Tim Tow's Hyperion Blog

The Book..

2012-01-30T18:20:00.002-06:00

You may have noticed that I haven't been posting consistently over the past few months. The main reason for that is that I have been involved in writing a book. Actually, I wrote one chapter of a book, but it was intense work on the Essbase Java API.

The title of the book is Developing Essbase Applications: Advanced Techniques for Finance and IT Professionals which is the brainchild of, and potential cause of heart failure for, my friend Cameron Lackpour. The chapter list is quite impressive:

Essbase infrastructure
Data quality
Essbase Studio
BSO in depth
BSO to ASO conversions
Designing ASO for performance
Practical MDX
Essbase Java API
Automating with Groovy
Advanced Smart View
Administering Essbase

Cameron recruited a team of Essbase professionals to come together on a book, defined what he wanted, managed us authors who whined about the amount of work it turned into, and lived to tell the story. This book was written by a collection of authors with large amounts of real-life Essbase experience. Almost all of these authors are speaking at Kscope12 as well. :

Dave Anderson;
Joe Aultman;
John Booth;
Gary Crisci;
Natalie Delemar;
Dave Farnsworth;
Michael Nader;
Dan Pressman;
Robb Salzmann; and
Angela Wilcox

The first draft of the book is now complete and has been sent to the publisher. We are hoping the book will be published before, and available at, Kscope12 in late June.

Kscope12 Venue

2012-01-24T12:15:00.001-06:00

This past weekend, I participated in the ODTUG Board of Directors meeting which was held at the JW Marriott Hill Country in San Antonio, TX. This will be the location of Kscope12 and I have to tell you, I was very impressed by the hotel and grounds. First and foremost, the meeting areas for the conference are close together, so you will not need to walk very far between sessions, to get to the Exhibit Area or to get to lunch.

One of the big benefits of attending a conference is the one-to-one networking that you can do with other attendees and with the presenters. This hotel looks like it will make that very easy. The central atrium of the hotel has a large meeting area called the Crooked Branch Lobby that features a multiple fireplaces, sitting areas, games and a bar. There are also multiple fireplaces and sitting areas just outside on the patio. My guess is this area will be a prime gathering spot at Kscope12. The picture I posted here does not do it justice.

The Crooked Branch Lobby

Just off the Crooked Branch Lobby is a sports bar called High Velocity. This place has TV screens nearly everywhere and will be a popular hangout for sports fans.

High Velocity Sports Bar

Given that the content will, as always, be extremely good, the networking opportunities at this conference will be the best ever. If you haven't registered yet, you can register at http://kscope12.com/ and use our discount code AOLAP to get $100 off. I hope to see you there!

Kscope 2012 Sessions and Discount Code

2012-01-18T08:15:00.000-06:00

Sorry I haven't posted anything in the past month or so, but recently I have been spending all of my writing efforts on some material for an upcoming book. Thankfully, my writing on that project is now complete and I hope to spend more time writing here.

Since I posted last, I have learned I will be giving two presentations at Kscope12. On Monday, 6/25/2012, I will be presenting on the topic of Oracle Fusion Accounting Hub: Where Oracle Fusion and Essbase Become One. I think this will be a very interesting session that talks about the strategic importance of Essbase in the Oracle Fusion stack. On Thursday, 6/28/2012, I will be presenting Advanced Essbase Java API Tips and Tricks. I have done this session at the last several Kscope conferences, but try to add new content each time.

This year, Kscope12 features four distinct Hyperion related tracks including tracks for Hyperion Applications, EPM Business Content, Essbase and Beginner Essbase. The session schedule is now posted on the Kscope website at http://caat.odtug.com/odtug_caat/caat_abstract_reports.location_schedule?conference_id=90&location_group=ALL.

If you have not yet registered for Kscope, register today and use the Applied OLAP discount code, AOLAP, to save $100 off your registration. You can register for Kscope 2012 at http://kscope12.com/registration. I am headed to the conference hotel tonight to help with conference planning and to participate in the ODTUG Board of Directors meeting. In a previous board meeting, I voted for the selection of this property, the JW Marriott Hill Country, as the location for Kscope 2012 as I believe it will be a great place to learn and it will be a great place for families to play (while us tech people learn). This will be my first visit to the property and I will let you know what I think.

Classic Excel Add-in on 64-bit Windows 7

2011-12-01T13:20:00.001-06:00

As I mentioned in my earlier blog post about getting the OlapUnderground Outline Extractor running on Essbase 11.1.2.1, the classic Excel add-in did not work on my laptop. In my case, when I attempted to login to Essbase, the Essbase Login dialog did not display. As a result, I could not connect to Essbase. My laptop behaved like this for a number of months and, frankly, I didn't miss the add-in that much. Dodeca has an add-in mode where I can do everything the classic add-in does and more. Still, I wanted the classic add-in to run. I often use the classic add-in to create report templates for deployment in Dodeca.

Recently, when my QA team was working on support for the Outline Extractor in version 11.1.2.1, they discovered a new requirement for the PATH environment variable. There is a new directory, the bin-32 directory installed under the EPM home directory, that is now required for the Essbase client API's to work. This directory appears to contain dll's related to Oracle security. The solution to get the classic add-in running on my machine was to add this new directory to the PATH environment variable.

I have an additional complication on my laptop as it also runs my Essbase server. Needless to say, I am very careful when considering changes to environment variables. I decided to create a command file to temporarily set the environment variables and then launch Excel. Now, when I launch Excel using the following command script, the Essbase add-in works correctly.

set EPMHOME=C:\Oracle\MIDDLE~1\EPMSYS~1
set ARBORPATH=%EPMHOME%\common\ESSBAS~2\1112~1.0
set ESSBASEPATH=%ARBORPATH%

set PATH=%ARBORPATH%\bin;%EPMHOME%\bin-32;%PATH%

set XLL_LOCATION=%EPMHOME%\products\EXCELA~1

start "C:\Progra~2\MIF5BA~1\Office11\EXCEL.EXE" %XLL_LOCATION%\bin\essexcln.xll

I find it more dependable to use the 8.3 filename format when creating command scripts. Keep in mind that the 8.3 filenames may be different on your machine.

