SAP BI Platform – Geek Tweaks

Hi Folks! Following my initial series of Geek Tweaks on SAP BusinessObjects Lumira today we will be seeing some Geek tweaks on our famous BI Platform. BI Platform at this form of writing is in version 4.2 currently on GA which promises lot of enhancements, improvements and new features which we have been waiting. You can read more about the new features https://scn.sap.com/community/bi-platform/blog/2016/01/11/sap-bi-42–bi-platform-new-features

Some of the tweaks explain the internals of the Platform and are for information purposes and some of them might be dangerous to try in your environment. You are responsible for performing any tweaks related to this.

“God does not make mistakes, the rest of us better take backup”

List all Internal BI Service

SAP BI Platform is built on principle of modular design and exposes its end points as Services so that other applications, clients can consume and communicate with them. Some of the internal SDK operations are also relay on web service to get their job done.

BI Platform uses the famous Apache Axis2 as its engine to process and expose the service. You can find the list of internal services used by the dswsbobje by using the following URL.

https://:/dswsbobje/services/listServices

This can be also used to check if the service is running or not. If this particular service has issues, SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio may not be able to communicate with BI Platform.

There are some more other services to explore from your webapps folder which is found under SAP BusinessObjects omcatwebapps

Changing the location of Data folder

The Data folder that is present in SAP BI platform acts as a cache and is also responsible for storing the session. Each node in the cluster will have separate folder in the format of hostname_SIAport. In addition to it, some of the services will also have its own folder to store their content.

The data folder should be in a High speed IO disk with less latency for high performance of the BI system. By default, it is located at the following location SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 4.0Data

You can mount a high speed storage on this location so that BOBJ can then take advantage of it. On Linux based deployment it can be done by using the mount command while in Windows it can be done with the power of mklink

 

mklink /J “ SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 4.0Data” “”

Finding and changing PID of BOBJ Process

BOBJ platform consists of lot of processing servers which internally spins up numerous process each having unique PID (Process Identifiers). These PID are used to identify the process and start them. You can find the same of each process in your task manager running under the service account which is used to start SIA.

All of the process always run in the same PID. That is because it is easy to operate a process when its PID is known. BOBJ stores all of the PID files in the following location

SAP BusinessObjectsSAP BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 4.0serverpids

Although changing them is not recommended, changing the PID on the process file and restarting SIA would result in the process running with the new PID.

Default Bootstrap BI Platform files

SAP BI platform has a set of default bootstrap files that are created during the install time. Those files hold configuration information and details about the deployment and the instance. The location of these configuration files is

SAP BusinessObjectsSAP BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 4.0win64_x64

_boe_.bootstrap contains the default deployment information in XML, internal Java process configuration and values for various key that the BI Platform uses.

_boe_.dbinfo contains the encrypted database information that is used by BOBJ to access the DB

_boe_.keyfile contains the encrypted key that is used by BOBJ to encrypt the artefacts in DB

Tweak Advance Configuration

BOBJ is a versatile platform with ever growing features, one of the important aspects of it is the fact that it’s modular and configurable. Hidden amidst of BOBJ files are some advance configurations which can be found at

The configuration folder contains a lot of configuration information including the version of BI Platform and other XML based configuration used by each process in BI Platform.

WebI Properties

Locate and open the file webiProperties.txt document to find some rendering options that are set for WebI

Apart from this, there are quite a bit of configurations that cannot be covered in this post. Lookout for future posts on those advance configurations.

Starting the CMS in console mode

Console mode is used when the CMS is refused to start or when there are some issues with it which needs some advanced debugging. Often console is used by SAP to debug the CMS when an issue is raised to them. Using the console mode can cause irreparable data corruption or data loss.

More details on the console mode is given on SAP Note 1828536

Securing your BOBJ with FIPS 140-2

BOBJ has support for FIPS based encryption. FIPS stands for Federal Information Processing Standard which is standards that specify requirements for cryptography modules. If your company compiles with this standard, you can enable FIPS to leverage the option in BI Platform.

 

Simply add the switch –fips to the SIA command in SIA properties to enable fips.

 

FIPS mode is stricter and prevents old clients that does not follow this to connect to BI Platform. If you are using old clients this may not be an option for you.

 

That’s all folks in this posts, Keep lookout for more Geek tweaks and if you have any, feel free to post below in comments.