Some remarks upfront:

• OBIEE is NOT a database. It’s a tool to plough trough multidimensional data out of a data warehouse or datamart.
• OBIEE is NOT an extraction tool. It’s not designed to extract 100k+ rows to a CSV or XLS file.
• OBIEE reports returning more then 1000 rows are often use as source for other tools (like Excel) and don’t contain any information for the user without having him/her plough trough the data manually.
• OBIEE caching is NOT in memory! It’s a file based system.

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We where recently asked how to run OBIEE as a HTTPS / SSL service. The customer wanted this because of in house security policy. Here is how we did it:

Step 1: Navigate to your OC4J config directory, ussally found in ..:\OracleBI\oc4j_bi\j2ee\home\config.  Add a new directory called: "backup_orignal". Copy the whole content of the config directory to the new directory. (better save then sorry……)

Step 2: Creating the SSLFILE (site certificate).

Open a command box and navigate to your OC4J config directory, ussally found at: ..:\OracleBI\oc4j_bi\j2ee\home\config. Enter

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Besides using batch / shell command to purge the cache (see: http://knowledge.ciber.nl/weblog/?p=96), it’s also possible to do this automatically based on events in your ETL process.

This is done by having the OBIEE cache manager polling one or more a ‘EVENTS’ table(s). What you do is have a predefined reference table in a each database you are using. (If you have 1 complete ETL process you could log all table changes in one table.)

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One the big strengths of OBIEE is the possibility to easily integrate Excel sheets into the repository. If you leave everything to the default settings you will find that you can’t edit the sheet “on the fly” without having to restart the OBIEE services.

Here is a workaround.

Step 1: Make the XLS Excel workbook “shareable”

In Excel goto Tools > “Share Workbook”

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