Strange New(?) Error Message in Essbase API 11.1.2.1

2011-11-16T15:39:00.001-06:00

I have been working with Essbase 11.1.2.1 and am seeing an error message that I don't remember seeing in previous Essbase versions. The new error message is:

Unknown Error: Not a valid entry

I saw this message a couple of times over the past couple of days when working with Essbase members. On the first occasion, I was calling the IEssCubeOutline.getDimensions() method and saw this error:

Cannot get child member names. Essbase Error(1013383): Unknown Error: Not a valid entry

I traced this issue to code that inadvertently called IEssCube.clearActive() before calling the IEssCubeOutline.getDimensions() method. The second instance happened when I called IEssMember.getRelatedMemberNames() on an IEssMember object that was obtained from an IEssMemberSelection object. In this case, the error number was slightly different:

Cannot get related member names. Essbase Error(1013384): Unknown Error: Not a valid entry

I expected the second exception to occur. The getRelatedMemberNames() method, which returns an array containing the parent, sibling and first child information, is not available unless you obtain the IEssMember object by querying an IEssCubeOutline object. I was simply surprised that the error message was the same.

Of course, it is confusing that all member objects are not created equal in Essbase. It will be a great day when Essbase returns a full IEssMember object regardless of the method used to obtain it. That being said, I am not holding my breath.

OLAPUnderground Outline Extractor on 11.1.2.1 - Updated Path Requirements

2011-11-10T18:47:00.001-06:00

We are starting to get OlapUnderground users who have installed 11.1.2.1 and are seeing problems with the Outline Extractor. We also had issues with this version of the Outline Extractor. Some of the typical symptoms were that Essbase dialogs, such as the login dialog, did not work. In fact, I saw this same behavior in the classic Excel add-in on my machine; it did not work. My QA team went to work and found a couple of interesting things about Essbase API applications in 11.1.2.1.

First, there is a new requirement for another directory in the path statement. After a bit of searching, our QA guys found the following article on Oracle's MySupport site (Document ID 1322496.1):

Problem : Running a 32-bit VB API on a 64-bit Essbase Server Fails With "ERROR: Essbase Initialization Failed, StatusCode = 1030803

This document explains that the "environment has to use the bin-32 directory to get 32-bit VB API programs to run on the 64-bit server."

There is a new directory that must be in the PATH environment variable! As I am running the 64-bit Essbase server on my machine, I didn't want to change the PATH of the operating system on the chance it would break the Essbase server. Instead, I created a cmd file to set the appropriate environment variables and run the Outline Extractor. Here is the complete command file:

@rem This command file uses the 8.3 filename format.
@rem The 8.3 filename may vary between machines, so
@rem be sure to check the paths carefully. Use dir /x
@rem to find the filenames in the 8.3 format.

set EPMHOME=C:\Oracle\MIDDLE~1\EPMSYS~1

set ARBORPATH=%EPMHOME%\common\ESSBAS~2\1112~1.0
set ESSBASEPATH=%ARBORPATH%
set ESSLANG=English_UnitedStates.Latin1@Binary

set PATH=%ARBORPATH%\bin;%EPMHOME%\bin-32;%PATH%

start C:\PROGRA~2\OLAPUN~1\ESSBAS~1.2\EXPORT~1.EXE

Note that I used 8.3 filename format. I quickly tried using double-quotes around long filenames to these directories in an attempt to make it run without the 8.3 filenames. I didn't get it right the first time and didn't put any more time into it; the script with 8.3 filenames worked the first time.

A second thing we noticed about the Essbase 11.1.2.1 VB API is that the VB supporting files, most notably esb32.bas declarations file that defines the functions in the dll's, do not appear to be in the distribution. We did find esb32.bas in the samples, but they were from Essbase 9.3

Finally, due to the missing esb32.bas, we have not yet shipped an official version of the Essbase Outline Extractor for 11.1.2.1. The likely case is that no declarations changed and we can just use the 11.1.2.0 version with an updated ESB_API_VERSION variable. Until we do that, when you run the Essbase Outline Extractor with Essbase 11.1.2.1, you will see a dialog that warns you are using the incorrect version of Essbase.

If you are using the Essbase Outline Extractor for 11.1.2.0, you can ignore this warning and the Extractor should still run successfully.

Note: I will follow up with a similar post on how I got the classic Excel add-in working on my machine.

2011-11-05T23:55:00.000-05:00

We finally got out and did something here in the beautiful city of Sydney. Yesterday, Darlene and I did the Sydney Harbour Bridge Climb with Mark Rittman and Stuart Bryson from Rittman Mead along with Stuart's wife Pamela. Here is a shot from the top of the bridge.

After the climb, we met up with Ash Beauman from Rittman Mead Australia for a few beers and even some late night clubbing around The Rocks area of Sydney. Of course, we had plenty of time to discuss OBIEE and how Essbase fits into the picture; I guess we are all true geeks.

Later, I pulled an all-nighter to go on-line and watch my Michigan Wolverines play Iowa; I didn't like the result. Today, it is off to Manly Beach to explore another part of Sydney.

NZOUG / ODTUG SP Sydney Wrapup

2011-11-04T02:30:00.000-05:00

It is Friday afternoon and my busy week of speaking is over. It started out in Auckland, New Zealand at the NZOUG conference. It was a great conference and the special event, a dinner with an interactive mystery game, was excellent.

Wednesday, we flew to Sydney for the ODTUG SP Conference. The flight was on Qantas and, due to the airline shutdown earlier in the week, we had to check-in for the flight 2 hours ahead of time or risk losing our seats. Qantas also enforces a weight limit of about 16 pounds per carry-on bag. We didn't know that until we tried to go through security and we were sent back to check-in to check one of our carry-on bags. Once airborne, however, the flight was great and I relaxed, watched the movie and enjoyed the meal service. They even brought ice cream bars for dessert! As we approached Sydney airport in the plane, we had a great view of the harbor, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and the famous Sydney Opera House.

The SP Conference was well attended in both the BI and the EPM tracks. I participated in the keynote where I got to tell everyone about the new version of Smart View. I also had the honor of introducing the Oracle Fusion Accounting Hub. This new product shows Oracle's deep commitment to Essbase and I will be doing a blog post with more details in the near future.

My first session in Sydney covered Essbase techniques in Excel. This session first discussed the new version of Smart View and I threw in some live demos. The new Smart View brings near-parity to the classic Excel add-in and thus makes available a number of techniques that did not work with the older Smart View versions. I also covered how Essbase 'Query-by-Example' grid layouts work and, based on the applause at the end, the session was very well received (or the attendees where very polite).

My final session was this afternoon and focused on Essbase API tips and tricks. The SP conference is now complete and it is time to relax for a while. I have been in Australia for 48 hours and haven't seen the famous Sydney Opera House yet. It is only 2 or 3 blocks from our hotel, but I haven't really been outside at all. We are headed out for dinner tonight and will be staying in Australia until next Wednesday, so I am sure I will see it soon.

