Comments on: OBIEE Hybrid OLAP Reporting using MS Analysis Services & Oracle

By: Mark Rittman

Mark Rittman — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 20:37:03 +0000

Hi Isaac,

I think you’re right, in that IIS and the XML/A provider needs to be installed on the same machine as the MSAS server. Certainly in my example they’re both on the same laptop, and I worked with a client recently who couldn’t get it working, had the same error as you, and also had IIS and the XML/A provider on one box, and MS AS on the other – which suggests that this might be the issue. Unfortunately I don’t work with MS AS enough to have lots of separate servers set up, but if you try out the suggested solution and it works, let me know.

regards, Mark

By: Isaac

Isaac — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 19:50:20 +0000

I’ve been trying this where I work without success. I keep getting a msg from OBI that that sax parser failed…expected white space.

It appears from your example that the Microsoft XMLA provider has to be installed on the same machine that your Analysis Services Server runs on. Is that the case? If so, that’s my problem. I installed it on a dedicated IIS server figuring that the MSAS server specifics could be provided later, and it would find the instance it needed.

Any advice is appreciated. In either case, it doesn’t seem to work on an IIS instance that’s on a different box than the MSAS server itself.

Thanks.

By: Clint Easton

Clint Easton — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 16:14:00 +0000

Mark
Great information. Thanks for sharing. I noticed you mentioned connecting to a virtual server in the early portion of your write up. I need to create both a test and production environment using a virtualized configuration on my Microsoft Server, running VMware ESX, and OBIEE. From your write up, I can assume the virtualization works fine, but can you tell me if you’ve validated this in an environment setup using VMware ESX and Microsoft SQL Server 2005? Will these “play well together” with OBIEE? The documentation I’ve found from Oracle says OBIEE is certified to work with Oracle VM on Linux, and it also says “OBIEE may be used with VMware virtualized environments”. I’ve found nothing from Oracle saying OBIEE will run (and is “certified”) for a virtualized Microsoft Server environment. Your thoughts? Did I just not read your write up carefully enough to answer my own question?

By: Mark Rittman

Mark Rittman — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 20:17:23 +0000

Hi Charles,

I’m not sure really what your question is on this, it’s a bit too general, perhaps if you could be a bit more specific I’ll try and help. In terms of using MSAS as a single data source for OBI SE One, you can of course create hybrid cubes in MS AS which will probably avoid you having to go through the hoops I went through, mine was more around tying together MSAS and Oracle data through OBIEE. As I said, I’m not sure what it is you’re trying to achieve, perhaps if you can give me a bit more detail I’ll see if I can help.

regards, Mark

By: Charles Americanos

Charles Americanos — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 14:29:50 +0000

Thanks very much for this detailed article, very useful.
We are looking at ways of leveraging the OBI SE 1 cut down offering to assist in our sales efforts as an Oracle partner to departmental proof of concepts–but I do need drilldown to detail as well as fast OLAP responses. The exclusion of OLAP or Essbase cubes (very costly of course) already lead me to to consideration of using as the single connection source MS AS offline/local cubes.

Do you have any other viewpoint re this hybrid approach before I start moving in this direct?

By: Eric Schleicher

Eric Schleicher — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 23:08:16 +0000

Wow! That’s a great writeup. Thanks for taking the time to 1) test all of that out, and for 2) writing this all up. We’re looking how we can integrate data from cube in OBIEE and this was really helpful.

Thanks!