OBIEE 10g presentation server cache directory parameter

A while back our oraclenerd had a question about presentation server cache settings which he sent out through twitter.



rnm1978 and me answered to his distress call (emails not included. twitter's quite useless for sending instanceconfig.xml subsets ;-)).



However, I wanted to make it clear through this post, what part of the presentation server cache is actually managed by which parameter since there's a little gotcha in there.
So basically we there are four parameter which exist for the presentation servers instanceconfig.xml (see also Johns pdf extract). By default they're not explicitly noted in the file so you need to specify them in order to change them. Here's a little sample with already modified paths:



Now normally the cache files for the presentation server reside in the \tmp directory within the respective subdirectories sawcharts, sawrptcache and sawvc; with the xml cache files lying in the \tmp folder itself. Note that I cleaned out all files in the directory for in the screenshot below to have a clean testing baseline:



Restarting the presentation server with the additional XML above gives me the following results:

Chart cache:


Report cache:


State pool cache:


XML cache:


XML cache empty? Aha, seems there's an issue. Let's check the original path:


The XML cache files are still here. Not really what we wanted. So the XMLCacheDefault CacheDirectory seems to be useless. At this point I actually created an SR on MyOracleSupport to confirm a hunch I had. Result:
"With regards the parameter , I have researched this and have not found any documentation on it, internally or published. Infact through my research it appears that it has never been the case that this parameter is used to determine the path of the nqsxxxx temp files.
Previous versions of OBI i.e. Siebel Analytics document that the temp files generated by the Analytics Web server could be redirected by using the parameter 'TempDir' in Instance config or as a registry variable, in conjunction with the work directory path."

So off to the NQSConfig.ini and change the WORK_DIRECTORY_PATHS:

#WORK_DIRECTORY_PATHS = "C:\Oracle\OracleBIData\tmp";
WORK_DIRECTORY_PATHS = "C:\DataSources\Cache\tmp";
SORT_MEMORY_SIZE = 4 MB ;
SORT_BUFFER_INCREMENT_SIZE = 256 KB ;
VIRTUAL_TABLE_PAGE_SIZE = 128 KB ;

After that, restart all the services and check again where the cache files went.



Ok now we know how to make the rest of the cache files elsewhere.

Cheers!