VirtualBox 4.2.4

I was working on my OBIEE Test Lab today. Having network issues, because I'm prone to those. I decided to look up The Fat Bloke as he seems to be the resident expert on all things VirtualBox. As to my network issues, The Fat Bloke had this great post back in June, which helped me understand how VirtualBox network interfaces work.

So, as I said, I was looking for some new articles. I ran across this one, What's New in Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2?. There was this section on Groups. I tried it out on mine...it didn't work. I check my version, 4.1.something. Hmmm. The article was dated September. I should have this. No sooner did I think that, I got an update message from VirtualBox saying a new release was available. Sweet!

So now I'm running the latest:



So what is this group stuff? You can go read the article, but I'll quote the important stuff here:

Groups allow you to organize your VM library in a sensible way, e.g. by platform type, by project, by version, by whatever. To create groups you can drag one VM onto another or select one or more VM's and choose Machine...Group from the menu bar. You can expand and collapse groups to save screen real estate, and you can Enter and Leave a group (think iPad navigation here) by using the right and left arrow keys when groups are selected.

But groups are more than passive folders, because you can now also perform operations on groups, rather than all the individual VMs. So if you have a multi-tiered solution you can start the whole stack up with just one click.

Very cool stuff. Now I can logically group my OBIEE Test Lab VMs. If I ever get around to having the software (database, OBIEE) start automatically, I'll be rocking.



Lots of cool new stuff there. Read the article and go get the software.

BIWA Summit 2013

I meant to write about this sooner...

If you're looking for a good BI/DW/Analytics focused event, check out the BIWA Summit which takes place in January of 2013. If you're interested in speaking at the event (and you know you are), hurry up and get your abstract in here, it closes tomorrow (November 9th).

Day 1 will give us Tom Kyte who will talk about What's new from Oracle in BI and Data warehousing. Day 2 will feature Vaishnavi Sashikanth, Vice President, Development, Oracle Advanced Analytics at Oracle who will speak on Making Big Data Analytics Accessible.

For more information, go here and here.

SOUG: Tampa Oracle Day

Life has been busy and I haven't been to a meeting in a while. There's a good one coming up though. If you're in the area you should make plans. RSVP here.

Here are the rest of the details from the email blast:

I wanted to give everyone an early head's up that we have a whole day of Oracle info coming up next week on Thursday, November 8th. We will have the Tampa Oracle Day and Product Fair at Raymond James Stadium from 9am-4pm. Following a brief intermission, our November Suncoast Oracle Users Group meeting will begin at 6pm in our regular Rocky Point location.

The Oracle Day event will include separate tracks with 4 sessions each for Simplify IT, Social/Mobile/Cloud, and Customer Experience. There will also be a Solutions Pavilion/Demo Grounds, breakfast and lunch, and a couple of Keynotes. In one of the Keynotes, I'll be relating some of our experiences at Nielsen in Leveraging Exadata for Consolidation and Business Growth.

You can register for the Tampa Oracle Day by calling 800.820.5592 ext.10942 or online at : http://www.oracle.com/us/dm/06495-nafm12034228mpp041-oem-1844932.html.

One of the most recent additions to Oracle's ever growing line of Engineered systems is the Oracle Database Appliance. The ODA is a 2-node RAC cluster with 4TB of storage all buttoned up in a 2U chassis. They've combined this hardware with a slick web interface management layer that allows you to stand up a 2-node RAC cluster in less than an hour with just a few clicks of the mouse. For our SOUG meeting this month, we will have one of these boxes in hand for a live demo and further discussion of the technology.

The Thursday evening SOUG meeting begins with refreshments and an opportunity for networking with your peers from 6:00-6:30pm followed by a presentation from 6:30-8:30pm. The meeting will be held in the Knowledge Services facilities at:

3031 North Rocky Point Drive West, Suite 275
Tampa, FL 33607

Hope to see you there.

OBIEE: 14006 Unsupported Predicate

My favorite Admin tool error:



In one of our subject areas, we recently changed the physical source from one system to another. No big deal right?

One of my colleagues figured out this neat little trick using Fragmentation content on the Content table of a logical table source. Basically, if the date was yesterday or greater, use Table_A, if not, use Table_B. Worked like a charm.

With the change to the physical source, it no longer worked. WTH?

I suspected the Fragmentation content because the data types changed, well, one was no longer the driver, if that makes sense. See, we had to do this work-around because the original source system wasn't designed with date date types. We had to pass a string in the YYYY-MM-DD format.

With the new source, that was resolved. We now had a date data type, awesome.

Not so awesome, because it broke. By broke I mean all the facts were doubling for everything but the current day (today).

If you're wondering, here is the logic in the Fragmentation content section for Table_A:

"BMM"."Dim - Date"."YYYY-MM-DD Column" >= VALUEOF( "INIT_BLOCK"."YYYY-MM-DD" )

For Table B:

"BMM"."Dim - Date"."YYYY-MM-DD Column" < VALUEOF( "INIT_BLOCK"."YYYY-MM-DD" )

The only thing different is the operator.

Since we now had a true date data type, I tried to use that, which is how I came across the 14006 Unsupported Predicate issue. You see, now I didn't have to use a repository variable, I could simply use OBIEE date functions. I came up with this to mimic the same behavior:

"BMM"."Dim - Date"."Date (Data Type!)" < CAST( TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_DAY, -1, CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ) AS DATE )

Of course I changed the operator for each LTS. Save RPD, Transaction Update Failed. Check Consistency,



It's a valid formula. Works in Answers (or whatever it's called these days). Perhaps someone with far more experience can spot the mistake.