Federal News Radio Segment with Guident

January 20, 2012

Dan Ackerman, Guident Executive Vice President, and I had the fortunate experience of being interviewed by Federal News Radio 1500 AM as we were guests on “Federal TechTalk with John Gilroy”. The focus of the discussion was the current state of government business intelligence – how the government is using it for increasing efficiencies and enabling data effectiveness – as well as taking a look into what’s on the horizon including topics such as mobile BI, predictive analytics, Big Data, content intelligence, cost containment, and consumer intelligence.

The interview experience was great.  John Gilroy is an energetic, personable guy who made Dan and I instantly feel comfortable.  Even though we were in a recording studio with large microphones in front of us, John helped us feel like we were having a casual conversation over coffee.  The interview was ‘Live-to-Tape’ which means while the show was not live, it won’t be edited.  The pressure was on for Dan and I to give clean, concise answers with minimal hiccups. Luckily, this was Dan’s third time on the show so he and John Gilroy were able to help me with my rookie radio butterflies.

The recording consisted of 4 ten minute blocks of interviews.  Between each session, John, Dan, and I chatted for a few minutes to discuss topics for the next block.  While 40 minutes seems like a long time, the session really flew by and allowed me to become one of John’s more than 240 survivors who have interviewed with him.  This was truly a great experience and exciting for Dan and I to represent Guident in discussing our thoughts on the state of current and future government affairs.

1/24/12 Update - Click here for a direct link to the Federal News Radio Segment featuring Guident.

Please provide us your comments and opinions on the business intelligence trends in the federal government!

Ken Raffel

Senior Vice President

OBIEE Publisher 11g - Performance Monitoring and User Auditing

BI Publisher performance monitoring enables you to monitor the performance of queries, reports and document generation and to analyze the provided details. User auditing provides information about what users logged in, when, how many times, what reports they accessed, and other actions they took within the application.

Enabling Monitoring and Viewing the Audit Log

To enable monitoring:

1. Update properties in the BI Publisher server configuration file.

2. Copy the component_events.xml file to your Middleware Home.

3. Configure the Audit Policy Settings with Fusion Middleware Control (Enterprise Manager)

4. Restart WebLogic Server.

To View Audit Log:

5. Configure Audit Repository

6. Create Data Source in WebLogic Server

7. Register the Audit-Storing Database to your Domain

8. Create Auditing Reports

DAC Reporting in OBIEE

The purpose of this blog is to show how to consume data in the DAC repository via OBIEE reports.

What is DAC?

Oracle Business Intelligence Data Warehouse Administration Console (Oracle DAC) provides a centralized console for schema management, configuration, administration, loading, and monitoring of the Oracle Business Analytics Warehouse. The Data warehouse Application Console (DAC) is used to create and schedule Informatica ETL workflows. It manages the following data warehouse load processes:

• Dynamic generation of subject areas and execution plans
• Dynamic settings for parallelism and load balancing
• Intelligent task queue engine based on user-defined and computed scores
• Index management for ETL and query performance
• Embedded high-performance OTLP change capture techniques
• Restart from any point of failure

DAC / ETL Statistics

The metadata for ETL is stored in the DAC repository that is composed of approximately 120 tables. These tables store the ETL metadata such as tasks, task steps, execution plan details, connection details, run history, etc.

In this exercise we are only interested in the run history table - W_ETL_DEFN_RUN. This table has the ETL execution details for every Execution plan that was run through DAC (see screenshot below).

Informatica - Beyond ETL

Informatica has long been one of the business intelligence / data warehouse industry leaders in data integration. Its PowerCenter and PowereExchange products have consistently been positioned in the leader quadrant for data integration by Gartner. However, Informatica is not resting on its laurels. Since 2009 Informatica has gone on an acquisitions rampage buying up best in breed companies with similar data-centric DNA while at the same time continuing to innovate and broaden its base products. The Informatica Platform now enables you to integrate data within the traditional enterprise (Enterprise Data Integration), control data in the clouds (cloud data integration), share data with your partners (B2B Data Exchange), archive data for efficiency and eDiscovery (Application ILM), and deliver data at zero latency (Ultra Messaging). To unlock the business value of all this data, the platform enables you to cleanse and gain trustworthy data (Data quality), to detect and act on operational intelligence (Complex Event Processing) and gain a 360 view of your strategic, authoritative master data assets (Master Data Management).

Informatica’s CEO stated that “only Informatica delivers the comprehensive, unified and open data integration platform to empower the data-centric enterprise.”

Data Modeling: Schema Generation Issue with ERwin Data Modeler 7.3

We are using Computer Associate's ERwin Data Modeler 7.3 for data modeling. In one of our engagements, we are pushing data model changes to the physical database (Oracle 11g R2) via ERwin's Forward Engineering / Schema Generation functionality.

Upgrading to Informatica PowerCenter 9.1 from Version 8.6

We have completed the upgrade from Informatica PowerCenter 8.6 to PowerCenter 9.1. The Informatica Upgrade Guide for PowerCenter 8.5.x and 8.6.x describes an in-place upgrade of an existing hardware and software environment. However, as we wanted to upgrade our hardware at the same time, our plan was to setup a brand new Informatica PowerCenter 9.1 environment and import the code from our legacy PowerCenter 8.6 server.

Installing Informatica PowerCenter 9.1 on a Windows 64-bit server was straight forward but we ran into the following two issues:

1. There seems to be a bug in the Pre-Installation System Check Tool (i9Pi). The purpose of this tool is to check that the server meets all installation requirements. This tool kept raising the following error “Make sure that open cursors are at least set to 1000” for our repository connection information to our Oracle 11g database. Even after our DBA had set this value to 1500 and restarted the Oracle 11g database service, the Pre-Installation System Check Tool continued to raise this error. This seems to be a bug in i9Pi because the installation was able to complete successfully.

How-To: Creating a Universe with the BO XI 4.0 Information Design Tool

The following describes the steps to create a universe with SAP BusinessObjects XI 4.0's new Information Design Tool.


We would like to start with a graphic displaying a systematic method to create universes in the new tool.

Figure 1: Universe Creation Flowchart for the Information Design Tool

There are a few new terms that may jump out as you are reading this, but in case you have not noticed them, let's take a minute to list those terms out:

• Connection – define how a universe connects to a relational or OLAP database. Local connections are stored as .CNX files, and secure connections are stored as .CNS files.
  
• Data Foundation – a schema that defines the relevant tables and joins from one or more relational databases. The designer enhances the data foundation with contexts, prompts, calculated columns, and other SQL definitions. The data foundation becomes the basis of one or more business layers.
  
• Business Layer – the universe under construction, and when the business layer is complete, it is compiled with the connections or connection shortcuts and data foundation, published, and deployed as a universe.
  
• Universe – the compiled file that includes all resources used in the definition of the metadata objects built in the design of the business layer.