Tomorrow morning, we are doing the Sydney Harbour Bridge Climb with Mark Rittman and Stewart Bryson from Rittman Mead. We will certainly see it then.

Speaking of Mark Rittman, he tweeted about the dangerous animals featured on the wall displays leading to customs in Sydney Airport. At lunch yesterday, he pulled up a 'Top 10' list of Australia's most deadly animals. I guess there are some nasty creatures here; the Great White Shark is only the 9th most deadly animal on the list! I will be sure not to let down my guard.

Outrageous..

2011-10-31T00:42:00.003-05:00

New Zealand is a beautiful country and we had a wonderful time on the weekend visiting the Coromandel Peninsula. I am now at the NZOUG conference, but I am outraged and need to let you know one thing in case you ever come here to visit. Leave your internet devices at home and don't plan to communicate unless you are prepared to empty your pocket.

I am staying at the conference hotel, The Pullman, where internet connectivity is $28.50/day/device. I was told I could upgrade to have access to the 'The Club' level for $40/person/day and that I would have unlimited internet. Given the fact that Darlene and I have 3 devices between us, and for the free snacks and drinks in the Club level, I decided I would upgrade us.

When I connected, it seemed strange that I was being prompted to login and agree to the $28.50/day even though I had the 'Club' status, so I went to the front desk. I was getting charged for both the club and the daily rate. What? Apparently, the clerk at check-in told me about the free internet in the 'Club' level but failed to mention that the internet was free only when you were on their computers in the 'Club'. So, with my devices *and* the 'Club', I was being charged $165/day for internet access. That is actually more than I paid for the room! On top of that, I had paid an extra $300 this month just to have phone/3G service on my iPhone in New Zealand. The hotel manager did agree to cancel my 'cCub' level access and remove those charges which was a nice gesture, the the idea that we are still paying nearly $90/day for internet access that drops when you move from room to room has left a bad taste in my mouth.

On a side note, on our first day in New Zealand, we stayed next door at The Quadrant hotel. I liked the rooms better and they had free internet. Next time, I will stay there the entire time.

OK.. I feel better now.. Besides, Edward Roske is here with his wife; he told me they have 4 devices!

The Limits of SSPROCROWLIMIT are History

2011-10-21T13:51:00.003-05:00

At Open World, in light of the announcement of Exalytics, I suggested during a panel discussion that the limit for SSROWPROCLIMIT be raised. In case you are not familiar with the setting, let me tell you about it and its implications. SSPROCROWLIMIT is an Essbase config file setting that controls the maximum number of spreadsheet rows Essbase processes on a Spreadsheet Add-in request. It is used only when suppress missing rows is turned on. The rows subject to the limit are counted before suppression.

The problem with this setting is the small number of rows allowed, as the default value is 250,000 and the maximum value is 500,000. That probably wasn't a bad limit when this setting was introduced in the very early days of Essbase. At that time, I was running a fast Pentium machine with 1 Mb of RAM and 2 1Gb SCSI drives. At that time, 500,000 rows was huge. Now, with Exalytics and 1 TB of RAM which is, if I did the math correctly, more that a million times more memory than my old Pentium, the same 500,000 row limit seems quite confining. At the same time, Essbase outlines keep growing. I have a customer who has 380,000 members in one dimension in a BSO database! If they tried to zoom in, suppress missing, on this and any other dimension, Essbase would need an SSPROCROWLIMIT of 760,000 rows if the second dimension had only 2 members. Further, the row limit enforced by this setting considers the number of rows before suppression. This means that it doesn't matter whether the query actually returns more than 500,000 rows or just a single row after suppression, the limit is used internally during the suppress missing processing.

I sent a quick email to the Essbase program manager after Open World and, like magic, he let me know that the latest Essbase version, 11.1.2.1.102, has removed the upper limit. Sure enough, I checked the readme.html for the new patch and here it is:

New Maximum for SSPROCROWLIMIT

(11730559)

The Essbase.cfg setting SSPROCROWLIMIT no longer has a maximum value of 500,000. The maximum number of spreadsheet rows Essbase processes on a request can now be set to 16,384 or higher. It is not recommended to use a limit higher than 500,000.

I haven't tried it yet, but I am sure I will in the near future. I know a number of customers who will be excited about this change.

Guest Blog Entry for ODTUG

2011-10-20T14:20:00.000-05:00

I have written a guest blog entry about my upcoming trip to speak at Oracle conferences in New Zealand and Australia. In the post, I discuss a couple of my plans for the trip and talk a bit about the sessions I am going to present. The blog entry now posted at http://odtug.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/tim-tows-heading-to-australia/.

Dodeca 6 is Here!

2011-10-13T17:16:00.000-05:00

We have been working very hard over the past year and are pleased to announce we are ready to release Dodeca, version 6. In past major releases of Dodeca, we have focused on a theme and this release is no different. The theme for Dodeca 6 is high performance.

The performance enhancements encompass changes to both the Dodeca server and the Dodeca client. The server changes include a major refactoring of both the Dodeca and the Dodeca-Essbase server components. The changes to both servers include:

Implementation of a new, object-oriented framework that makes it easier for us to add new functionality in the future. It also makes it easier for customers and partners to extend the server functionalities of Dodeca.
Significantly improved performance reading and writing the xml used to communicate with the client. In fact, in the case of large documents, xml read/write performance has been improved by more than 2000%.
A new logging infrastructure that allows customers to better understand the internal operations of the servers. Each server has both a timed log and an untimed log. The timed log allows customers to see internal timings in the server which can be very useful for performance tuning.

Additionally, to both improve performance and to add flexibility for dynamically generated Essbase templates, we have also added relational caching of the Essbase outline. Though this capability is optional, we think it is a nice new functionality.

The client also has some impressive performance enhancements. These enhancements include:

Significantly improved performance reading and writing the xml used to communicate with the Dodeca-Essbase service.
The new Accelerator that can improve the overall performance of our .NET client by up to 400%.
We have also added some new functionality that we think users will love. For example, Dodeca now features:

Multi-level Essbase undo/redo.
An Essbase Unknown Members explorer
Customizable Excel AutoCalculate to display sums, averages, etc of a selected range in the status bar.
New options for inserting/deleting rows, columns and worksheets.
Over 10 new workbook script methods and functions. The new functions and methods enable Dodeca workbook scripts to call a custom web service, to execute custom code on the Dodeca-Essbase server, to get the dimension name represented at a given member cell and to obtain a GUID from the operating system, among other features.

