Need help -To Restrict Huge temp file, which grows around 3 GB in OBIEE 11g

Question

Hi Team,
I am working on OBIEE 11.1.1.5 version for a client specific BI application. we have an issue concerning massive space consumption in OBIEE 11g installed linux environment whenever trying to run some detail level drill down reports. While investigating, we found that whenever a user runs the drill down report a temp file named nQS_xxxx_x_xxxxxx.TMP is created and keep's growing in size under the below given folder structure,
*<OBIEE_HOME>/instances/instance1/tmp/OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent/coreapplication_obips1/obis_temp/*
The size of this temp file grows huge as much as around 3 GB and gets erased automatically when the drill down report output is displayed in UI. Hence when multiple users simultaneously try to access these sort of drill down reports the environment runs out of space.
Regarding the drill down reports:
* The drill down report has around 55 columns which is configured to display only 25 rows in the screen and allows the user to download the whole data as Excel output.
* The complete rows being fetched in query ranges from 1000 to even above 100k rows. Based on the rows fetched, the temp file size keeps growing. ie., If the rows being fetched from the query is around 4000 a temp file of around 60 MB is created and gets erased when the report output is generated in screen (Similarly, for around 100k rows, the temp file size grows up to 3 GB before it gets deleted automatically).
* The report output has only one table view along side Title & Filters view. (No Pivot table view, is being used to generate this report.)
* The cache settings for BI Server & BI Presentation services cache are not configured or not enabled.
My doubts or Questions:
* Is there any way to control or configure this temp file generation in OBIEE 11g?
* Why the growing temp file automatically gets deleted immediately after the report output generation in screen. Is there any default server specific settings governing this behaviour?
* As per certain OBIEE article reference for OBIEE 10g, I learnt that for large pivot table based reports the temp file generation is quite normal because of huge in-memory calculations involved . However we have used only Table view in output but still creates huge temp files. Is this behaviour normal in OBIEE 11g. If not, Can any one Please suggest of any specific settings to be considered to avoid generating these huge files or atleast generate a compressed temp file.
* Any other work around solution available for generating a report of this type without the generation of temp files in the environment?
Any help/suggestions/pointers or document reference on this regard will be much appreciated. Please advice
Thanks & Regards,
Guhan
Edited by: 814788 on 11-Aug-2011 13:02

Answer 1

Hello Guhan,
The temp files are used to prepare the final result set for OBI presentation server processing, so as long as long you dataset is big the tmp files will be also big and you can only avoid this by reducing your dataset by for example filtering your report.
You can also control the size of your temp files by reducing the usage of the BI server.I mean by this if you are using any functions like for example sorting that can be handled by your database so just push to the DB.
Once the report finished the BI server removes automatically the tmp files because it's not necessary anymore.you can see it as a file that is used for internal calculations once it's done the server gets rid of it.
Hope this helps
Adil