Happy Spring

Well, spring is here. Well, not exactly. The date has arrived but in sunny Belgium, we seem to have missed the whole event. It actually snowed today as we were enjoying our "Bring a plate" lunch, followed by the usual drinks (and this time even beer). These team-building are really enjoyable and everybody really seemed to enjoy it. Those who didn't at least did a great job of pretending. My Icelandic Spring Curry was as big a hit as many other dishes: There was none left at the end. I must admit that I was disappointed with it; it was lacking that gut-wrenching burning effect I was going for. Next time there will be no holding back since this time around it will surely only burn once (if at all).

Today the BI EE server is due to be installed in production. So far I have been using a local desktop (more powerful than the eventual server, but eyhh!) and it's time to get the final box set up and on the 100Mbit network instead of the office 10Mbits. Not that performance has been an issue, but it might get troublesome once we have more than 2 test users connecting :) That cache really does work as advertised. It's more more of an issue to disable it than actually using it. Why disable it? Well, as a POC we are showing the whole process of receiving data files, loading and hitting refresh in the browser to show the changed figures. Snazzy innit?

I must admit that getting the hang of the Dashboard design (i.e. Answers) was dead easy. I am far from reaching any expert level at it, but so far it's been a walk in the park. Sure it's been a bit rainy in said park, but that's Belgium for you. I had a mock-up I did using Oracle Portal and Discoverer (which in turn was a mock-up from a BO muck-up a colleague had done) to mimic. This made understanding the requirements all the much easier. I was done in about one afternoon, and this was the first real Dashboard I had come up with. Too bad that once it was time to demonstrate this the server room had a small A/C melt-down so the dev database was taken off-line :S! If only we had had the cache enabled :P

The LDAP integration was hardly a challenge either, but I didn't get the user/group setup working yet (after about 1h of banging at it my gold-fish mind turned on to other things). The client relies heavily on the corporate LDAP (iPlanet) which worked 'out of the box' when I set up the OBIEE LDAP thingamajig.