Tag: Oracle Database

Business Intelligence Platform, Data Integration, Database Administration, Performance Tuning November 13, 2019

BI Application getting ORA-02391 error

Last week we rolled out a new dashboard that uses a new data source.
In one of our BI environments, the application was throwing an error:
“ORA-02391: exceeded simultaneous SESSIONS_PER_USER limit at OCI call OCISessionBegin“

This is an Oracle Database error, and not an error directly from the BI Application.

For the “ORA-02391: exceeded simultaneous SESSIONS_PER_USER limit” error …
The Cause is: An attempt was made to exceed the maximum number of concurrent sessions allowed by the SESSIONS_PER_USER clause of the user profile.
And the Action for resolution is: End one or more concurrent sessions or ask the database administrator to increase the SESSIONS_PER_USER limit of the user profile.

Turns out the SESSIONS_PER_USER parameter was set too low; it was set to 3 for the user being used to access the database from the BI application. This error could have also been observed from an ETL tool accessing the database with an ID with the same parameter setting.

One of the DBAs bumped this parameter up to 30 for the user, and that resolved the issue.
We requested for this change to be done on the BI application databases in all the environments – Development, Test, QA, and Production.

Although all seems to be well, we will now monitor to see how many sessions the application is using and if there is any negative impact on the source application. This will allow us to determine if we need to make any other adjustments.

Thanks for reading. I hope you found this information useful.

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 Platform July 11, 2012October 11, 2019

Installing OBIEE 11g on Windows XP

I recently installed OBIEE 11g on a Windows XP box. I followed instructions I found on the deliverbi.blogspot.com Blog site … thank you Shahed Munir.

I would like to add some details to 2 of the steps, in case it helps clarify those steps for others:

– The detailed instructions I got from Shahed’s blog can be found here …

http://deliverbi.blogspot.com/2010/11/obiee-11g-windows-xp-installation.html

– And the details I would like to add are below …

1. Step 4 (Install Oracle Database 11g).

Download your Oracle database software to, and run from, a directory without spaces.

If you get an error such as …

“Windows cannot find ‘C:Documents’. Make sure you typed the name correctly, and then try again. ….”

then you have downloaded and are trying to run the RCU from a directory under ‘C:Documents and Settings…’ (for example)

As mentioned above, download to and install from a directory such as ‘C:Oracle_rcu…’ (no spaces)

2. In Step 7 (Create RCU Repository), it does not specify how to run the RCU. Go to the [Extract Directory]rcuHomeBin and run rcu.bat from there -or- run it from a command prompt …

for example … C:[Extract Directory]rcuHomeBin> rcu.bat

3. If you get an error in Step 7, verify that the following services have been started and try again: