Oracle Business Intelligence (OBI) is Oracle Corporation’s flagship business intelligence product. It incorporates state of the art software for reporting and for defining business metadata.

OBI includes an application server known as OC4J, which handles the web based requests to the OBI server. OC4J is installed as a program which starts upon logon to the Windows server. This configuration requires that someone is always logged into the server with the OC4J running in their session, or the OBI front end will not run. While this does work, it does impose a restriction on the server which is not standard for programs of this kind. A more standard and potentially more robust solution is to configure OC4J to run as a Windows service, so that it starts when the server is booted up regardless of whether anyone actually logs onto the server.



Step 1

First, you have to download Open Source software that will set up the windows service
1. Create a directory for the software, such as C:\JavaService
2. Go to http://javaservice.objectweb.org
3. Download the javaservice program. On my computer the folder C:/Temp is where downloaded files are placed.
a. Select javaservice:
b. Then, select JavaService-2.0.10.zip
c. You have to fill in a form, and agree to the Open Source license:
d. Select the Download site:
e. Click OK to download
f. Copy the zip file to c:\JavaService






Step 2

Use your favorite zip utility to unzip the file, or use the Extract File selection from the menu when you right click on the file:

1. Press Next, and press Yes to overwrite any files that may be flagged as duplicates.
2. Press Finish and you will see the contents of your new folder. You are ready to proceed to the next step.



Step 3

In order to complete the installation, follow the following steps. Two assumptions are made in this script: you have installed OBIEE in the default c:\OracleBI directory, and you have installed Java in C:\Java. For the script to run successfully, you need to verify on your system where these components have been installed.

1. Open a DOS command window
2. Change directory to C:\JavaService\JavaService-2.0.10
3. Run the following command, all in one line. Be sure to edit this to reflect the actual location of the jvm.dll. This is highlighted in bold blue below:
javaservice.exe -install Oracle-BI-OC4J-Server C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0_11\bin\client\jvm.dll -XX:MaxPermSize=128m -Xmx512m -Djava.class.path=C:\OracleBI\oc4j_bi\j2ee\home\oc4j.jar -start oracle.oc4j.loader.boot.BootStrap -description Oracle0-BI-Oc4J-Service

Step 4

To verify that the service is running, go to Control Panel/Administrative Tools and click on Services. By default, the OC4J service is set up to start Automatically, and is not started at this point.



Click on your new Oracle-BI-OC4J-Server service to bring up the Service Properties:

Start your service, and you are good to go.


Caveat

This process has been implemented on many servers in many companies. However, it is important to note that as of the writing of this article, Oracle Corp. does not officially certify use of this process. So, use this at your own risk.



Conclusion

We have seen that in four very simple steps, you can create a Windows service to start the OC4J web server on your OBIEE installation. This will make your life, and the lives of your OBIEE community, easier and more productive.