Oracle^® Business Intelligence Presentation Services Administration Guide > Administering the Oracle BI Presentation Catalog >

About the Presentation Catalog

The Presentation Catalog stores the content that users create in Answers and Dashboards. This content, which includes items such as folders, links, and objects (that is, requests, filters, prompts, dashboards, and so on), is stored in a directory structure of individual files.

NOTE:  Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher reports are not saved in the Presentation Catalog. For more information about Oracle BI Publisher, see Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher User's Guide.

Each object is stored in its own .xml file. For example, a request created in Answers called Report 1 would be stored in a file named Report1.xml.

Each item has a corresponding attributes file. For example, the request called Report 1 would have a corresponding attributes file named report1.atr.

The attributes file contains the item's full name, access control list (ACL), description, and so on.

NOTE:  To guarantee that only one writer can write to a file at one time, a lock file is created when an item is being written to. On rare occasions (for example, after a power outage), temporary lock files in the Presentation Catalog may not get cleaned up completely. If Oracle BI Presentation Services reports of such a lock file, you will need to delete it manually.

On installation of the Oracle Business Intelligence infrastructure, you are provided with a Presentation Catalog directory named default.

The following locations are the default locations for the Presentation Catalog directory:

• In Windows

  SADATADIR\web\catalog

  where SADATADIR is the data directory. The default data directory is C:\OracleBIData. Your data directory may be different.

• In UNIX

  SADATADIR/web/catalog

  where SADATADIR is the data directory. The default data directory is /usr/local/OracleBIData. Your data directory may be different.

NOTE:  In previous releases of Oracle BI Presentation Services, the Presentation Catalog (formerly known as the Siebel Analytics Web Catalog) was stored in a single file rather than in a directory structure of individual files. If you have a previous version of the Presentation Catalog, you will need to convert it to the new format. Also, because the Presentation Catalog is stored in a directory structure of individual files rather than a single file, automatic backups that were done in previous releases are no longer necessary; instead you can use the strategy your site has in place for file system backup. For more information on how to convert the Presentation Catalog to the new format, see the Oracle Business Intelligence Infrastructure Upgrade Guide.