The performance we are seeing in Dodeca is quite astonishing. We have a number of customers who have the desire to retrieve large amounts of data from the Essbase server. Oracle, with its new ultra-fast Exalytics hardware, validates this customer requirement by producing hardware to support large and fast Essbase operations. Yesterday, I did a zoom-in during a webcast demo that returned nearly 190,000 cells of data; it was about 9,500 rows by 20 columns. The operation completed in about 2 seconds. The means Dodeca was able to make a request to Essbase, Essbase retrieved the data, and the data was returned into the spreadsheet, at a rate of approximately 95,000 cells per second.

I also was doing some stress testing a few months ago and did a large zoom-in operation. Here is a screenshot of the spreadsheet after the zoom.

This retrieve, where the grid size was 803,530 rows by 9 columns, processed through our server in just over 42 seconds. How do I know that? I could see it in the Dodeca logs:

The items circled in the log indicate the grid size before the zoom-in, the grid size after the zoom-in and the milliseconds to complete the entire transaction. Since this screenshot was taken, we have done further work on the logs to separate items that have sizes/times associated with them and things that don’t have associated times. Further, the default formatting for the timed logs use pipe-delimiters between the fields so the log can be imported directly into a relational database, or even into Excel, for further analysis.

I have covered a bunch of things in this blog entry but there are a bunch of new things in Dodeca 6. When we began work on the servers, I put in many, many 80+ hour weeks researching and working on conceptual designs for the server. I was telling someone recently about my experiences during that time. Basically, I didn’t shower for days at a time and my hair gets greasy after 1 day, so I wore a toque (or stocking hat). I wore one of my many hooded sweatshirts, kept my headsets on and was generally anti-social. My family barely got a word in and most of my friends at Starbucks didn’t even recognize me. The person to whom I was telling this was another programmer and familiar with the concept. He said to me, “So, you went into Unabomber mode!” I guess you could call it that. For everyone who reads my blog on a regular basis, perhaps you can see why my posts have become a bit scarce over the last year.

In summary, this post talks about a few of the key aspects of Dodeca 6. I will delve into some of these topics deeper as time goes by, but for now, I will leave this post with a bit of a puzzler for you. Below is a screenshot of one of the new samples created using the out-of-the-box functionality of Dodeca 6. This sample view features write-back to Essbase, but it breaks the rules of Essbase a bit. Tell me, what are at least 3 of the normal Essbase rules we broke and how did we do it? I will send a free Dodeca T-Shirt to the first 5 correct answers posted in the comments below.

Note that I have to approve the comments before they show up in the comments, so I will know who the first 5 people are. For those of you who have already seen this demonstrated, you are ineligible to win but, then again, you probably already have a bunch of Dodeca T-Shirts. Winners need to send me email once you have been identified as a winner and include your name/address/size so I can mail the shirt. Also, if you want to win a shirt, use your real name when you post the comment as I don’t want to try to manage sorting out who the real ‘anonymous’ is.

So, how did we make this work?

Using the Java API to Logout Users From a Server

2011-10-13T08:29:00.000-05:00

There was a question on the Network54 board today regarding the Java API and logging off all users from a given application. I quickly wrote up a quick (but untested) bit of Java API code as an example, but decided to post it here as Network54 mangles the formatting of code examples. Without further ado, here is the code in a more readable format:

void disconnectUsersOfApplication(IEssOlapServer server, String applicationName) throws EssException {
    // get the connections to the server
    IEssIterator connections = server.getConnections();

    // loop the connections
    for (int i = 0; i < connections.getCount(); i++) {
        // cast to a connection info object
        IEssOlapServer.IEssOlapConnectionInfo connection = 
         (IEssOlapServer.IEssOlapConnectionInfo)connections
         .getAt(i);

        // if the connection is to the target app
        if (connection.getConnectedApplicationName()
         .equalsIgnoreCase(applicationName)) {
            // log them off
            connection.logoffUser();
        }
    }
}

Essbase Strategic to Oracle Fusion

2011-10-06T10:14:00.000-05:00

We have been hearing that Essbase is a core technology in the Oracle Fusion strategy, but what is Fusion and how does Essbase fit?

In general, Fusion is the next generation set of applications from Oracle. Oracle has acquired a number of companies over the past several years and each company, like Hyperion, brought compelling functionality to the Oracle family. Each product they acquired, however, presented significantly different user experiences. Under the covers, the acquired products were also significantly different as they were built on a variety of technical frameworks.

In Fusion applications, Oracle is bringing together the world class applications they have acquired into a single suite. Fusion is not simply a marketing slogan nor is it simply a creative packaging of the acquired products. Instead, Fusion is a completely new product line that takes the best ideas from the acquired products and incorporates them into a single, rationalized product. These products have been rewritten from scratch using a single UI platform, the Oracle Application Development Framework ("ADF") which is an industry standard Java technology that runs on Oracle Middleware. Oracle ADF delivers a standard set of components which are available to customers and partners and when customers want, or need, to extend the Fusion applications, the extension will be written in the same ADF Framework that Oracle uses to build the products.

So, how does Essbase fit in? I had previously heard that Essbase will be incorporated into the Fusion Financials General Ledger as the standard allocation engine. I was thrilled to hear this week that the Fusion Financials General Ledger will also automatically spin off Essbase analytic cubes. This is great news for all of us that love Essbase as it places Essbase into *every* Oracle customer. With all of the love Oracle has given Essbase this year, this has been the best Oracle Open World ever!

Oracle Annouces the Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine

2011-10-05T09:47:00.000-05:00

Larry Ellisom opened Open World with a keynote on the theme of Extreme performance and focused on how the Oracle Exadata and Exalogic servers have hardware and software engineered together for performance.

The Exa* line feature both parallel hardware and software. That means the servers, network, storage, vm's, OS, database and middleware all run parallel with no single point of failure. The Exa* line uses a Hybrid Columnar Compression algorithm to compress the data in memory. The computers also use Infiniband network connectivity within the machine which provides a 10x performance increase over TCP/IP. Combining the compression with the network performance gains, Oracle is claiming 100x performance increases.

Likewise, the Exa* line has massive amounts of RAM inside the machine. How much? You guessed it. 10x more. Combining the 10x compressed memory with the 10x more RAM means 100x more data in memory.

In summary, the Exa* line is fast. Oracle cited results from customers including BNP Paribas where the data warehouse ran 17x faster with no other changes.

