Oracle Business Intelligence Infrastructure Installation and Configuration Guide > NQSConfig.INI File Reference >

General Section Parameters in the Configuration File

The parameters in the General section contains general server default parameters, including localization and internationalization, temporary space and memory allocation, and other default parameters used to determine how data is returned from the Oracle Business Intelligence Server to a client.

NOTE:  The settings for the parameters LOCALE, SORT_ORDER_LOCALE, SORT_TYPE and CASE_SENSITIVE_CHARACTER_COMPARISON, described in the following topics, are interrelated. They help determine how the Oracle Business Intelligence Server sorts data.

LOCALE

Specifies the locale in which data is returned from the server. This parameter also determines the localized names of days and months.

See also the topic area Localizing Oracle Business Intelligence Deployments.

For more information about Oracle BI Catalog Manager and language extensions, see Oracle Business Intelligence Presentation Services Administration Guide.

SORT_ORDER_LOCALE

Used to help determine whether the Oracle Business Intelligence Server can function-ship an ORDER BY clause (used in sorting) to an relational database.

Every database defined in the Physical Layer in the Server Administration Tool has a features table associated with it. If you want to override the default value in the Features table for a particular type of relational database, you need to do it for all occurrences of it in the Physical Layer.

In the Server Administration Tool, the Database dialog > Features tab > Features table specifies the features and functions that the relational database supports. The settings for SORT_ORDER_LOCALE in the Features table and in the NQSConfig.INI file should match only if the database and the Oracle Business Intelligence Server sort data in the same way.

For the relational database and the Oracle Business Intelligence Server to sort data the same way, they must be in agreement on the parameters shown in Table 22.

The SORT_ORDER_LOCALE entries in the Features table and in the NQSConfig.INI file match only if the database and the Oracle Business Intelligence Server have matching settings in these areas. If the settings do not match, wrong answers can result when using multidatabase joins, or errors can result when using the Union, Intersect and Except operators, which all rely on consistent sorting between the back-end server and the Oracle Business Intelligence Server.

Example: SORT_ORDER_LOCALE = "english-usa" ;

SORT_TYPE

Specifies the type of sort to perform. The default value is BINARY. Binary sorts are faster than nonbinary sorts.

Valid values are BINARY and DEFAULT. If you specify DEFAULT, a nonbinary sort is performed; this yields better sort results for data that contains accented characters.

Example: SORT_TYPE = "BINARY" ;

CASE_SENSITIVE_CHARACTER_COMPARISON

Specifies whether the Oracle Business Intelligence Server differentiates between uppercase and lowercase characters when performing comparison operations.

Valid values are ON and OFF. When set to OFF, case is ignored. When set to ON, case is considered for comparisons. For binary sorts, case sensitivity for the server and for the relational database should set the same way.

This setting only applies to the Oracle Business Intelligence Server's internal comparisons for caching and for aggregation. Case sensitivity is a function of database operations and is set at the database level. The CASE_SENSITIVE_CHARACTER_COMPARISON parameter allows the Oracle BI Server to match the back-end database's functions. The following operators are affected:

• Order By
• Group By
• Distinct
• Join
• comparisons (<, >, =, <=, >=, <>)

For example, consider the following three terms:

• ACME
• DELTA
• acme

An Order By with CASE_SENSITIVE_CHARACTER_COMPARISON set ON results in rows in the order shown in the preceding example. An Order By with case-insensitive setting results in ACME and acme being adjacent.

If the term is case-sensitive and you perform a duplicate remove (Distinct), the result is three rows. If the term is not case-sensitive, then the Distinct result is two rows.

CASE_SENSITIVE_CHARACTER_COMPARISON should be set to correspond with how the back-end database deals with case. For example, if the back-end database is case-insensitive, then Oracle Business Intelligence Server should be configured to be case-insensitive. If Oracle Business Intelligence Server and the back-end database are not similarly case-sensitive, some subtle problems can result.

For an example of CASE_SENSITIVE_CHARACTER_COMPARISON applied to aggregation, a case-sensitive database has the following tuples:

Region  Units
 WEST     1
 west     1
 West     1

With CASE_SENSITIVE_CHARACTER_COMPARISON set to ON, the data is returned to the client the with the same results shown in the preceding table.

With CASE_SENSITIVE_CHARACTER_COMPARISON set to OFF, the data is again returned to the client the with the same results shown in the preceding table. There is no change because the Oracle BI Server has not done any character comparisons.

