OBIEE 11g - Temporary Files for Presentation Server and BI Server Explained

OBIEE 11g presentation server creates lots of temporary files such as cache, exporting analysis and dashboard and printing to pdf etc. OBIEE 11g bi server also creates temporary files as cache and during sorting, union and federation.

I have come across the tech note on Oracle Support which explains the creation of temp files by presentation and bi server during the query execution. This blog is an attempt to share temp files information around OBIEE system components, Java components running within WebLogic Server is not in preview of this blog.

TEMP Files

Oracle Presentation Server

Process Which Creates Temporary Files 

Cache, Exporting Analysis and Dashboards, Printing (to PDF), Previewing, Chart rendering (via JavaHost engine), Resolving chart views and Resolving/Rendering HTML pages

Location of temporary Files

ORACLE_INSTANCE/tmp/OracleBIPresentationServices/coreapplication_obipsn/xxxxx

Example

[ORACLE_INSTANCE]tmp/OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent/coreapplication_obips1/sawcharts/saw51ef32e4_2-2.tmp

[ORACLE_INSTANCE]/tmp/OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent/coreapplication_obips1/

dxe

[ORACLE_INSTANCE]/tmp/OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent/coreapplication_obips1/querycache_0

Oracle BI Server

Process Which Creates Temporary Files 

Caching, Sorting and Query Union/ federation / SQL resolution

Location of temporary Files

ORACLE_INSTANCE/tmp/OracleBIServerComponent/coreapplication_obisn/temp

Example

[ORACLE_INSTANCE]/tmp/OracleBIServerComponent/coreapplication_obis1/obis_temp/nQS_Xml_8821_334_50005153.TMP

Clustered Installs

For clustered installs which uses global cache, the temp files for local cache are *.TBL while *.DES for global cache files

Changing Default Temp Location and Symbolic Link

One can change the default temp location, for optimum performance, temporary directories should reside on high-performance storage devices. One option is to leave the default configuration and create a symbolic link to place them in a desired location.

Oracle Presentation Server

For UNIX symbolic link is created as below.

mkdir /tmp/obips1

ln -s /home/oracle/obiee/instances/instance1/tmp/OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent/coreapplication_obips1 /tmp/obips1

While on Windows the script of creating symbolic link is as follows

cd $ORACLE_INSTANCE/tmp/OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent

mv coreapplication_obips1 coreapplication_obips1.localDisk

ln -s /dev/shm/coreapplication_obips1 .\

Java Host

Navigate to the directory

[ORACLE_INSTANCE]/config/OracleBIJavaHostComponent/coreapplication_obijhN

Take a back-up of the file xdo.cfg.

Open xdo.cfg and check for the value set for system-temp-dir property

Re-start the Javahost component

Oracle BI Server

This can be changed via the WORK_DIRECTORY_PATHS parameter in the NQSConfig.INI

I hope you find this information useful.