So, what does this have to do with Essbase? Larry Ellison also announced the new Exalytics Intelligence Machine. The marketing bulletpoints on this announcement included extreme in-memory analytics, speed of thought analysis, and instantaneous business intelligence. As many of you remember, Speed of Thought Analysis was one of the Arbor or Hyperion marketing slogans; it is great to see it back!

The details of the machine, though, are really cool. The hardware features include:

1 Tb of RAM (which could contain 5 to 10 Tb of compressed data)
40 cores (4 x 10 Core Intel Xeon CPUs)
Disk read rates of up to 200 Gb/sec
40 Gbps Infiniband internal network
1-10 GBps ethernet external network

Exalytics isn't just hardware. It comes pre-installed with software as well:

BI Foundation Suite: OBIEE
In-memory parallel Analytics
In-memory parallel Essbase
In-Memory Parallel TimesTen

So, what the heck is In-memory parallel Essbase? The short answer is that it is Essbase tuned to work with in-memory data. So, what does that mean? They have implemented an adaptive in-memory cache that decides what get stored in memory. The algorithm adapts to change to the workload and can auto-tune or be tuned by administrators.

What I have learned talking with my sources is that the Essbase server engine has a number of new optimizations that enables it to better utilize large amounts of memory. Apparently, these optimizations will also be in the upcoming 11.1.2.2 version of Essbase regardless of whether Essbase is running on the Exalytics hardware. In other words, the improvements will benefit all Essbase customers but the improvements can be more fully leveraged on the Exalytics hardware.

Thomas Kurian, who is the Executive Vice President of Product Development at Oracle, introduced the details of Exalytics in his keynote. At the ACE Directors meeting last week, we were honored to have Thomas speak to our group where we were briefed on Exalytics. I have heard Thomas speak a number of times since the Hyperion acquisition and, in my opinion, I think Thomas is truly one of the smartest people in the world. He is responsibile for hundreds of products yet, last week, I heard Thomas answer a question about support on a specific virtual machine. Not only did he have the answer, but he referenced a specific device driver file. Wow!

Oracle had an Exalytics machine on display outside the keynote. Here is a picture of the Exalytics machine (in the foreground; that is an Exadata database machine in the background).

So, yes, I actually got to touch the new machine. Oracle didn't announce availability or pricing on the machine. Of course, I am sure your friendly neighborhood Oracle sales rep would be happy to answer those questions for you.

On the screen in the background, Oracle was displaying the new OBIEE running against Essbase. It appears they have implemented much of the same type of functionality that was previously available in the Hyperion Visual Explorer add-in for Excel. This type of visualization is very helpful for spotting patterns in large datasets and I expect it will be very popular.

I look forward to working on an Exalytics based system soon. I know a number of customers who look forward to having one of these systems.

Oracle Support Events at Open World 2011

2011-09-30T17:58:00.001-05:00

I was recently on the Oracle support site and saw some interesting information about the Oracle Support presence at Open World 2011. When I first attended Open World years ago, my impression was that it was the big Oracle sales party. Since that time, however, I have found more technical content in both the JavaOne and Develop tracks. One thing I was pleased to see this year, however, is the Support Stars Bar.

The Support Stars Bar is a place where you can meet, in person, with Oracle support people. I think this is a great step by Oracle as, once a sale is complete, Oracle Support really is the face of Oracle for the customer. Many times, however, support people are just voices on the phone. I really like speaking with people I have met in person and, if you like that as well, this is your chance to meet some of the support people.

I found out through the grapevine that at least 3 Hyperion support people will be there:

Kevin Lawrence - Senior Manager in charge of Essbase support
David Nguyen - Manager in charge of Essbase support
Majeed Malik - Senior Tech Support Analyst for BI+ (formerly Brio)

The Support Stars Bar will be located in the Moscone West, Level 2 Lobby Sunday through Thursday.

Oracle Support also has an interesting session scheduled for Tuesday.

Best Practices: Supporting Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Applications
Session Number 14910
Tuesday, Oct 4th: 1:15pm-2:15pm
Westin St. Francis, Elizabeth CD – Floor 2

You chose Oracle's enterprise performance management products to help your organization deliver superior results. Now learn how to take full advantage of your software with all the great tools, resources, and product updates you're entitled to through Oracle Support. In this session, Oracle product experts provide proven best practices to help you work more efficiently, plan and prepare for upgrades more effectively, and manage risk. Topics include My Oracle Support best practices, remote diagnostic tools, the My Oracle Support Community, and lifecycle framework reviews. New users and experts alike will leave with fresh ideas and practical, easy-to-implement next steps for successfully supporting Oracle and Oracle Hyperion solutions.

Finally, there is an Oracle Support Community Meetup (Note: Call it a party) on Monday night. The event is free, but you do have to stop by the Support Stars Bar on either Sunday or Monday to pickup a pass. The pass will tell you the location of the party (which sounds like it may be at a microbrewery).

Smart View 11.1.2.1.102 Webcast

2011-09-26T09:09:00.003-05:00

As you may have heard on other blogs, the new version of Smart View has been released and it has some pretty cool features. What that means is, after having been available since Essbase 7X, Smart View is finally good enough, in many cases, to be a replacement for the classic Excel add-in.

Some of the new features include:

POV Toggle
Formula Preservation
Formula Fill on Zoom Operations
Sheet level Options
Member Name and Alias on Rows
Resolve Alias Name
Zoom Options
Submit without Refresh
Duplicate Member Name
Member Information
Range-Based operations
Multi-cell based operations
Use Excel Formatting
Butterfly Report
Substitution Variable Support
Linked Reporting Objects

The Smart View team is hosting a webcast this coming ~~Friday~~ THURSDAY morning to show off their new product. You can sign up for the webcast at on the Oracle support site under document id 1356368.1. Note that you must have a (free) Oracle account to sign up for the webcast. My team and I participated on the beta and, despite the fact that I will be at Oracle headquarters that day and the webcast is scheduled for 6 am Pacific time, I will be there.

A few people have asked me about Smart View vs Dodeca and asked if the products compete in the market. To some degree, Dodeca does compete against Smart View, but it is more of a co-opetition. We know the Smart View team and have worked closely with them for many years. In fact, when I was briefed on the functionality, my comment was that Smart View would finally be a decent environment for creating Dodeca templates. Congratulations to the Smart View team for finally reaching that milestone!

Speaking of Dodeca, we are on the verge of announcing a major new version. Watch this space over the next few days as we start to show off our work!

