BIWA Exalytics Test Drive Instructions

BIWA Exalytics test drive instructionsLab 1

You will be connecting using Remote Desktop (RDP) to a Windows server, from which you can access your Exalytics server.

1. Using Remote Desktop, connect to the Windows machine. a. If you are connecting from a Windows laptop, go to the Start Menu -> Run -> Cmd

and enter mstsc and press enter. Then enter the IP you have been given. b. On a Mac laptop use Remote Desktop Connection, or Cord to connect

2. When prompted for credentials to connect to the Windows machine, enter username Training and password Password01

Ignore any certificate warnings you may get when connecting to the machine such as the one shown to the right

BIWA Exalytics test drive instructions

RittmanMead 2014! Page 1 of 15

On the Windows machine is the Firefox web browser. You will use this to connect to your Exalytics server.

3. From the bar at the bottom of the screen, click on the Firefox icon.

4. Firefox will launch straight to the Exalytics OBIEE login page. Login as weblogic with password Password01



At the moment the Exalytics server has not got any TimesTen aggregates created, so we would expect performance to be fairly slow. To explore this you will now create a simple analysis

5. From the header bar, click on New -> Analysis, and select the Sales - Fact Sales subject area

6. Expand the presentation folders in the Subject Areas pane, and add the following columns to the report by double-clicking on them: a. Dim Times - Year YYYYb. Dim Products - Product Categoryc. Fact Sales - Sale Amount



7. Your analysis criteria should look like this:

8. Now click on Results to run the query against the source database.

Approximately how long it takes before you see the data?

9. Save the analysis in My Folders as Query01

-- End of lab 1 --



Lab 2

In this lab you will see the Summary Advisor tool in action, build the aggregates in TimesTen, and observe the dramatic improvement in query time that TimesTen aggregates support.

1. Reconnect to your Windows machine using RDP, following the step 1-2 in Lab 1 if necessary.

The Summary Advisor tool is a utility run as part of the BI Administration tool. You will now run this and connect to the Exalytics server through it.

2. From the Windows Start Menu, run the BI Administration tool:



3. Use the blue folder icon on the toolbar (or, File -> Open -> Online) to open the RPD online dialog:

4. Enter login details as follows, and then click OpenRepository Password: Password01User: weblogicPassword: Password01

5. Once the RPD opens, click on the Tools menu and select Utilities



6. From the Utilities dialog box that opens, select Oracle BI Summary Advisor and click on Execute...

7. The first screen of the wizard enables you to refine the Fact tables for which you want to search for aggregates. Leave the default options selected and click Next

8. The second screen allows you to restrict the date range of user activity data against which you want to build aggregate recommendations. Again, leave the defaults as they



are and click Next.

9. Where a lot of Logical Table Sources (LTS) exist, you may want to restrict which ones are evaluated for aggregate improvements. The third screen gives you the option to deselect specific LTS if you want to. Leave the options as they are and click Next



10.The Summary Advisor needs to know where to build the aggregates that it is going to suggest. This is done in the Targets screen. Select the options from the dropdown lists as follows: Database Schema: Timesten..EXALYTICSConnection Pool: TimesTen.Connection PoolCapacity (MB): 256and then click Add Target so your screen looks like this:

and then Next



11.The Summary Advisor writes a script with the aggregates that it finds. Select a path in which to save it : C:\Users\Training\Documents\ag.sql

12.The Summary Advisor can be configured to run for a predetermined amount of time, or until it finds aggregates that give a specified level of performance improvement. Leave the options as default and click Next.



13.For rerunning the Summary Advisor the parameters you have specified can be saved to a file. In this example, leave the option unset and click Next.

14.You should now be at the Run screen of the Summary Advisor. Click Run and wait for the Summary Advisor to calculate the optimal aggregate to build.



15.The Summary Advisor will return aggregates matching the query that you built in the first lab:

Click Next

16.The final step of the Summary Advisor is to manually deselect any proposed aggregates that you do not wish to be included in the final script



Click Next to see the finished version of the script:

Click Finish to close the Summary Advisor

In actual use of Exalytics, you would then take this script and execute it with the nqcmd utility. For the purposes of convenience in this exercise a prebuilt script has been provided for you.

17.Close the BI Administration tool (File -> Exit)18.On the Windows Desktop are two batch files. Doubleclick on the one labelled

build_aggs.bat

The script may take a few minutes to run. Once completed you will see the message Aggregate script



completed

19.Go back to OBIEE and rerun the query you built before and saved in My Folders as Query01. You should find that the response time is now subsecond, because the data is coming from the TimesTen aggregate that you just built.

NB BI Server caching is disabled, meaning that the response time you are seeing is from an actual database fetch.

To see again the difference that the TimesTen aggregate makes, you will now delete it so that the query will then run again against its original (slow) source.



20.From the Windows Desktop run the batch file delete_aggs.bat

The script will take a few minutes to run. When it has finished you will see the message Aggregates deleted.

21.Rerun the analysis Query01 in OBIEE and observe what impact removing the TimesTen aggregate has had on the response time.

You may find that the response time is not quite as slow as the first time you ran it. That is because the data will probably now be cached in the source database.

-- End of lab 2 --



BIWA Exalytics Test Drive Instructions

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