:7002/em
2. Enter your Username and Password. Username is typically Weblogic
3. Under Farm, on left-hand side, expand Discoverer and Discoverer(11.1.1.x.0)
4. In the Components window, highlight Discoverer Plus then click the Configure button
5. In the Communication Protocols window, click the Tunneling radio button (see below)
6. Click the Apply button
7. Shut Down the Discoverer service from the top link by clicking on Discoverer | Control | Shut Down - confirm the action
8. Restart the Discoverer service from the top link by clicking on Discoverer | Control | Start Up - confirm the action (sometimes you have to do this twice)

 

Still here

Hi everyone
I am still here. Just wanted to let you know that I am still in the business of working with Discoverer even though Oracle recently announced that it would be de-supported. If you need help just get in touch.

Also, you may not be aware but we have updated our Discoverer Handbook with the latest 11g version. You can find it on Amazon

New OTN Interface

If you are a user of OTN (Oracle Technology Network) you should have noticed that there is a new interface. I think its pretty cool. What do you think?