OTN Asia Pacific Tour / ODTUG EPM/BI SP Conference in Sydney

2011-09-23T22:30:00.001-05:00

I am hitting the road soon as I have been invited to speak in Auckland, New Zealand as part of the OTN Asia Pacific Tour and in Sydney, Australia at the ODTUG Seriously Practical Conference. Both of these conferences are scheduled for the week of October 31. Due to commitments at my company, I was unable to speak at other OTN Tour stops in Bangkok, Thailand, Beijing, China and Manila, The Philippines but don't worry. My friend Edward Roske will be speaking at all locations.

The trip will start in New Zealand with 2 presentations at the NZOUG Conference 2011 on October 31 and November 1. The presentations, and related abstracts, I am scheduled to do in Auckland are:

Find Meaning in Your General Ledger Using Oracle Essbase

Oracle owns several General Ledger applications and, with the addition Oracle Essbase, now has a world class analytic engine. However, many Oracle general ledger users may not know that Essbase exists or know how it can help them. Attend this session and learn what Essbase and learn how
companies are leveraging Essbase to analyze the data in their General Ledger.

What is Oracle Essbase and How Is It Different From the Oracle Database?

Since the acquisition of the Hyperion suite of products, including the Essbase analytic server, many Oracle professionals have wondered "What is this piece of software called Essbase, how is it different than the Oracle database, and why would I need it?" Attend this session to see Essbase and
the Oracle Database compared and contrasted from both the technological and the business perspectives and to see opportunities for Oracle customers to leverage these technologies.

The first session is completely new content that I need to generate before I leave for Auckland. My assumption for this presentation is that the audience will be from the Oracle GL user audience and I want to introduce them to Essbase. I also plan to discuss the Oracle products that link together Essbase and the GL such as ERPi and FDM, but I don't yet have any good videos showing how it works. Does anyone out there have any cool FDM type of videos you could share? And, of course, I will also talk about Essbase Studio drillthough and Dodeca.

The second session in Auckland is a session that closely parallels the article I wrote for this quarters ODTUG Technical Journal.

The schedule calls for us to fly from Auckland to Sydney, Australia on Wednesday, November 2 for the ODTUG EPM/BI Seriously Practical ("SP") Conference. I am doing two different sessions in Sydney on November 3 and 4:

Unleashing the Power of Essbase in Excel

Excel was the original user interface for Essbase and remains the most popular user interface for Essbase data. Attend this session by Tim Tow, Oracle ACE Director, and learn techniques, tips and tricks to make Essbase spreadsheets easier to create, easier to maintain and more performant using both the classic Excel Essbase add-in and Smart View. Tim, who was also one of five charter Microsoft Excel MVPs worldwide, has 16 years of Essbase spreadsheet experience, wrote some of the original Excel/Essbase demoware, and has helped thousands of users over the years.

Best Practices for Expanding Essbase with the API’s

The Essbase API is what elevates Essbase beyond being just a product and turns it, instead, into a platform. Customers can leverage the Essbase APIs to finely tailor their Essbase experiences and can range from simple automations to full applications. Join one of the world’s most experienced Essbase API developers, Oracle ACE Director Tim Tow, and learn best practices for using both the Essbase VB API and the Essbase Java API.

These two sessions will be, for the most part, new content but it is content that comes from what I do *everyday*. I am excited about the SP Conference as maybe ODTUG can put on SP Conferences in other parts of the world. Where would you like ODTUG to do a Seriously Practical Conference?

Oracle Executive Webcast - Oracle Database Appliance

2011-09-21T13:55:00.000-05:00

The Oracle Executive Webcast announced the new Oracle Database Appliance. Oracle ventured into the hardware space in just the last few years with the introduction of their Exadata database machine. The Exadata, however, is a very large box intended for very large companies with very large applications (and has a price to match). The new Oracle Database Appliance is somewhat of an Exadata-lite intended for the SMB and departmental applications.

The appliance itself is a self contained unit with 24 processing cores, 192 Gb of RAM and 12 Tb of storage. It also has Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Enterprise Manager and other management pre-installed on Oracle Linux and configured in a dual server configuration. It also has what Oracle is calling a 'phone-home' feature that can automatically, and proactively, contact Oracle support even before the customer realizes they have an issue.

Software licensing is what Oracle is calling 'Pay-as-you-grow' licensing which means that you can buy the appliance with as little as 2 of the cores enabled and, as needs grow, can upgrade the license to more cores that take little more than a system reboot to enable. You can also transfer existing licenses to the appliance.

Obviously, one of the advantages of this appliance is the ability to essentially buy the system, plug it in, connect a network cable and turn it on and thus eliminate a bunch of pain acquiring hardware and downloading, installing and configuring software. One of the quotes in the webcast that stood out for me was that the statement that Oracle is looking for other opportunities to deliver products on an appliance. Note to Oracle: I think both an Oracle EPM appliance and an Essbase appliance, preconfigured with an Oracle database as the repository, would be very popular!

The appliance is available now. More information is available on the Oracle website at http://www.oracle.com/us/products/database/database-appliance/index.html.

Oracle Executives on Oracle Database Webcast

2011-09-20T18:08:00.000-05:00

I found out about an Oracle Executive webcast tomorrow, Wednesday September 21, at 1 pm US Eastern Time / 10 am US Pacific Time. The webcast is focused on the Oracle Database and features Oracle executives

Mark Hurd, President;
Andy Mendelsohn, Senior Vice President, Database Server Technologies; and
Judson Althoff, Senior Vice President, Worldwide A&C and Embedded Sales

The thing that intrigued me about this webcast is the statement on the registration page that 'Oracle executives will share plans for a new product that will offer customers and partners a faster path to take advantage of the world’s #1 database.'

I am going to try to catch the webcast so I can find out what new product is.. You can register for the webcast at http://www.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=140522&src=7317513&src=7317513&Act=45. Note that you must have an Oracle account to register for this webcast.

Consulting and 9/11

2011-09-11T13:59:00.001-05:00

This week, I read an interesting blog entry on the effect that 9/11 had on another consultant (http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/how-911-changed-my-it-consulting-career/18415?tag=nl.e550). I, too, was affected heavily by 9/11; this is my experience.

Starting in late 1994, I worked primarily as a consultant. At first, I was doing Excel consulting. After all, I had co-authored some Excel books and was one of the original five Microsoft Excel Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) in the world. In early 1995, Dave Farnsworth from Solutions Experts and Ron Moore from Marketing Technologies Group showed me Essbase when we were all working at Smith Kline Beecham in Philadelphia; I was highly impressed. Shortly afterward, the small consulting firm I worked for was contracted by Microsoft to write some demoware showing Excel as a frontend to Arbor Essbase. That job changed my life.

