Category: BI Administration

BI Administration, Business Intelligence Platform, Data Governance, Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft OneLake, Power BI August 17, 2025August 17, 2025

Microsoft Fabric OneLake Catalog – description and links to resources

What is OneLake Catalog?

Microsoft Fabric OneLake Catalog is the next generation, enhanced version of the OneLake Data Hub. It provides a complete solution in a central location for team members (data engineers, data scientists, analysts, business team members, and other stakeholders) to browse, manage, and govern all their data from a single, intuitive location. It provides an intuitive and efficient user interface and truly simplifies and transforms the way we can manage, explore, and utilize content in Fabric. Usage is contextual and it has unified all Fabric item types (including Power BI items) and expanded support to all Fabric item types, integrating experiences, and providing detailed views of data subitems. It is a great tool.

Why use OneLake Catalog?

This tool will make your work within Fabric easier, and it will reduce duplication of items due to improved discoverability, and it will enhance our ability to govern data objects within the platform. So, check out the resources below to learn more.

Here is a link to a detailed Microsoft blog post introducing the OneLake Catalog:

Introducing the new OneLake catalog: Your central hub for data discovery, management, and governance | Microsoft Fabric Blog | Microsoft Fabric

And here is a link to a Microsoft Learn OneLake Catalog overview:

OneLake catalog overview – Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn

And finally, this is a link to a great, short (less than 5 min) video that gives an overview of the OneLake Catalog:

Microsoft OneLake catalog

Thanks for reading! Good luck on your data journey!

BI Administration, Business Intelligence, Business Intelligence (BI) Development, Power BI September 10, 2024August 16, 2025

Why can’t I download my report from Power BI Service to a pbix file?

You might be attempting to download a report from the Power BI Service to a pbix file and do not see that option or that option is not active or selectable. The reason you cannot select the option is most likely because the report was created in the Power BI Service as opposed to using the Power BI Desktop.

When a report is created in the Power BI Service, you are not able to download that report to a Power BI pbix file. That option is only available when you create the report using the Power BI Desktop and then publish it to the Power BI Service.

Thanks for reading!

BI Administration, Business Intelligence, Business Intelligence Platform, Data Governance, Data Security, Power BI August 10, 2022August 10, 2023

Power BI Workspace roles

Power BI has 4 roles. Those roles, in order of increasing access/capabilities, are Viewer, Contributor, Member, and Admin. Before granting roles to users in your environment, it’s best to have a solid understanding of what each role has access to and is capable of doing.

The table below provides a list of capabilities of each role. As you will see, each roles “absorbs” or “inherits” the capabilities of all the roles below it in the hierarchy – for example, the Contributor can do everything the Viewer can do plus more, and the Member can do everything the Contributor can do plus more.

The Power BI Workspace roles

Viewer	Contributor	Member	Admin
View dashboards, reports, and workbooks in the workspace	Everything that the Viewer can do	Everything that the Contributor can do	Everything that the Member can do
Read data from dataflows in the workspace	Add, edit, delete content workspaces	Add other users as members, contributors, or viewers to the workspace	Update and delete the workspace
Row-level security applies to viewers	Schedule refreshes and use the on-premises gateway within workspaces	Publish and update the workspace app	Add and remove other users of any role from the workspace
	Feature dashboards and reports from workspaces	Share and allow others to reshape items from the workspace
	Have access to the lineage view	Feature the workspace app
	Have full access to all datasets within a workspace

A few things to keep in mind regarding roles:

Only the Member and Admin roles can perform access related tasks and publish apps.

Both Member and Admin roles can update workspaces, but only the Admin role can delete.

By default, the Contributor role cannot update apps, but there is a workspace setting that allows Contributors to update apps.

Both the Member and Admin roles can add users, but only the Admin role can add other Admins.

A Power BI Pro license is needed to be able to fully utilize the Admin role.

This article was intended to be an easy read; more detailed information regarding Power BI roles can be found here on the Microsoft site.

Thanks for reading!

