OBIEE 12c server contains customer data?

Question

Hi,

Our server admin asked me if the OBIEE server stores customer data.  I said no since we didn't turn on Server Cache.  I read the following article (   ) and it confirms analyses doesn't save with data.   What happens if I schedule a the analyses to run?  Would the results be saved into the OBIEE server??   Any other potential ways OBIEE server stores customer data?

[Deleted User] · Answer

3310714 wrote:Hi, . What happens if I schedule a the analyses to run? Would the results be saved into the OBIEE server??

Only if you order it to through an action which uses script to write files to disk or something along those lines.

The rest I can skip because the others beat me to it while I was typing :-)

rmoff · Answer

What's the context for the question? As in, why are they asking this question?

How are you defining "store" data? Disk, or RAM too?

Analyses and dashboards do just save metadata in the Presentation Catalog. But if someone builds a report with a filter on a given customer, that customer's ID will be saved in the metadata of the report, and therefore on the server.

The BI Server (OBIS) will also create .TMP files as and when it needs to land data to disk for processing post-DB query (discussion here). These TMP files are transitory but can sometimes be left around e.g. on unclean shutdown. They're also proprietary encoded and not user-readable, but that's not to say an attacker couldn't make use of them. Which brings me back to the context for asking this question - how far does your scope of "contain data" go?

Final point, if you're using Mashups with DV (XSA) then the files uploaded by end users are stored on disk on the server, unless you use the XSA cache in which case they go to the database (I've not checked to see if the source file gets removed from disk or not).

Gianni Ceresa · Answer

Even without cache you have temporary internal caches that are still there, but it's not a real storage, more like an operational storage (like an app creating tmp files while running etc.).

If you schedule an analysis with an agent? The output of the analysis is sent out based on your config.

As data flow through OBIEE in a way it store data (the time to process and serve them for sure), but it can't really be called "data storage", so saying "no" to your admin isn't a wrong answer ...