Soon afterward, I was on the road every week doing Excel / Essbase consulting all around the country. I spent tons of time in both California and New York while my wife held down the fort at home. By 1998, I had ideas for a product, but my colleagues at the consulting firm wanted to continue consulting. Many of them were not doing the heavy travel at the time, so I decided to leave and founded Applied OLAP.

I spent the first nine months of Applied OLAP doing consulting and spent most of that time in the New York area. In fact, I spent something like 150 nights that first year at the Newark Airport Hilton; I was on a first name basis with the room service people there. That initial travel did provide the capital to write a product and our original ActiveOLAP for Essbase product was born. Having a product, though, led to even more travel. I took 35 trips to San Francisco in one year!

ActiveOLAP also caused me to write the world’s first web services for Essbase. Hyperion was highly interested in these web services; they eventually became the Hyperion Application Builder for .NET product and directly affected the architecture of Smart View. Hyperion also told me they wanted to acquire the technology and invited me to join XML for Analysis Advisory Council. Interesting story, right? But what does this have to do with 9/11?

My meeting with Hyperion was on 9/6/2001 and the inaugural XML/A Advisory Council meeting was on Tuesday, 9/11/2001. I flew to Seattle for this one day meeting and was due to fly home late that evening. I will never forget the events of that morning; probably no American alive that morning could ever forget. And although nobody from my family or any of my friends in New York were injured or killed, I still can’t think about what happened without choking up in tears.

I was in a hotel just off the Microsoft campus in Redmond when, early in the morning, my wife called and was upset. An airplane had hit the World Trade Center and, at that time, it was thought to be a smaller plane. As we had been flying a lot of trips in our Cessna 210, she asked me “How could that happen? Didn’t they have GPS? Could a GPS be off that much?” I assured her that it wasn’t a GPS problem as I reached to turn on the TV. Before the TV turned on, my wife screamed as the second plane hit. That is when I knew this wasn’t a navigation issue.

The XML/A meeting was held that day, but I was the only Hyperion-related representative. The Hyperion team was on a plane that was forced to land somewhere between San Francisco and Seattle. There were representatives from many companies including Microsoft, Cognos, Microstrategy and Temtec. We managed to get some work done that day, but there were some side conversations about how we would all get home. A number of guys who attended the meeting set off the next morning driving eastbound to Toronto and beyond. When I was younger, I made the drive a couple of times from my native Michigan to the west coast, so I really wasn’t interested in driving back to Alabama.

That night and the next day, I watched, along with most of the nation, as the search continued for possible survivors in the rubble. I had worked with some companies in the World Trade Center and been there many, many times. I remember walking through the mall under the World Trade Center at 3 am during the blizzard of ’96; it was absolutely silent and it seemed as though I was on the only person in the building. When I traveled to New York, I normally took the PATH train into the World Trade Center from Newark.

Another day passed and I finally decided to get away from the TV for a while. It hurt not being with my wife and family during this national crisis. I thought about going to Mt Rainier; it was something grand and beautiful and strong and seemed untouchable for terrorists, but it would require several hours of driving to get there and back. Instead, I headed to downtown Seattle and ended up at the Experience Music Project, a museum dedicated to guitars. I saw the guitar played by my guitar hero, Eric Clapton, on the song ‘Layla’ and forgot about New York for a while.

Due to the airline groundings and with people trying to get home any way they could, rental cars where in short supply. People were renting moving vans to drive themselves home. I was reluctant to give up my rental car in case I needed to drive across the country, so I engineered a plan to keep my rental car until I knew I had an airline seat. I parked my rental car at the home of a friend in Seattle and he drove me to the airport. He generously volunteered to return the rental car after I finally left Seattle.

As I was traveling so much during that time, I had Delta Airlines Platinum status. That certainly helped me on Friday, 9/14, as I waited 20 minutes in the Platinum line instead of waiting in the ¼ mile long line of those without airline status. It took only a few minutes to get through the newly rigorous security and into the Delta Crown Room. A couple of hours later, I settled into a first class seat and, as the plane lifted off, came close to breaking out spontaneously in the ‘Star Spangled Banner’.

In the weeks, months, and even years that followed, I heard from friends I knew to be in or near the World Trade Center. One friend, a well-known Essbase consultant, was supposed to be in towers but was saved when his boss called a company meeting that morning. Another friend, who worked at Deutsche Bank, told me he felt jolts but didn’t know what had happened. He was evacuated a short time later through the basement but still was unaware what had happened. When he came to the door at the surface, the first responder told him to ‘run and don’t look back’. Only then did he know the scope of the tragedy. He ran for his life as office furniture, and people jumping from the towers, fell to the ground all around him.

My wife had been urging me to spend more time at home and it was an easy decision to cut back on my travel. Travel was fun at first, but I realized after a while that cubicles look the same in every city in the country. I am happy to report that I have not had Platinum status since that year and, in fact, have probably not been in first class either. And when I do have to travel, my wife often travels with me which makes exploring cities much more fun.

As a guy watching 9/11 on a TV in a hotel room in Seattle, the events had, and still have, an effect on me. I can’t start to imagine the effect that the attacks of 9/11 had on the thousands that lost a loved one that day, but I will always keep them in my thoughts. I am thankful I was nowhere near New York that day.

Kscope11: Java API Tips/Tricks Slides

2011-08-29T15:01:00.000-05:00

I have been quite busy working on getting Dodeca version 6.0 ready to ship, thus the long delay in getting these slides posted. I wanted to get these posted, however, as they are unfinished business before I can really start writing about Dodeca 6. So, without further delay, here are the slides..

BTW, the slides contain the abbreviation 'WWEAD'.. This stands for 'What Would the Essbase Addin Do?'

I also have uploaded some sample code that shows two different variations of signing on to the server, several different ways of getting member information and some examples of grid operations. The member information example was very interesting as I added a speed test that shows how one particular method is much faster than another. The code is available for download here.

Quick Essbase 32-bit on Win7 64-bit Installation Tip

2011-08-22T09:58:00.000-05:00

I don't remember if I posted about it, but I have been using 64-bit Essbase on Win7 64-bit system for about 9 months now and have not encountered any significant issues. Remember, this installation is on my laptop and is used only for my development purposes. The 64-bit installation was very easy but, when I had my team testing installations on Win7 64-bit, they didn't have very much luck installing Essbase 32-bit in this environment.

