Total Business Intelligence

OBIEE 11g Admin Tool Essbase Connectivity

I’ve seen lots of cases where people are experiencing problems connecting to Essbase from the OBIEE Administration Tool in 11gR1. The not so helpful message “The connection has failed” is all that is returned by the tool.

Depending on your system setup and Essbase version, there could be two missing variables: ESSBASEPATH and/or ARBORPATH. These need to be set before the Administration Tool starts. (For the curious amongst you Essbase 11.1.2 uses ESSBASEPATH whereas version 9.3.3 requires ARBORPATH).

I can’t see any harm in setting both and my preferred method is to edit user.cmd. This file is called by bi-int.cmd which in turn is called from the Administration Tool launch shortcut.

So edit:

<mw_home>\instances\instance1\bifoundation\OracleBIApplication\coreapplication\setup\user.cmd

Add these lines after checking the paths apply in your environment, save and restart the Administration tool.

set ARBORPATH=C:\middleware\Oracle_BI1\clients\epm\Essbase\EssbaseRTC
set ESSBASEPATH=C:\middleware\Oracle_BI1\clients\epm\Essbase\EssbaseRTC
set PATH=%ARBORPATH%\bin;%PATH%