BI Administration, Business Intelligence Platform, Reporting September 16, 2020September 16, 2020

External Embedded Content in OBIEE or OAS dashboard pages does not display in most web browsers

There is an “issue” or “security feature” (depending on how you look at it) that exists in OBIEE 12c (Oracle Business Intelligence) and in OAS (Oracle Analytics Server). The OBIEE or OAS dashboard pages do not display external embedded content in most browsers.

We use multiple BI platforms, but wanted to avoid sending users to one platform for some reporting and to another for other reporting. This can be confusing to users. To provide a good user experience by directing users to one place for all dashboards and self-service reporting, we have embedded most of the QlikView and Qlik Sense dashboards into OBI pages. With that, the users can be provided with one consistent training and have one place to go.

However, the Qlik embedded content only shows when using the IE (Internet Explorer) browser and the others give some “error” message.

The Chrome browser gives this error message:
“Request to the server have been blocked by an extension.”

And the Edge browser gives this message:
“This content is blocked. Contact the site owner to fix the issue.”

Or you may get other messages, such as (from Oracle Doc ID: 2273854.1):

Internet Explorer
This content cannot be displayed in a frame
To help protect the security of information you enter into this website, the publisher of this content does not allow it to be displayed in a frame.
Firefox
No message is displayed on the page, but if you open the browser console (Ctrl+Shift+I) you see this message in it:
Content Security Policy: The page’s settings blocked the loading of a resource at http://<server>/ (“default-src http://<server>:<port>”).
Chrome
No message is displayed on the page, but if you open the browser console (Ctrl+Shift+I) you see this message in it:
Refused to frame ‘http://<server>/’ because it violates the following Content Security Policy directive: “default-src ‘self'”. Note that ‘frame-src’ was not explicitly set, so ‘default-src’ is used as a fallback

This situation, although not ideal, has been fine since our company’s browser standard is IE and we provided a work-around for users that use other browsers to access the embedded content. But this will change soon since IE is going away.

There are 2 solutions to address the embedded content issue.

Run Edge browser in IE mode for the BI applications sites/URLs.
1. This would have been a good option for us, but it causes issues with the way we have SSO configured for a group of applications.
Perform some configuration changes as outline below from Oracle Doc ID: 2273854.1.
1. We ended up going forward with this solution and our team got it to work after some configurations trial and error.

(from Oracle Doc ID: 2273854.1):

For security reasons, you can no longer embed content from external domains in dashboards. To embed external content in dashboards, you must edit the instanceconfig.xml file.

To allow the external content:

Make a backup copy of <DOMAIN_HOME>/config/fmwconfig/biconfig/OBIPS/instanceconfig.xml
Edit the <DOMAIN_HOME>/config/fmwconfig/biconfig/OBIPS/instanceconfig.xml file and add the ContentSecurityPolicy element inside the Security element:

<ServerInstance>
…
<Security>
…
<InIFrameRenderingMode>allow</InIFrameRenderingMode>
<ContentSecurityPolicy>
    <PolicyDirectives>
      <Directive>
        <Name>child-src</Name>
        <Value>’self’ http://www.xxx.com http://www.yyy.com</Value>
      </Directive>
      <Directive>
        <Name>img-src</Name>
        <Value>’self’ http://www.xxx.com http://www.yyy.com</Value>
      </Directive>
    </PolicyDirectives>
</ContentSecurityPolicy>
…
</Security>
…
</ServerInstance>

Restart the presentation server component (obips1)

Engage the teams responsible for enterprise browser settings or other appropriate teams at your company as necessary.

BI Administration, Business Intelligence Platform September 15, 2020September 14, 2020

NULL values in prompts after upgrade from OBIEE to OAS

After upgrading from OBIEE to OAS (Oracle Business Intelligence to Oracle Analytics Server), the prompts started showing NULL values in the drop downs. This was not happening in OBI because we had the <ShowNullValueWhenColumnIsNullable> config parameter set to “never” for prompts.

