Archive for March, 2011

Possible Business Objects XI R2 + R3 Scheduling Issue When Clocks Change (UPDATED)

I just received the following alert from the UK Business Objects User Group (very good, you should join) and have scraped the following text from the SAP support site…

SAP Business Objects Enterprise Daylight Savings Brief

Applies To: All Business Objects Enterprise XI r2 FP6.3 and earlier, and XI 3.1 SP3+ (FP3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5 ) Environments.

Brief: Due to Daylight Savings Time changes that went into effect on March 13, 2011 in the Americas and are scheduled for March 27, 2011 in Europe there is a potential of scheduling issues and excessive failed instances to appear on Recurring Daily Schedules in Business Objects Enterprise XI r2 FP6.3 and earlier as well as XI 3.1 SP3+ environments. If you encounter any issues please refer to the SAP Knowledge bases below for workarounds and resolutions and if required please raise a Message for Processing to via the Service Marketplace.

I’ve installed the fix pack recommended here: https://websmp210.sap-ag.de/sap/support/notes/1448881 and I’ll post an update after the weekend to say whether or not it worked.

UPDATE:  The instance of Business Objects that I manage appears to have crossed the clock change boundary without any duplication of scheduled reports so either the fix pack mentioned above did the trick or the issue itself did not occur!

More Business Objects Browser Problems: Java/Tomcat in IE9 (UPDATED: WORKAROUND)

UPDATE: An excellent workaround has been posted by one of the members of the BOB Forums, please see this thread. 

Hot on the heels of my Business Objects problems with Firefox, I’ve now encountered an issue with Internet Explorer 9 (again a new release), again with the Java / Tomcat version.  Whenever I click to view or modify a report I receive the following error message…

Thankfully everything is fine in the IIS / ASPx version but nonetheless I am still advising my users not to upgrade until either Microsoft or SAP are able to provide a fix.

Business Objects Java Query Panel Issues with Firefox 4 (UPDATED: WORKAROUND)

UPDATE: Milos, a reader of bisql.net has posted a comment on this thread with a workaround:

• Enter “about:config” in the browser’s address bar. 
• Search for “html5.parser.enable”. 
• Double-click the row to set the value to “false” (row should also go bold to indicate change). 

There is a possibility that it may cause HTML5 compatibility issues down the road but it solved the issue I experienced in XI 3.1 so thanks Milos! 

Mozilla released Firefox 4 yesterday, touting speed improvements as one of the key features so I installed it to see if it would make a good client for Business Objects.  Unfortunately it seems that there is a bug whereby Firefox fails to recognise that Java is correctly installed and so whenever I go to modify a report using the Java Query Panel I see the following screen…

… and when I click on the “Install Missing Plugins” button I end up with the following message stating “No suitable plugins were found.”…

I tried re-installing both 32-bit and 64-bit Java runtime packages and it made no difference whatsoever, I then reinstalled Firefox 4 with still no change.  For now I’ve gone back to Firefox 3.6 and it works like a charm so until I see an updated version or a decent workaround I am advising my users not to upgrade.

Register for the SAP Business Objects XI Release 4 Launch

UPDATE: since the event has now passed you can also read my SAP BI 4.0 Launch rundown and my What’s New in Business Objects XI Release 4.0 posts, of course – don’t let that put you off reading the remainder of the article below…

I just wanted to give people a head’s up – SAP are running a “Launch Event” for the upcoming 4.0 releases of their BI and EIM tools in London on the 7th of April, I’m assuming that this is going to be the release of the XI 4.0 product though there could be a change in branding to remove the ‘XI’ portion and fall more in line with SAP’s naming conventions.  I’ve not seen much in the way of expected features so it’ll be an interesting event I expect, most of the speakers are unfamiliar to me although I’ve seen Richard Neale speak at a number of BOUG (Business Objects User Group) events and he always comes across confidently gives a compelling view of the product.

One thing that is clear is that there’s definitely some coming together of traditional SAP products and the Business Objects line, if nothing else the sponsors/exhibitors bear that out pretty clearly with the inclusion a few ‘big guns’ such as Atos Origin and Cap Gemini as well as some smaller SAP specialists like Bluefin and Edenhouse.

In terms of what to expect, that’s tough – there’s going to be a lot of emphasis on shiny new features such as Mobile BI, advanced dashboarding and data visualisation but that’s not what I’m there to see.  I’m really hoping for a slicker version of Web Intelligence, less fiddly and more intuitive – you can achieve a lot in the current version of WebI but the interface feels a little dated when compared to many of today’s web tools.

The lag between cloud and in-house software suites is something I think all BI vendors suffer from and it will be a tough problem to solve.  Cloud services are able to evolve continually whilst installed applications represent a snapshot of the industry’s ‘state of the art’ at the time of release and large corporate installations will almost always be 1 or 2 versions behind the bleeding edge.  This never used to be much of a problem but now most users are familiar with rich interactive web tools such as Google Docs, Mobile Me, Nike+ and Garmin Connect – now when your users come into the office they have certain expectations and at the moment I think many BI tools fall somewhat short either in functionality or ease of use.  On a related note I also expect to hear more too about potential cloud offerings from SAP or SAP partners.

Whatever happens I’m sure it will be an interesting day and of course I’ll post an event wrap-up for those of you that can’t attend, if you feel like coming along you can register at sapevent.co.uk/4launch and perhaps I’ll see you there.

Internet Explorer Using 2.7GB RAM!

Erm, something’s not right here…

… I only had about eight tabs open, although one was Google Reader.

Using MySQL BLOB Data via ODBC in SSIS, SQL Server & Business Objects

Whilst trying to build a centralised cross-platform alerting system I spotted a peculiar issue when trying to move the output of a SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST command on MySQL via ODBC.  It seems that the output of the SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST command returns both integers and binary (BLOB) data types even though to they eye (that is, in the MySQL Query Browser) most of the columns appear to be short text fields.

Despite the fact that the data looks like text whenever I tried to return the data into an application, I tried SSIS, SQL Server Linked Servers and Business Objects, each time the data would come back unusable or an error would be returned.  Business Objects gave me the key by declaring “This is a BLOB.” as you can see in the following screenshots…

SQL Server Integration Services

SQL Server Linked Server

Business Objects Desktop Intelligence

As with my recent post about loading data into MySQL with SSIS the saviour turns out to be an ODBC configuration setting, this time in the Metadata tab of the MySQL ODBC driver.  All you have to do is check the “Always handle binary function results as character data” and instantly your problems will be solved…

Out of a crazy fit of completeness I also took screenshots of the final results and it’d be a shame to waste them so here they are…

SQL Server Integration Services

SQL Server Linked Server

Business Objects Desktop Intelligence