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Wednesday, July 18, 2007

How to limit the disk cache used by the BI Server

This is from a question asked on our internal mailing lists... (yes, I cannot seem to find the time to write new, original posts)

"Is there any way to limit the amount of disk space taken up by data stored on the BI Server for aggregations, calcuations, etc?"

The shor answer is "yes".
NQSConfig.ini (under C:\OracleBI\server\Config) has a section named [ CACHE ] for this purpose.

It reads something like this:

###########################################################
#
# Query Result Cache Section
#
###########################################################

[ CACHE ]

ENABLE = YES;
// A comma separated list of
pair(s)
// e.g. DATA_STORAGE_PATHS = "d:\OracleBIData\nQSCache" 500 MB;
DATA_STORAGE_PATHS = "C:\OracleBIData\cache" 500 MB;
MAX_ROWS_PER_CACHE_ENTRY = 100000; // 0 is unlimited size
MAX_CACHE_ENTRY_SIZE = 1 MB;
MAX_CACHE_ENTRIES = 1000;
POPULATE_AGGREGATE_ROLLUP_HITS = NO;
USE_ADVANCED_HIT_DETECTION = NO;


For example, this is how my cache folder looks like:

And to get more information on what these settings mean and do, you can see pages 229-240 of the "Oracle® Business Intelligence Server Administration Guide, Version 10.1.3.2, December 2006, (Part No B31770-01)" for a detailed explanation of what the different settings mean, and a brief exposition of the caching strategies.

Thanks to Krishnan Viswanathan from BI product management for providing the answer (yes... I am rendering credit unto others - wouldn't be nice on my part to steal and scoot -
चोरी और सीना जोरी "chori aur seena jori" is not something I subscribe to).