Finding Physical tables/columns used in OBIEE catalogs

Question

Hello,

I am new to OBIEE. I'm trying to document physical tables and columns used in a obiee catalog without running the catalog. Also need to document which text columns are used for display and which are used to drive logic in a catalog. Does OBIEE store any metadata/catalog logic anywhere which i can use for this purpose?

Eventually, the idea is to somehow automate this process so that whenever there is a change in a catalog this document is also updated automatically. Any ideas/thoughts on this are welcome.

Thanks in advance.

Gianni Ceresa · Answer

As extension to Joel, if you look into Sample App 607 (https://www.oracle.com/middleware/technologies/obiee-samples-downloads.html ) you find some scripts and dashboard to display those information.

If you really want to go down to the physical table, once you have the info from the catalog you also need to get the metadata of the RPD (in the Admintool: Tools > Utilities > Repository Documentation).

Keep in mind both the catalog manager reports and the repository documentation will miss some details (shortcuts and aliases).

There are ways to get everything: from any catalog object down to the physical source but it isn't an out of the box solution.

I wrote a bit about it and have a presentation which was covering that:

https://gianniceresa.com/2018/03/gdpr-analytics-challenge/

https://gianniceresa.com/2018/04/gdpr-analytics-solution/

https://speakerdeck.com/gianniceresa/gdpr-and-you-the-nightmare-of-ba

Joel Acha · Answer

You should consider the reporting capability of Catalog Manager - https://docs.oracle.com/middleware/bi12214/biee/BIESG/GUID-FF29B794-97F5-4975-A924-ED40319B9150.htm#BIESG3785

It also has a CLI which you can put a script around to automate what you need from it. Under the bitools directory, run the following to get some information about the CLI reporting functionality - runcat.sh/cmd -cmd report -help