by Shiva Molabanti

In OBIEE 11G, The instanceconfig.xml file stores the Oracle Business Intelligence Presentation Services configuration settings. Many configuration settings are available in EM and those should be controlled within EM only unless if we disabled centralConfigurationEnabled option. If any particular setting is not available in EM then we should make changes directly in instanceconfig.xml file. There are many situations where we need to change the default OBI configuration settings to a new value.

Interestingly, The OBIEE 11g have the following information on Maximum limits for these configuration settings in system MBean called "BIDomain.BIInstance.PerformanceConfiguration" which helps to asses a safe value without guessing.

Cache:

Be careful when you are setting the Cache attribute values. For implementations under significant stress increase this value to 1000 or a higher value as mentioned below. The main factor that affects its size is the memory consumption. 

• Maximum range of Global Cache storage size (in Megabytes) to use when BI Server cache is enabled - 9,999
  
• Maximum number of cache entries; used to tune cache performance - 99,999
  
• Maximum size (in Megabytes) for individual server cache entries - 9,999
  

Data Display/Download:

The Maximum no.of rows that we can set to display/download in the Table/Pivot views. But keep in mind OBIEE is NOT meant to be a tool to extract huge amounts of information.

• Maximum number of rows of data to include in Table views - 9,999,999
  
• Maximum number of rows of data to include in delivered emails - 9,999,999
  
• Maximum number of rows to export to excel - 9,999,999
  

Topology:

This is the Maximum no.of OBI Components instantiated for the BI Instance within the Oracle Instance when you are scaling out the OBIEE 11G.

• OBI Presentation Servers - 99
  
• OBI Servers - 99
  
• OBI Java hosts - 99
  
• OBI Cluster Controllers - 2
  
• OBI Schedulers – 2
  

In my humble opinion, this is something every OBIEE Consultant has to know before hand to properly update the OBI PS configuration settings. 

Shiva Molabanti is a Manager and Senior Architect at KPI Partners.  He is a business intelligence enthusiast who likes blogging about acquisitions in the BI space, technical workings of BI tools, and Oracle Business Intelligence. Visit Shiva at his personal blog or check out Shiva's blog at KPIPartners.com.