OBIEE: Copy Reports From Prod to Dev

Yes, I said from Prod to Dev.

As I recently reacquired my job via the DW guy resigning, I'm in charge of all his stuff. Which basically means I get to learn the easy way, fire.

This means that I haven't had any time to "learn." I've just had to do. Fortunately so far, I haven't been asked to do a whole lot with the tool. Until now.

We have a large migration in the pipe right now...massive changes to the core of our OLTP system which require massive retooling of our DW system. Naturally I've been working on the database side of things. I started out with some 150 invalid objects and I've whittled it down to 3.

What about the reports though? That SQL is not stored in the database (at least as I understand it). Last week I began looking for a tool in OBIEE that would allow me to see database dependencies, kind of like Application Express' tool. Alas I couldn't find one, but I didn't have a whole lot of time to search. And I'm still learning the OBIEE lingo so I don't really know what to search for.

Anyway, I chatted with my former colleague and he told me I could just update the catalog in the Dev environment. Talked to the DBA and the Linux admin about getting access but it never materialized (it was Friday I think and I was out sick today). I still don't know what all is involved other than there's some sort of file I can just swap out...which scares me. Chances are I'll write over something.

So, off to Mr. Rittman's site.

First, Migrating OBIEE Projects Between DEV and PROD Environments, which led me to this one, Migrating OBIEE Reports Between Web Catalogs.

I hadn't seen (or heard) about the BI Catalog Manager, so I opened it up. It want's a directory or URL. Hmmm...I have no idea. I'll have to get the admin guys to help me out with this one. Let me just try the login URL and see if that works:

http://bi_server_prod:7777/analytics/

Nope. But there's a hint, URL must be in the form of...

http://bi_server_prod:7777/analytics/saw.dll

Got it. Sweet. No outside intervention necessary. Log in to dev:

http://bi_server_dev:7777/analytics/saw.dll

Voila!

Copy and paste the reports over and I'm done. Now the arduous task of going through each report to make sure it's not broken. Should be fun.