This setting looked something like this in OBIEE (note the first line after the <Prompts> tag):

<ServerInstance>
…

<Prompts>
<ShowNullValueWhenColumnIsNullable>never</ShowNullValueWhenColumnIsNullable>
<MaxDropDownValues>256</MaxDropDownValues>
<ResultRowLimit>65000</ResultRowLimit>
<AutoApplyDashboardPromptValues>true</AutoApplyDashboardPromptValues>
<AutoSearchPromptDialogBox>true</AutoSearchPromptDialogBox>
…

</Prompts>
…
</ServerInstance>

In OAS, this parameter needs to be set in the new analytics/systemsettings page. Go to that page and set the option. Then restart by clicking on the Restart button on that page. After a restart, it resolved the issue for us.

We had a similar resolution to an issue we had with “not able to save analyses that contained HTML markup“.

Analytics, BI Administration, Business Intelligence, Business Intelligence Platform September 14, 2020September 14, 2020

Unable to save analysis with HTML markup in OAS after upgrade from OBIEE

We recently upgraded from OBIEE 12 to OAS 5.5. (Oracle Business Intelligence to Oracle Analytics Server). After the upgrade, we were not able to save analyses that contained HTML markup. We were able to do this before the upgrade.

Turns out, the configuration parameter for this now needs to be set in the new analytics/systemsettings page. Go to that page and enable the option “Allow HTML Content”. Then restart by clicking on the Restart button on that page.

After a restart, it resolved the issue for us.

If this doesn’t resolve it for you, you may need to remove the parameter from the instance config file and try again.

Back up your instanceconfig.xml file. Then edit it by removing the element “EnableSavingContentWithHTML” from the Security section and save the file. You will be removing a line that looks something like this:

“<EnableSavingContentWithHTML>true</EnableSavingContentWithHTML>”

Then go back to the analytics/systemsettings page, confirm “Allow HTML Content” is enabled, and restart again. This hopefully should resolve your issue.

BI Administration, Business Intelligence, Reporting February 1, 2020February 1, 2020

OBIEE Agent sending emails to the wrong recipients

We recently ran into an issue where we had an OBI Agent setup to send personalized reports via email to each recipient but some recipients (about 2%) were receiving the wrong email.

A search of Oracle Support produced Document ID # 2119485.1 as a possible solution.

“OBIEE 11g|12c: Agents Send Emails To Incorrect Recipients When Master Trigger Agent Is Present (Doc ID 2119485.1)”

This document recommended applying patch #s 22821787 and 25545058.

However, we are on OBIEE 12c (12.2.1.2.0) and one of the patches seemed to be for 11g only.

Patch # 25545058 seemed to be for 11g only.
Patch # 22821787 was for both 11g and 12c versions.

We applied patch # 22821787, but unfortunately, the issue persisted.

After looking around some more, we realized there was another patch but for the 12.2.1.2.180116 release (found in Document ID # 2395331.1). It didn’t match our version, but we decided to explore it anyway.

“OBIEE 12c : Agent Sending The Incorrect Result (Doc ID 2395331.1)”

That was patch # 27072632 but it turns out that patch was superseded by patch # 27916905.

Our admin team tried to apply patch # 27916905, but it had a conflict with the initial patch # 22821787.

We then backed out patch # 22821787 and applied the bundle patch 27916905.

The patch # 27916905 seems to have resolved the “email going to wrong recipients” issue. Since we applied it, no user has reported they received the wrong email. However, we are not yet 100% sure.

However, we are noticing that some images are not displaying properly which may have been caused by the patch. We are looking into that issue now.

I went through the detailed description of how the patches were found to let you realize that on the Oracle Support site, you may need to do a very thorough search to find any and all patches related to an issue before applying any. The documentation does not necessarily tie them together or they won’t necessarily come up in when you search on the keywords. Note: Before any of the above changes were made, backups were taken so that we could revert to any stage that we wanted to.

BI Administration, Business Intelligence Platform, Database Administration, Databases October 26, 2019

BI Application getting ORA-00257 Error

One day this week, we got the following error showing up on our BI dashboards.
“ORA-00257: Archiver error. Connect AS SYSDBA only until resolved.”
This is an Oracle database error (which you may guess based on the “ORA”), and not an error directly from BI application.

