OBIEE login takes forever. Logging in... please wait.....

When trying to login to BI server, we were getting a perpetual message :



Logging in... please wait.....


Select * from table_name

was running for over 5 mins. Asked DBAs to do their magic, and sure enough, everything was back to normal. But why in the name of god, login would hang up if database is preoccupied? Why can’t BI log you in and show a blank page in you’re My Folders?

Answer: Initialization blocks. Every time someone logs in, all session variables are populated, and till the results from BI comes back, BI would ask user to wait.

We checked the presentation server, BI server, memory, CPU, hard disk free space, temp files, you name it, all was good. Turns out, database server was the culprit. A simple query like :