Text searching the SQL of BI Publisher Data Model contents in the OBIEE catalog

If you're working in an environment where there are a lot of Business Intelligence Publisher (BIP) reports in an on-site OBIEE instance, sometimes you want to impact assess, or find usages of a certain database table or column. The following shell script is a very simple way to search the Data Model SQL in BI Publisher reports in the filesystem. Note of course this only works if you have an on-site OBIEE instance. For Oracle eBusiness Suite you'd be better to query the CLOBs in stored XML Publisher tables, and for Cloud based Oracle Analytics - you'll need to work that one out!

Change the CAT= like to store the location of the shared folder that you're catalog resides in.

Save the contents to a file called bipdmsearch and remember to chmod 755 bipdmsearch so you can execute it.

#!/bin/sh

if [ -z "$1" ]; then
 echo "Usage: bipdmsearch <search string>"
 exit 1
fi

if [ -z "$CAT" ]; then
 CAT=/u01/app/obi12c/config12.2.1.2/bi/bidata/service_instances/ssi/metadata/content/catalog/root/shared
fi

echo "cd $CAT"
cd $CAT

echo "Search for $1"
find . -type f -name \*xdm\* -exec grep -il "$1" {} \;

echo "Done"

This is a post from Gareth's blog at http://garethroberts.blogspot.com