Thursday, April 20, 2017

Breaking News! Dodeca Spreadsheet Management System Certified on Oracle Analytics Cloud!

Now that the Oracle Analytics Cloud, or "OAC", has been released, we had to get serious about our work with one of the Oracle Analytics Cloud components, the Essbase Cloud Service, or "EssCS" for short.  You would think that we should have been working hard on EssCS for quite some time, but we had been assured by Oracle product management that the Essbase Java API would be available in EssCS.  Of course, Dodeca was built using the Essbase Java API and thus we expected that support for EssCS would be very easy.

We got access to a production version of the EssCS last week and started our work.  As promised by product management, the Essbase Java API is available in EssCS and, believe it or not, we did not need to change a single line of source code in order to support the Essbase Cloud.  We did, however, have to update our build processes to use Java 8 instead of the decrepit Java 6 used in Essbase 11.x.

As far as configuration inside Dodeca itself, the only change we made was that we configured the APSUrl in the Essbase Connection object to point to the Essbase Cloud APS instance.  Note that the URL format has changed in the cloud.  The Java API was accessible in Essbase 9.3.1 through Essbase 11.1.2.4 using the format:

http://<server>:<port>/aps/JAPI

In the cloud, this has changed to:

http://<server>:<port>/essbase/japi

The Essbase Connection configuration looks pretty much the same as the configuration for an on premise connection configuration:








Of course, the Dodeca views look identical when run against an on premise or a cloud server:



In summary, it was trivial to test Dodeca using EssCS.  Every single Essbase functionality that we use in the product, from data grid operations to metadata operations and even report scripts, worked exactly the same as it does against an on premise Essbase cube.  Based on our testing, we are certifying the Dodeca Spreadsheet Management System to work on the Oracle Analytics Cloud.

We have a number of innovations we plan to introduce in the near future aimed to improve the Essbase Cloud experience, so stay tuned.  If you are planning to come to Kscope17 in San Antonio, plan to attend the Dodeca Symposium and you may just be the first to see of these cool new things!