Where Are You Coming From?

Have you ever been confused by directions or road signs?  Sometimes information doesn’t bring clarity.  Hopefully this blog will bring some clarify to potential issues you might encounter in your upgrade to SP2.  I can’t believe this is my 4th post about the subject.

Issues When Moving From Fix Pack 1.6+ to SP2

I made the move to SP2 several weeks ago from XI 3.1 FP 1.3, but what I have since discovered is that not everyone’s journey has been so straight forward.  If a BusinessObjects system was using XI 3.1 FP 1.6 or later, then you may run into issues after you upgrade to SP2.

It seems that at the time SP2 was being built, all the fixes up to FP 1.5 were included; however there have been a number of additional FixPack releases SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 since then.  SAP has released Fix Pack 1.6, 1.7 and 1.8.  These three releases included DLLs that were newer than the DLLs in the SP2 release because they contained fixes that were not originally in SP2.  If this is the case for you will want to move to Fix Pack 2.1 immediately.

What happened?

What I’ve discovered is that due to the desire to keep the size of Service Packs as small as possible, the service pack does not overwrite all the DLLs on the system.  Instead, the service packs looks at your system and only replaces those DLLs which are older than the DLLs within your BusinessObjects XI 3.1 environment.  This means that if you upgraded to FP 1.6, 1.7 or 1.8, some DLLs will be newer than the DLLs contained within SP2.  This can introduce incompatibilities.

For example, if you use WebIntelligence, you may notice that after sometime the WebIntelligence Server stops functioning and you get the following message when opening a WebIntelligence document:

Cannot Initialize Report Engine server: (Error: RWI 00226) (Error:INF)

The Good News

The Good News is that engineering has already identified this issue and has fixed it through the release of Fix Pack 2.1.  If you read the release notes of Fix Pack 2.1, you will see the following:

BusinessObjects XI 3.1 and Crystal Reports 2008 Service Pack 2 Fixed Issues
This Service Pack can only be applied on top of BusinessObjects
Enterprise XI 3.1 / Crystal Reports 2008 SP1. This Service Pack
includes all XI 3.1 FixPacks up to 1.5. Note If you install XI 3.1
SP2 in top of FixPack 1.6 or later, reinstall the latest 2.x FixPack.
Each machine in your deployment must be updated separately with
the patches you require. A separate patch is available for each
BusinessObjects product that has a standalone installation.

There it is.  Tucked into the release notes of Fix Pack 2.1 it explains that if you are on a later fix pack, you need to install Fix Pack 2.1.  I would welcome your suggestions to pass on to the BusinessObjects engineering team of ways to avoid this in the future.

«Good BI»

XI3.1 SP2 Installation Issues Addressed in Re-Release

Over the last several months, we’ve worked to make customers aware of one of the major issues with the latest upgrade within the XI 3.1 product stack.  The main issue has been that the upgrade is simply too slow.  Way too slow.  I knew that the SAP BusinessObjects product development team has been working on resolving this issue and we have some great news.

Recap

The problem only affects Windows and only the BusinessObjects Enterprise package. The problem arises due to limitations of the Microsoft Patch (msp) technology performing disk checking when managing large numbers of files… and the BusinessObjects Enterprice package has lots of those! When run in silent install mode, the installation is significantly faster, but this advantage only works on some versions of Windows (those using Microsoft Installer 3).

RE-RELEASE is available!

If you have an older copy of the SP2 release on your servers, you may just want to update them.  If you go to Service Marketplace, you will see that there is an updated version of the Service Pack (Server+Client) available for download.  These downloads have been updated.

Click image to enlarge

So was the issue completely fixed?  Well, no… not exactly.   In order to get the installer to run fast in interactive mode, either the installer would have to be modified to use the older msi technology or Microsoft will have to fix the issue.  In the meantime, what SAP BusinessObjects has been able to do is to give us an updated version of the installer that is always fast when run in SILENT MODE…. that is… with all versions of Microsoft Installer (3.0/3.1/4.0/4.5).  Therefore be aware.  You must continue to follow the silent installation procedures outlined in my previous posts, however you no longer have to be concerned with what version of the Microsoft Installer is on the Windows Operating System.

And if you are on Unix?  Well, this was never a problem in that case.  This problem only affects the Windows platform.

Thanks!

Finally, thanks to the teams at SAP BusinessObjects for getting this fix released.