If you get this error, it means that the database redo logs are filled up, and cannot be archived due to lack of space on the designated archive area or some other issue. In our case, the “some other issue” was caused by some issues with “commvault”, a software application used for data backup and recovery, among other things.

When this happens, if a user tries to connect to the database, such as the BI Application user in our case, the database will not allow the new connection. The only exception is SYSDBA users will be allowed to connect.

If you are not the database administrator (DBA), you will most likely work with your DBA (as we do) to get this error resolved.
After the issue that caused the problem is resolved and the redo logs are cleared, then the database, and therefore the BI application, will allow new connections as normal.

Thanks for reading and I hope you found this helpful.

BI Administration, Business Intelligence (BI) Development, Business Intelligence Platform, Data Development September 7, 2014October 10, 2019

“The connection has failed” Error when trying to Import Metadata into OBIEE

If you get the error “The connection has failed” when you try to Import Metadata into the RPD, this post may help you to resolve it.

The solution is to: Create an Environment Variable called TNS_ADMIN and set its value to the directory of your tnsnames.ora file.
The TNS_ADMIN variable tells Oracle Client where to find the tnsnames.ora file which contains your data source details.

In case you need the details:
Click the Windows Start menu –> Right-Click on Computer –> select Properties
Then click on “Advanced system settings” on the left.

Click the “Environment Variables” button.
Then in the Environment Variables window, click New.
Enter the details for the TNS_ADMIN variable. The value needs to be the path to your tnsnames.ora file, typically located at [ORACLE_HOME]networkadmin. The path will look something like the value shown below (it depends on where Oracle is installed on your system).

Hope this helps.

BI Administration, Business Intelligence Platform March 29, 2014October 10, 2019

WebLogic startup failure – BackendRoot cannot cast to BackendStandard

My colleague from a previous company contacted me recently to help with a problem. OBIEE was not starting up. They had a power failure the night before, and then OBIEE would not start up. The system is OBIEE 11g on Linux.

This is the error that was generated when trying to start the WebLogic Admin Server…

——-

——–

After trying a few things that did not resolve the issue, an online search helped with the solution. This post was very helpful: https://community.oracle.com/thread/2285489?tstart=0

After reading through the post, we went to the below directory on the OBIEE server (Linux) and examined its contents:

$MIDDLEWARE_HOME/user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain/servers/AdminServer/data/ldap/ldapfiles

[oracle@[SERVERNAME]]$ cd /u01/product/middleware/user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain/servers/AdminServer/data/ldap/ldapfiles [oracle@aeledwpbi ldapfiles]$ ls -l total 11308

-rw-r—– 1 oracle oinstall 10071624 Mar 27 08:40 changelog.data
-rw-r—– 1 oracle oinstall 56940 Mar 27 08:40 changelog.index
-rw-r—– 1 oracle oinstall 804359 Mar 27 08:40 EmbeddedLDAP.data
-rw-r—– 1 oracle oinstall 2028 Jun 25 2013 EmbeddedLDAP.delete
-rw-r—– 1 oracle oinstall 3576 Jun 25 2013 EmbeddedLDAP.index
-rw-r—– 1 oracle oinstall 0 Mar 28 12:36 EmbeddedLDAP.lok
-rw-r—– 1 root root 615242 Mar 27 08:40 EmbeddedLDAP.tran
-rw-r—– 1 oracle oinstall 8 Mar 27 08:40 EmbeddedLDAP.trpos
-rw-r—– 1 oracle oinstall 8 Mar 27 08:40 EmbeddedLDAP.twpos

Note how one of the files (EmbeddedLDAP.tran) is owned by “root”. It seems the power outage caused something unusual to happen resulting in “root” being assigned ownership of the file.

After having the system administrator change the owner from “root” to “oracle” (the OBIEE admin user), we were able to start the OBIEE system back up.

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