Migrate Enterprise Manager Application Roles and Weblogic Users and Groups between environments

http://adventuresinobiee.blogspot.com/2013/02/migrate-enterprise-manager-application.html

Managing users across environments, when using the built-in Weblogic LDAP was a tedious process. What I have found to work well is create the users once, and then have a script which caries them across to the rest of the environments. This has been very useful in our Development and Test environments when getting the users seeded.

The Enterprise Manager (EM) migration script utilizes a very cool java program that ArtofBI developed and posted to Github. I've tweaked the code a bit for my needs, so attached to this post also includes the modified javasource and complied JAR.

Continue after the break for links to the files, and example scripts for both Enterprise Manager and Weblogic.

OBIEE ACL refresh

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/bi.1111/e10541/prescatadmin.htm

17.1.3.1 Handling Users of the Catalog

The catalog is designed to scale to thousands of concurrent users. To achieve this scaling, the catalog adheres to the following guidelines:

• The average user typically only reads from the catalog and rarely, if ever, writes to it. In Release 11g, each user is constantly and automatically updating his or her Most Recently Used file, but each user's "read" operations still far outweigh the user's "writes" operations. Therefore, the read-to-write ratio is typically at least 100 to 1.
• While a locking mechanism guarantees that only one user can write to an object at a time, it is rare for multiple users to attempt to write simultaneously to the same object. A feature called "lazy locking" allows users to continue reading an object even when another user is updating that object.
• Modern file systems cache "small" files directly inside the directory record, such that reading any information on a directory simultaneously loads all small files directly into the operating system's memory cache. Therefore, it is good practice to keep files in the catalog "small," especially the frequently "read" .atr metadata files. When these metadata files remain small, then all the .atr files in a directory are loaded into memory with one physical hard disk read. Every file that exceeds the "small" threshold adds another physical hard disk read, which can cause a 100% degradation for each large file. In other words, use care when considering storing arbitrary "Properties" in .atr files.
• Reading an object's .atr metadata file using NFS is far slower than reading it directly from a local disk. For this reason, Presentation Services additionally caches all .atr files internally. This cache can become briefly "stale" when another node in the cluster writes data to the file that is newer than the data that is cached by the current node. Therefore, all nodes are refreshed according to the MaxAgeMinutes element in the instanceconfig.xml, whose default for a cluster is 5 minutes. This default setting commonly achieves the best trade-off between the possibility of stale data and the known performance impact. (The default for an environment without clusters is 60 minutes.)
  
  You can modify the MaxAgeMinutes element for your system. Its parent elements are Cache and CatalogAttributes. Before you modify the element, ensure that you are familiar with the information in Section 3.4, "Using a Text Editor to Update Configuration Settings."

Linux screen - quick guide

http://magazine.redhat.com/2007/09/27/a-guide-to-gnu-screen/

A guide to GNU Screen

by The editorial team

written by Steve ‘Ashcrow’ Milner and Anderson Silva

The same way tabbed browsing revolutionized the web experience, GNU Screen can do the same for your experience in the command line. GNU Screen allows you to manage several interactive shell instances within the same “window.” By using different keyboard shortcuts, you are able to shuffle through the shell instances, access any of them directly, create new ones, kill old ones, attach and detach existing ones.

Instead of opening up several terminal instances on your desktop or using those ugly GNOME/KDE-based tabs, Screen can do it better and simpler.

Not only that, with GNU Screen, you can share sessions with others and detach/attach terminal sessions. It is a great tool for people who have to share working environments between work and home.

By adding a status bar to your screen environment, you are able to name your shell instances on the fly or via a configuration file called .screenrc that can be created on the user’s home directory.

Postgresql Debian APT install

http://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1432/

PGDG apt repository for Debian/Ubuntu

Posted on 2012-12-06

We are pleased to announce the availability of the PostgreSQL Global Development Group apt repository of PostgreSQL packages for Debian and Ubuntu.

The repository itself is located at http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt/, with instructions in the PostgreSQL wiki at https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Apt. The FAQ list is athttps://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Apt/FAQ.

The repository already includes the latest PostgreSQL versions released today.

People using the old "pgapt.debian.net" location of this repository should update their sources.list entries.

Recording the session

Recording the session

It is strongly recommended that you use the /usr/bin/script program to record a transcript of the upgrade session. Then if a problem occurs, you will have a log of what happened, and if needed, can provide exact information in a bug report. To start the recording, type:

# script -t 2>~/upgrade-wheezystep.time -a ~/upgrade-wheezystep.script

or similar. If you have to rerun the typescript (e.g. if you have to reboot the system) use different step values to indicate which step of the upgrade you are logging. Do not put the typescript file in a temporary directory such as /tmp or /var/tmp (files in those directories may be deleted during the upgrade or during any restart).

Escape chars

• When you have to send a control sequence/character to programs like Ctrl-C or Esc and you don't have an editor that allows you to put them directly in your script you can send the octal equivalent. Tcl provides a way of encoding using octal or hex. For example to send the Esc character you would use send "\033". To find the octal number for any key use the program od. Start it with "od -c". Press the function key you want to know about. Then hit return. Lastly, press Ctrl-D. The string between the 0000000 and \n is what you want. You could also try it this way: Type "echo " on the command line. Then Ctrl-V, then the key you want to see (lets say Ctrl-C). Then it will print ^C. After that put "|od -cb". This will print out the octal code between 0000000 and \n like before. Ctrl-C is octal 003.

Postgresql ROWNUM

http://explainextended.com/2009/05/05/postgresql-row-numbers/

select max(e.jednostka) as jednostka,
--       e.id_klienta,
       e.modulo, 
       e.konto,
       max(case e.rownum when 1 then e.wlasc end)        as wlasc_id,
       max(case e.rownum when 1 then e.typ_formatki end) as wlasc_f,
       max(case e.rownum when 1 then e.nazwa end)        as wlasc_nazwa,