Installing Oracle XE 11gR2

Last week Oracle XE 11gR2 has become available for download.Lucas Jellema must be among the first ones to write about the installation. This installation seems to be very straight forward. Unfortunately I was presented with an error message about my Physical Memory. A search on Google showed that I was not the only one. On OTN there were a few people with similar ‘problems’.

After going through the documentation I found out that the installations requires a free Disk Space of 1.5 GB minimum. When I freed up to 1,5 GB of Disk Space (it was less than 750 MB) on my C-drive (Windows), I was able to continue the installation. If necessary you can even install the software on another drive if you want to.

Implementing Row-Level-Security in Oracle BI EE

Sometimes there is a need to restrict data access to certain groups of users. Oracle provides a mechanism called Row-Level-Security. You could achieve similar functionality from within Oracle BI EE.

Picture this; You have a table of Sales Managers which are responsible for a certain region. Each Sales Manger may only see the data for his / her region.

First you have to know which user has logged on and to which region this user belongs. Therefore you should use Session variables. To set this up properly you could refer to the documentation. You validate the logged on user to a table of Sales Managers. This way you could also select the region a Sales Manager is responsible for. The principle of this solution is that you have the Sales Manager and their regions in a table which you can select from. Let’s say we now have a ‘REGION’ session variable.

We can go on to the Security Groups. Create a new Security Group called; ’Sales Managers’. Assign all the Sales Managers (Repository Users) to this newly created group.

The final step is to set Business Model Filters on this group. The concept of these filters is thatb you add all Logical Tables to this group, which you want to restrict on a Sales Managers’ region. You could achieve this by following the next steps;

1. Open the ‘Sales Manager’-Security Group,
2. Click on; ‘Permissions’,
3. Click on the Tab; ‘Filters’,
4. Click; ‘Add’,
5. Select the table you want to restrict, eg.; “Sales”.”Dim Region”.”Region Name”,
6. Use the Expression Builder to create the actual filter; “Sales”.”Dim Region”.”Region Name” = VALUEOF(NQ_SESSION.”REGION”).

Now when you use the “Sales”.”Dim Region”-table in an Oracle BI Answers query, the Business Model Filter will be applied. This filter only applies to this Security Group. User which do not belong to this group will see all the regions.

Similar functionality is used when implementing Oracle BI Apps Security.

Security issues when upgrading a Web Catalog from 10g to 11g

I blogged about upgrading from Oracle BI EE 10g to Oracle BI EE 11g R1 earlier. Although this is a very straight forward process, you could end up with some security issues.

Picture the following. You are an administrator user with the appropriate security roles to act as an (Presentation Server) Administrator. You are able to login and manage the Weblogic Console and the Enterprise Manager. When you log into the upgraded Web Catalog you are not able to see the Administration-link.

There already a lot of good blogpost about the new Oracle BI 11g security setup. Just to name a few;

• RittmanMead
• Rob Reynolds Part1
• Rob Reynolds Part2

When upgradin a WebCatlog you could be forced to do a work-around  for the security, thanks to René Kuipers. The workaround is as follows;

• Do the upgrade according to the documentation
• Make a backup via the Catalog Manager or upgrade a second time so you have a copy of the Web Catalog
• Throw away the user folders via the Catalog Manager
• Login again into the Web Catalog via; http://localhost:9704/analytics (a new user folder should be created)
• If necessary you could move the reports from the backup to the online Web Catalog

It’s a workaround and could be very time-consuming when you have to upgrade a Catalog with a lot of users. Hopefully this issue will be solved in a future release.

Connect to the Database from Oracle BI 11g

I ran into the following issue when I upgraded from Oracle BI 10g to Oracle BI 11g. Although the upgrade went smoothly, all of a sudden I was not able to reach the database anymore. After doing some research on the internet I stumbled upon the following thread on OTN.

The main difference between Oracle BI 10g and Oracle BI 11g is the fact that Oracle BI 11g has it’s own Oracle_Home.

Thanks to Dirk and Venkat for the possible solutions:

1.

navigate to; {ORACLE_INSTANCE}\bifoundation\OracleBIApplication\coreapplication\setup,

alter user.cmd or user.sh depending on your OS,

set your TNS_ADMIN location to point to; {MIDDLEWARE_HOME}\Oracle_BI1\network\admin

2.

Copy your tnsnames.ora to {MIDDLEWARE_HOME}\Oracle_BI1\network\admin directory

3.

Use the full expanded tnsnames as shown below and use this one as the datasource name in your Connection Pool:

(DESCRIPTION =(ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = host_name/ip_address)(PORT = port_number))(CONNECT_DATA =(SERVER = DEDICATED)(SERVICE_NAME = service_name)))

Installing Oracle BI 11g R1 – Windows Server 2008 R2 64bit

Recently I did an installation on a Windows Server 2008 R2 64bit. Reading through the documentation made me realize that it’s not possible to do a ‘Enterprise Install’. Check the following part in the manual:

“1.4.3 Software Only Install

The Software Only Install type installs the Oracle Business Intelligence software binary files in an Oracle home for later configuration as part of a Fusion Middleware deployment. This install type is required to install Oracle Business Intelligence on an AIX operating system or with a 64-bit JVM, such as on a supported 64-bit operating system.”

Th following could be a guideline to install Oracle BI 11g on Windows Server 2008 R2 64bit:

Install RCU –> rcuHome\BIN\rcu.bat
Install JDK 64bit
Install Weblogic generic –> via the Command Line java -jar wls1033_generic.jar
Install Oracle BI11g –> ‘Software Only’
Run config.bat to configure Oracle BI11g –>C:\Oracle\Middleware\Oracle_BI1\bin\config.bat

Of course you need to check the manual for additional info. Next to that you have to perform a ‘Software Only’ install on 32bit machine to be able to use your client tools.

Check My Oracle Support for more details.