Promoting OBIEE column formats from Dev to QA to Prod

Mark.Thompson

Is there an established "best practice" for migrating default column formats between environments (i.e. from Dev to QA or from QA to Prod)?  MIgrating individual analyses is easy, and migrating the updated repository is fine.  But what about the default column formats (for example, Profit Margin % has a default data format of 1 decimal place with percentages)?  The only way I can see to migrate those is to copy the the file with the name of the subject area (and no extension) from C:\<home>\user_projects\domains\bi\bidata\service_instances\ssi\metadata\content\catalog\root\system\metadata  (that is the 12c folder), and paste it into the new environment.  But that runs the risk of overwriting stuff that may have been added in the upstream environment.

What is the best practice in this area?

JustTheFacts

The very few times when we've needed to promote column formats we have just recreated them by hand in the production environment. Very rarely will we work with the defaults files directly (and usually it is to remove system-wide defaults that were created by accident).

That said, at some threshhold (maybe ~50 columns that needed to be touched? 100?) I probably would be looking at a more traditional promotion of metadata from envrionment to envrionment. And if I remember correctly, the defaults file (in 11g anyhow) is just XML (I don't have one in front of me, sorry). If this is a common thing you will need to do in your environment, you could probably use any of the many XML-aware file-comparison tools available to merge your promoted file with the existing file so as not to lose what was already configured. And you get to set the best practice!

You might want to try to enforce, say, QA as the system of record for default formats. So you can promote from there to prod without any merging.

Good luck.