New Dodeca Whitepaper En Francais!

Our partners at Limpida in Paris have recently published a whitepaper on Dodeca in French!  We recently hosted two Limpida consultants in our office here in Huntsville.  During their week in Huntsville, we had the opportunity to give them some in-depth training on Dodeca so they can provide quality implementation services back home in France.

I also used their visit to work on my French, the but progress is very slow (ou trop lent pour ceux d'entre vous en France), so I haven't translated the whitepaper.  I trust is says good things about Dodeca!

Kscope 12 Early Bird Deadline is Almost Here

If you are planning to attend Kscope 12 in San Antonio and you have not yet registered, be sure to register this week as Early Bird discounts end next Monday and the price goes up $150 $300. Better yet, register this week and use the Applied OLAP discount code, AOLAP, and you will save another $100.

Kscope features the world's most intensive learning opportunities for Essbase, Hyperion Planning, Hyperion Financial Management, Oracle Application Express (APEX) and Oracle Fusion Middleware.  Register today and I will see you there!

Smart View 11.1.2.1.102 Performance Tip

A couple of weeks ago, I was preparing to speak on the new Smart View 11.1.2.1.102 at the ODTUG Hyperion SIG Dallas meeting and found a performance issue when trying to zoom in on large datasets.  Here is the sheet I was zooming:

I used Sample Basic and zoomed in to all levels on Year, Measures, and Product.  When I zoomed in on Market, Smart View never returned but rather just kept trying to zoom in for a while.  After working on it for a bit, I decided to try the same thing in the classic Excel add-in and, guess what?  The same sequence of operations is not even possible there as it easily shoots past the 65,535 rows supported by the classic add-in.   I tried it in Dodeca and it returned a bit over 172,000 rows in 5 seconds, so it certainly isn't an issue with the Essbase server and large retrieves.

I next talked to one of my friends inside Oracle and found the source of the performance issue.  If you have used the classic Excel add-in, you may remember seeing the Use Styles option which formats the cells returned by Essbase based on member cell or data cell attributes.  Based on my VBA experience, I can tell you that doing lots of format operations in an Excel worksheet can be quite slow.  In Smart View 11.1.2.1.102, there is a new option called Use Excel Formatting which also defaults to false.  This setting is conceptually the opposite of Use Styles in the classic add-in.  In other words, Smart View 11.1.2.1.102, along with all previous versions of Smart View, automatically formats the cells that are returned.  In fact, you can see the formatting in the screenshot above.

To prevent this automatic formatting and speed up your retrievals, set the Use Excel Formatting option to true.

Once I made this change, the zoom in operation on Market did complete and brought back more than 172,000 rows.

Another thing you may note from the spreadsheet is that member labels are repeated.  This is another difference between the classic add-in and Smart View.  The Repeat Member Labels option has been renamed Suppress Repeated Members and the default behavior has changed.  With Smart View, you must select the option to Suppress Repeated Members to see the same behavior you saw by default in the classic add-in.  Frankly, I don't remember if this is something new in Smart View 11.1.2.1.102, but just be aware of it.  In the screenshot below, I have set the Suppress Repeated Members setting to mimic the classic add-in.