However, if SUM_SUPPORTED is set to OFF in the features table, the Oracle BI Server is forced to do a character comparison. The results of the query in this case are as follows:

Region  Units
 WEST     3

The reason for these results is that the Oracle BI Server has case-sensitive character comparison turned off, so it now treats the three tuples as the same value and aggregates them. In this case WEST = West = west. However, if you filter on the Region column, you would still see the regions WEST, West, and west; CASE_SENSITIVE_CHARACTER_COMPARISON does not affect filtering on a back-end database. The logic shown in the aggregation example applies to caching as well.

Since CASE_SENSITIVE_CHARACTER_COMPARISON is set in the NQSConfig.INI file, the parameter applies to all back-end databases in a repository. Therefore it should be set to match the case sensitivity of the repository's dominant back-end database.

Example: CASE_SENSITIVE_CHARACTER_COMPARISON = OFF ;

NULL_VALUES_SORT_FIRST

Specifies if NULL values sort before other values (ON) or after (OFF). ON and OFF are the only valid values. The value of NULL_VALUES_SORT_FIRST should conform to the underlying database. If there are multiple underlying databases that sort NULL values differently, set the value to correspond to the database that is used the most in queries.

Example: NULL_VALUES_SORT_FIRST = OFF ;

DATE_TIME_DISPLAY_FORMAT

Specifies the format for how date/time stamps are input to and output from the Oracle Business Intelligence Server.

Example: DATE_TIME_DISPLAY_FORMAT = "yyyy/mm/dd hh:mi:ss" ;

DATE_DISPLAY_FORMAT

Specifies the format for how dates are input to and output from the Oracle Business Intelligence Server.

NOTE:  Specify the year as either 2-digit (yy) or 4-digit (yyyy). Separators can be any character except y, m, or d.

Example: DATE_DISPLAY_FORMAT = "yyyy/mm/dd" ;

TIME_DISPLAY_FORMAT

Specifies the format for how times are input to and output from the Oracle Business Intelligence Server.

Example: TIME_DISPLAY_FORMAT = "hh:mi:ss" ;

WORK_DIRECTORY_PATHS

Specifies one or more directories for temporary space.

Each directory listed needs to be an existing fully-qualified, writable directory pathname, with double quotes ( " ) surrounding the pathname. Specify mapped directories only. UNC path names and network mapped drives are allowed only if the service runs under a qualified user account. To change the account under which the service is running, see the corresponding topic in the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Deployment Guide.

Specify multiple directories with a comma separated list. Valid values are any fully qualified pathname to an existing, writable directory.

For optimum performance, temporary directories should reside on high performance storage devices. If you specify more than one directory, they should reside on different drives.

Syntax: WORK_DIRECTORY_PATHS = "<full_directory_path_1>" [, "<full_directory_path_2>"{, "<full_directory_path_n>"}] ;

Example 1: WORK_DIRECTORY_PATHS = "C:\Temp" ;

Example 2: WORK_DIRECTORY_PATHS = "D:\temp", "F:\temp" ;

NOTE:  Specifying more than one directory per drive does not improve performance because file I/O takes place through the same I/O controller. In general, specify only one directory per disk drive. Specifying multiple directories on different drives improves the overall I/O throughput of the Oracle Business Intelligence Server because internally, the processing files are allocated using a round-robin algorithm that balances the I/O load across the given disk drives.

SORT_MEMORY_SIZE

Specifies the maximum amount of memory to be used for each sort operation. Multiple operations can each use memory up to the value specified. The limit for SORT_MEMORY_SIZE is determined by the physical memory of the server machine and on the number of sort operations that might occur simultaneously. Specify KB for kilobytes, MB for megabytes, and no units for bytes.

Example: SORT_MEMORY_SIZE = 4 MB ;

Related Topic

SORT_BUFFER_INCREMENT_SIZE

Specifies the increment that the sort memory size is increased by as more memory is needed. As more memory is required, the size increases by the value specified until it reaches the value of SORT_MEMORY_SIZE.

Example: SORT_BUFFER_INCREMENT_SIZE = 256 KB ;

Related Topic

See the topic How the SIZE Parameters Affect Oracle Business Intelligence Performance.

VIRTUAL_TABLE_PAGE_SIZE

Specifies the size of a memory page for the Oracle Business Intelligence Server internal processing. A higher value reduces I/O but increases memory usage, especially in a multiuser environment.

Example: VIRTUAL_TABLE_PAGE_SIZE = 128 KB ;

Related Topic

See the topic How the SIZE Parameters Affect Oracle Business Intelligence Performance.