Oracle Business Intelligence Applications (OBIA) 11.1.1.10.2 Installation on Oracle Linux 7.2 - Inst

This is the sixth in a series of posts regarding installing BI Apps 11.1.1.10.2 on Oracle Linux 7.2. For your reference, here is a list of URLs for each of the posts that make up this series::

In this post, I will be discussing how to install the OBIEE 11.1.1.9 RCU silently. The RCU creates schemas in a database for use by OBIEE. In a later blog post, we will be installing the OBIA 11.1.1.10.2 which creates additional schemas for use by other OBIA components in addition to OBIEE.

General Assumptions and Conventions Used

I will assume that readers of this blog have read the prior blog entries in this series before continuing. In addition, this is the first blog entry in the series that will make use of a fully-functional Oracle Enterprise Edition Database version (which must be 11.2.0.3 or higher, or 12.1.0.1 or higher according to the SRSP) which has been configured for the unicode (AL32UTF8) character set. This blog will assume that all of this has already been setup.

Furthermore, this blog entry will assume that the SYS database account is what is used to connect to the database. If the SYS database account cannot be provided to you due to the security policies of your organization, you will at least require a database account that has been granted the SYSDBA role in addition to being granted execute privileges on sys.dbms_lock. Please check out this link to the Fusion Middleware documentation which describes all of this in detail.

Please note that the specific version of the Oracle database that I used for this installation was version 12c - 12.1.0.2. Furthermore, I patched the database up to 12.1.0.2.160719 which was the latest version available to me at the time I created the material for this blog. Here are some additional details about the database I have setup:

Database Server Specifications: 4 CPUs, 8 GB RAM
Hard Disk space available to DB: 500 GB
Server IP Address: 192.168.1.6
Service Name: obaw
Port: 1521
SYS Account Password: admin4$DB

Furthermore, the RCU will ask us for a "prefix" which will be prepended to the names of the schemas that will be created. By default, this is set to "DEV", however for the purpose of this blog I will set this prefix to FMW (for Fusion Middleware).

Lastly, as indicated in a previous blog entry, I will assume that the OBIEE RCU archive V75907-01.zip has been downloaded from eDelivery and has been placed in /u01/sw/rcu.

Installation

The RCU will connect to a database and create database schemas using the SYS account (or account with the SYSDBA role as mentioned above). The two schemas it will create are the MDS and BIPLATFORM schemas. As just mentioned, the prefix that we will be using will be FMW, meaning that the actual names of the schemas that will be created are:

FMW_MDS

FMW_BIPLATFORM

A quick note on other operating systems

Before we get started, I just wanted to point out that while this blog will install the RCU from the Oracle Linux machine that has been setup for us, this is not at all a requirement. The RCU can be installed from any machine provided the target database is the one that will be used by your installation. This point is most useful for those of you installing from operating systems such as Solaris or AIX which cannot be used to launch the RCU. In those cases, I would recommend setting up a "Windows Client Machine" and using that machine to install the RCU.

Since the operating system we are using is Oracle Linux 7.2, and this is supported to install the RCU, this blog will use this machine for that purpose (as opposed to my own Windows desktop or some other machine).

Creating a password file

In order to install the RCU silently, we will need to create a password file. This password file is a text file that contains the passwords for the SYS account (or account with the SYSDBA role) and a password that will be used for the schemas that will be created. I recommend using the same password for both schemas, as a result this password file will contain 2 lines:

Line 1: SYSDBA Account Password

Line 2: MDS, BIPLATFORM Schema Password

If I wanted to specify different passwords for the MDS and BIPLATFORM schemas, I could do so by simply adding another line.

The password file I used is called rcuPasswordFileOBIEE.txt and I have posted it to my Github Account. Please feel free to download it and place it in the /u01/sw/scripts directory on the server. The remainder of this blog will assume that this has been done.

Create new directories

I like to create two new directories at this point: one to store the logs for the RCU, and the target directory for the unzipped RCU. The logs will be stored in a subdirectory underneath the logs directory that we have already setup ($ORACLE_BASE/logs/rcu), and the target directory will be underneath the middleware home that we created in the last blog entry ($MW_HOME/rcu).

To create these directories, please issue the following commands from the terminal:

$ mkdir $ORACLE_BASE/logs/rcu

$ chmod 770 $ORACLE_BASE/logs/rcu

$ mkdir $MW_HOME/rcu

$ chmod 770 $MW_HOME/rcu

Unzip the RCU archive

Now that the directory structure has been created, we'll unzip the RCU archive, and then clean things up a bit to make them more manageable going forward.

Firstly, we'll unzip the archive using the following commands:

$ cd /u01/sw/rcu

$ unzip -q V75907-1.zip -d $MW_HOME/rcu

This will create a subdirectory uder $MW_HOME/rcu called rcuHome. We'll rename this subdirectory to biee. This is simply to organize things so that when we perform a similar set of actions in the future for the OBIA RCU, we will establish a separate subdirectory for that. That way, all of the RCU software will be in one place.

To rename this directory, simply issue the following command:

$ mv $MW_HOME/rcu/rcuHome $MW_HOME/rcu/biee

Execute the RCU in silent mode

Before executing the RCU, you need to determine the connection string for your Oracle database. This string will need to be put in the following format:

'<database hostname or IP address>:<port number>:<service name>'

As a result, the connection string for my database is as follows:

'192.168.186.6:1521:obaw'

This connection string is passed as part of the connectString parameter to the RCU command. Another parameter that may require changing is the dbUser parameter which contains the name of the user that the RCU will be connecting to the database as in order to create these new schemas. As I've already stated, I am using the SYS user. A third parameter that may require changing is the schemaPrefix parameter depending on what prefix you want to give to the MDS and BIPLATFORM schemas. Again like I've already stated, I will be using the FMW prefix.

In order to execute the RCU in silent mode, issue the following commands:

$ cd $MW_HOME/rcu/biee

$ umask 027

$ ./rcu -silent -createRepository -databaseType ORACLE -connectString '192.168.186.6:1521:obaw' -dbUser SYS -dbRole SYSDBA -variables RCU_LOG_LOCATION=$ORACLE_BASE/logs/rcu,RCU_LOG_NAME=rcu_biee.log -schemaPrefix FMW -component MDS -component BIPLATFORM -f < /u01/sw/scripts/rcuPasswordFileOBIEE.txt

This process will take several moments to complete. When done, the output to the terminal should resemble the following:

The last line should read: Repository Creation Utility - Create : Operating Completed. If it does, then the RCU has successfully created the MDS and BIPLATFORM schemas.

Summary

In this blog entry, we installed the OBIEE RCU from the command line. In order to do so, we created a password file along with several directories to house the logs from the RCU along with the target directory for the RCU utility itself.

Looking ahead

In my next blog entry, I will show how to install OBIEE in software-only mode from the command line.