«Good BI»

BusinessObjects XI 3.1 SP2 Upgrade Update

I wanted to write a quick follow-up post to the one I posted earlier about the BusinessObjects XI 3.1 SP2 install.  Now that I’ve done several I wanted to give you some additional heads up on some things.  This is what I’ve learned:

Be Careful of Language Packs

The install can take a long time even with the silent install – If you decided to just install all the language packs what you will find is that each language packs adds just under 30 minutes to the install time per language.  In other words, if you installed English, German, and French your installation will take almost a full extra hour.  The installation daisy chains the installations together.  First it will all the SP2 updates and the english language pack.  Next, it will install French and then German.

Comprende?

Is My Install Done Yet?

When running a silent install you can include the options /qn+ to have the setup.exe program inform you when the installation is done…

setup.exe /qn+ -r <responsefilepath>\<filename>.ini

there’s only one surprise.  The installer will information you that the installation is complete.  What it doesn’t tell you is that it will install the language packs next.  Yep that’s right… It’s done but not REALLY done.  But because it’s running a silent install you won’t know it.  This is related to the previous issue.  After the main installation completed, it tells you the installation is complete.  It THEN begins to install each of the languages packs.  If you look in the task manager you will see that msiexec.exe is still running.  Be very careful and make sure those language packs have completed before you start trying to clean up the install files.

Good Luck

The issue of the installation of the BusinessObjects XI 3.1 SP2 was a main topic of our recent GABOUG meeting.  There was a strong recommendation from customers to make sure and install the SP2 hotfix that came out just after the release of SP2.  I haven’t read through the technical notes, but apparently there were problems with some SAP universes getting corrupted.  This hotfix will solve that problem.

«Good BI»

Walking Through SAP BusinessObjects Explorer

Today I attended the GABOUG quarterly meeting and saw a really nice presentation of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer by Rob Fiorillo of RFP Consulting.  He showed multiple demos.

During the first demo, he wanted to show how to use Explorer with data from Excel, so he used Live Office to take the data out of the EDW.  He then imported the data into SAP BusinessObjects Explorer using the new plug-in from labs called, SAP BusinessObjects Explorer with Excel Navigation Prototype.

There are currently two versions of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer.  There is:

• SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Accelerated
• SAP BusinessObjects Explorer

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Accelerated – The Accelerated version provides unlimited scalability of in memory processing for data regardless of size and is really the way to go.  It requires the use of SAP’s Netweaver BW 7, BWA Blades and SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Blades.

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer (non-Accelerated) – Organizations can use the non-accelerated version, but there are limitations to the amount of data SAP BusinessObjects Explorer non-Accelerated can handle.  In 2010, SAP BusinessObjects will be bringing a “BWA Blades for non-SAP data” to the market, which will overcome the existing limitations.

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer breaks new ground with the way it brings together:

• Fast Performance
• Unlimited Data
• Intuitive User Experience

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Demo Site

A great example of the solution is represented my the http://microfinance.sap.com/ demo site.  Click below and take it for a test run.

Incredible Data Volumes

The microfinance website does a great job of showing you the intuitive user interface while and the same time demonstrating the large data volumes that can be processes.  This demo site is running a relatively small data sample of 27 million records, but look at the response time!

That’s fast!  0.016s to return a result set of 1,123,000 records.  Also what I love about SAP BusinessObjects Explorer is that I am able to see the desired metric broken down by every  dimension member.  In the screenshot above you can see that of the selected sample, 498 are Existing Clients, 375 are New Clients and 250 are Former Clients.

I am fascinated by the growth of in memory solutions within the BI Marketplace.  Qliktech’s QlikView is probably one of the better know solutions in the space.  With Explorer, SAP BusinessObjects answers the call of the industry to provide in-memory solutions for organizations who have standardized on their platform.  The good news is that you no longer have to deploy niche solutions to get the type of in-memory performance many of your end-users would love.

«Good BI»

SAP BusinessObjects Demos on YouTube…

I’m amazed at how easy it is to find information these days.  Today I decided to do a follow-up post based on my most recent WebIntelligence demo post.  After a little searching around and I found a number of demos that had been posted by David Collins Dixon onto Youtube.  David has written a number of books about the SAP Business Information Warehouse (or BW for short).

SAP Integration Demos

Here are the list of demos:
http://www.youtube.com/user/davidcollinsdixon

Crystal Reports Demo leveraging SAP Hierarchies (No AUDIO)

David does an especially nice job with the Crystal Reports demo and shows you how to use the Hierarchy Node so Crystal Reports can properly leverage your SAP Hierarchy definition.

Xcelsius Demos

There are also a couple of demos from the guys at Everything Xcelsius:
http://www.youtube.com/user/XcelsiusGurus

If you find any SAP BusinessObjects videos that you think others would benefit from, just add links to them in a posted comment.

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