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Administering Usage Tracking

The Oracle BI Server supports the accumulation of usage tracking statistics that can be used in a variety of ways such as database optimization, aggregation strategies, or billing users or departments based on the resources they consume. The Oracle BI Server tracks usage at the detailed query level.

When you enable usage tracking, statistics for every query are inserted into a database table or are written to a usage tracking log file. If you use direct insertion, the Oracle BI Server directly inserts the usage tracking data into a relational database table. It is recommended that you use direct insertion to write statistics to a database table.

When the Oracle BI Server starts up, Oracle BI Server validates the column names in the metadata against the list of valid columns in the usage tracking table. The lengths of varchars will not be validated. The following events occur:

• Column names. If metadata contains column names that are not in the table, an error will be written to the Oracle BI Server log and usage tracking will be disabled. If there are columns in tables that are not in the metadata, the columns that are in the metadata will be written to the usage tracking table.
• Varchar length. If the length in metadata and the set length in the table do not match, an error will be written to the NQServer.log file and usage tracking will be disabled.

This section contains the following topics:

• Setting Up Direct Insertion to Collect Information for Usage Tracking
• Setting Up a Log File to Collect Information for Usage Tracking