New OBI/BI Apps installation for PS 9.1 Financials. 7.9.6.3 or 7.9.6.4?

Question

Hi Folks,
We're starting a green field implementation of OBIEE 11g with BI Apps. We want to integrate with PeopleSoft 9.1 Financials. I see 7.9.6.4 was release recently, and now we're undecided on whether to go with 7.9.6.3 or 7.9.6.4. The one piece that has me worried is the new DAC version 11.1.1 that comes with 7.9.6.4 - is this very different from DAC version that comes with 7.9.6.3 (10.1.3.4.1)? Are there any compelling reasons to go with 7.9.6.4 other than that it's the latest and greatest? I'd be curious to hear from anyone who has tested 7.9.6.4 and the experience they've had so far.
Thanks

Answer 1

MK wrote:
Thanks All. I think we are going to go with 7.9.6.4. I'll certainly post back my experiences once we get a better understanding of what's involved.Hi Folks, updating on my experience so far. Here are some issues we ran into which I hope I can help other people avoid when installing 7.9.6.4:
(1) Creating the Dataware house tables from DAC
We ran into an issue when building out the warehouse tables from the DAC. This is from the wizard which launches from DAC -> ETL Management -> Configure. The documentation says to leave the container blank, so in our case we would have the "Universal" container and the "PeopleSoft 9.1" container. Here is the documentation I refer to:
Container: (from Oracle Business Intelligence Applications Installation Guide for Informatica PowerCenter Users Release 7.9.6.4 E35271-01 p4-51)
The name of the source business applications for which you want to create
the data warehouse tables.
Note: You must leave this field blank, unless told to specify a value by
Oracle Support.
If you leave the Container field blank, DAC creates a container by default for
all of the following:
-The source business applications that you selected when you imported
the seed data into the DAC metadata repository earlier (for more
information, see Section 4.9.3, "Importing Metadata into the DAC
Repository").
-Any copies of those source system applications.
- Any additions made to those source system applications.
- Any new source system applications that you have custom built.
If there are tables that are common to these containers, then only one table
will be created.
When we follow these instructions, the operation fails with the following error:
ERROR
62 SEVERE Fri Jan 25 15:05:10 EST 2013 MESSAGE:::
Table Name : W_INTL_ASSGN_D
Column Name: CREATED_BY_WID.
The column properties that are different :[statistics]
EXCEPTION CLASS::: com.siebel.analytics.etl.sqlgen.disambiguator.TableDescriptorDisambiguatorException
Support came back to us saying this is a bug and to work-around, we can use just the PeopleSoft 9.1 container. Here is the reference:
Bug 16231709- OBIA7964:ERROR WHILE CREATING DATA WAREHOUSE TABLES USING DAC 11G
(2) The other issue we ran into was caused by problems with the batch scripts that set the environment on windows (we have 2008 R2 x64). Both the config.bat and dac_env.cmd. The specific lines are these in the respective files:
set INFORMATICA_SERVER_LOCATION="D:\INFA910" (from dac_env.cmd)
set JAVA_HOME="D:\app\JDK1.6u38x64\jre" (from config.bat)
The double quotes in the variables above were causing problems setting the environment and affected us both with the integration between DAC and INFA and also with starting the DAC server.
-The error when testing out connection to infa was:
===================
Informatica(r) PMREP, version [9.1.0 HotFix2], build [357.0902], Windows 64-bit
Copyright (c) Informatica Corporation 1994 - 2011
All Rights Reserved.
This Software is protected by U.S. Patent Numbers 5,794,246; 6,014,670; 6,016,501; 6,029,178; 6,032,158; 6,035,307; 6,044,374; 6,092,086; 6,208,990; 6,339,775; 6,640,226; 6,789,096; 6,820,077; 6,823,373; 6,850,947; 6,895,471; 7,117,215; 7,162,643; 7,254,590; 7,281,001; 7,421,458; 7,496,588; 7,523,121; 7,584,422; 7,720,842; 7,721,270; and 7,774,791, international Patents and other Patents Pending.
Invoked at Sat Jan 26 18:33:30 2013
Connected to repository Informatica_Repository in Domain_D01 as user Administrator
connect completed successfully.
Completed at Sat Jan 26 18:33:35 2013
=============
ERROR OUTPUT
=============
EXCEPTION CLASS::: com.siebel.analytics.etl.infa.interaction.PmrepConnectException
com.siebel.analytics.etl.infa.interaction.PmrepInvoker.connectIfRequired(PmrepInvoker.java:155)
com.siebel.analytics.etl.infa.interaction.PmrepInvoker.pmrep(PmrepInvoker.java:89)
com.siebel.etl.gui.data.StaticDatabaseCalls.testRepositoryServer(StaticDatabaseCalls.java:854)
com.siebel.etl.gui.data.StaticDatabaseCalls.testInformaticaServer(StaticDatabaseCalls.java:777)
com.siebel.etl.net.ExecutionPlan.getInformaticaStatus(ExecutionPlan.java:241)
com.siebel.etl.net.
-The error while starting DAC was:
Windows cannot find "\bin\javaw.exe"
For both issues, removing the double quotes resolved the problem. I.e., it should look like this (and make sure you install in a path with no spaces :) :
set INFORMATICA_SERVER_LOCATION=D:\INFA910 (from dac_env.cmd)
set JAVA_HOME=D:\app\JDK1.6u38x64\jre (from config.bat)