There are some key Fusion Middleware technologies, terminology and utilities tha

t you ll need to get to know when starting to work with OBIEE 11g.
WebLogic Server (often abbreviated to WLS) : this is the J2EE application server
that Oracle uses across the board for all their 11g BI applications, such as Es
sbase 11.1.2, Discoverer 11g, BI Publisher 11g , Real Time Decisions 11g. It s als
o used for the upcoming Fusion ERP applications, and is the default application
server that you get with JDeveloper 11g. In the past it s role in OBIEE was perfor
med by OC4J and Oracle Application Server (which used OC4J under the covers), an
d both of these in 11g have been replaced by the core WebLogic Server, with JRoc
kit (as opposed to the Sun JVM) generally used as the JVM (thanks Simon H for th
e clarification in the comments).
OPMN (or Oracle Process Manager and Notification Server to give it its full name
) : You may have first come across this in Oracle Application Server 10g, where
it was used to start up the various Application Server components (OC4J_BI_Forms
, OC4J_Portal etc). Its since been adopted across the technology stack to start,
stop and monitor processes across distributed servers, and it s used in OBIEE 11g
to do the same for the system components (BI Server, BI Presentation Server, BI
Scheduler and BI Cluster Controller). You can either access OPMN through the co
mmand line (opmnctl), or Oracle s recommended approach is to use a graphical inter
face within Fusion Middleware Control. OPMN is also used in the 11g stack to con
trol Essbase, Discoverer and other BI components, so it s a tool that s worth learni
ng.
DMS, or Dynamic Monitoring System, works alongside OPMN and provides statistics
on the various components which can be persisted in a database. This will defini
tely be interesting when it comes to performance monitoring and optimization for
11g.
ODL, Oracle Diagnostic Logging, is a centralized framework for logging. Again, i
nteresting for performance, though not all logs (nqquery.log, for example) are c
overed by it.
JPS (Java Platform Security) and CSF (Credential Store Framework) are just two p
arts of security in 11g. Security is a big change in 11g with users no longer st
ored in the RPD (including the Administrator user, which has now gone), and user
s, roles and groups now managed by WebLogic, linking out to LDAP servers as necc
essary.