This weekend, a blog reader reached out to me for help on installing 32-bit Essbase on Win7 64-bit but, unfortunately, I wasn't able to help him. He emailed me today and told me he had found a solution! The trick, apparently, is to run the installer from a 32-bit command prompt (which I didn't even know existed). I did a quick search and found this tip/trick for running a 32-bit command prompt along with an explanation of how it works differently:

http://www.tipandtrick.net/2008/how-to-open-and-run-32-bit-command-prompt-in-64-bit-x64-windows/

I haven't tried this approach yet but thought I would share it.. Thanks to reader Kevin Tate for this tip!

Got the Plane Back

2011-08-05T13:23:00.002-05:00

My plane was in for its annual inspection and I got it back on Tuesday. Here are a couple of shots leaving Jackson, TN on the flight home. Thanks to Paul New, who is one of the world experts on the maintenance of Cessna 210's, for these shots.

I was doing about 150 mph has I hit the end of the runway and turned off towards home!

Kscope 11 Opening Session: Behind the Scenes

2011-07-22T13:56:00.001-05:00

Frankly, most opening sessions at software conferences, with a few exceptions, are pretty forgettable. I will never forget the Kscope11 opening session. This is my backstage story.

The ODTUG Board of Directors, myself included, had no idea what we were getting into when Edward Roske was named the Conference Chairman. I knew Edward had a flair for the dramatic; does anyone else remember the Solutions session from his company that was structured as a musical? So, what did Edward have in mind for us? Well, instead of announcing the location of Kscope12 with a slide or two, Edward wrote a 'screenplay' spoofing reality shows starring, you guessed it, the ODTUG Board of Directors! Yes, we all had plenty of opportunities of make fools of ourselves in public! As we were so close to LA, we had a professional film crew put together these spoofs! We filmed all of these videos over about a 7 hour stretch on Saturday, one day before the conference started. I was in the first four of the videos. The first reality show? Survivor!

As people were dismissed from each reality show, they were introduced as the next speaker. Edward was dismissed in Survivor, via unanimous vote no less, and went on stage to welcome attendees to the conference. Next up? American Idol. Keep in mind as you watch this video that we all selected our own songs and tried to make them very funny. Further, the panel, comprised of interRel employees Terrance Walker and Danielle White, joined by ODTUG Board Member Mark Rittman (who played a spot-on Simon Cowell), had no idea what songs we were planning to sing, so you get to see their real reactions.

I picked the my song, 'Thank God I'm a Country Boy', as I thought it would crack up the panel, especially if I dressed up in some nice threads for the gig. Actually, I did grow up on a farm in Michigan, so I really am a bit of a country boy.. Karen Cannell, the ODTUG Journal editor, cracked me up with her song. She had actually never heard the song before and had to learn it out in the hall just before her performance. Trivia note: Karen is wearing my Michigan hat that I got a the 2008 Citrus Bowl when my Michigan Wolverines beat the Florida Gators.

Next up was Big Brother. We filmed all of these videos on Saturday afternoon and I was exhausted after the board meeting all day on Friday and the Saturday Community Service Project (where I restored 3 foosball tables at a Boys and Girls Club). I was actually sleeping on the floor during portions of filming of this spoof.

There was a scene cut from Big Brother due to the lack of time. I was supposed to do a 'surprised coming out of the shower scene' as they feature on Big Brother. Unfortunately, due to my utter exhaustion, I didn't think of a really funny ending for the next spoof, The Bachelorette., until the next day. More on that after the video.

Yes, Cameron and I, the EPM guys, both met our demise in The Bachelorette We thought Danielle would certainly give us a rose as she is also a good EPM citizen, but we were sadly mistaken. By the way, the drama after the dismissal, with Cameron refusing the hug and me having to give her an 'uncomfortably long' hug were both late script changes, but they were actually planned. Of course, I didn't mind doing my part for ODTUG.

OK, back to the cut Big Brother scene.. I woke up the next morning and realized we had missed an opportunity for a big laugh.. My thought is that the shower scene should be at the end of 'The Bachelorette' and after I had been dismissed. I would be surprised coming out of the shower and would exit stage left while the camera stay focused on the shower door. After about 5 or 6 seconds, Danielle would peek out, look both ways and then sneak away.. I think it would have been a huge laugh!

Cameron and I were then introduced and our job, on-stage, was to introduce the keynote speaker, Joey Asher. Joey is an author and the founder of a company called SpeechWorks that helps companies communicate better. The thing is, we introduced a fake version of Joey; it was actually geek comedian Don McMillen. Don was extremely funny. Here is a video posted to YouTube by someone in the audience.

After Don McMillen and the real Joey Asher spoke, the next spoof was 'So You Think You Can Dance'. Board Members David Schleis and Month Latiolais absolutely cracked me up in this video which, by the way, I didn't see until just before the opening session.

Finally, the last spoof was 'The Amazing Race'. Most of the race was held on Segway's through the sidewalks of Long Beach. Actually, the entire ODTUG Board did a Segway tour of the facilities on the Thursday before the conference. It was fun and only a couple of us fell off our Segway during the tour (Hello Edward and Fred).

The race ended on-stage with ODTUG President Mike Riley edging out Board Member John King by a nose. Mike then had the honor of announcing that KScope12 is coming to San Antonio, Texas! Next year, we will be at the JW Marriott Hill Country which features 2 TPC golf courses, a spa, an on-site 6 acre waterpark and an on-site, 100-acre nature preserve. Plan to bring your family to enjoy the facilities while you learn the latest from the experts in the Essbase, Planning, HFM, OBIEE, APEX, PL/SQL, Database Development and Fusion Middleware.

The Kscope12 website is now open. You can register for the conference, book a room, or even submit an abstract to be a speaker at www.kscope12.com.

Kscope11 Lunch and Learn Session - EPM

2011-07-20T12:16:00.003-05:00

Here is a link to the EPM Lunch and Learn session which was a panel discussion with a number of us Oracle ACE Directors. This was one of my favorite sessions of the week though I am bias as I am on the panel. I was so exhausted by this time of the week, I was just hoping I could put together my sentences without stumbling or degrading into gibberish.

One of my favorite sections of this session was my debate with OBIEE expert, fellow Oracle ACE Director and fellow ODTUG Board of Directors member Mark Rittman. The debate starts somewhere around the 22:30 mark and, though Mark makes some good points about OBIEE and Essbase and OBIEE itself has some magic in flattening Essbase so data can be mixed/matched with relational data in a SQL query, I stand by my contention that Oracle doesn't get the magic that users see in Excel when they retrieve data from Essbase.

By the way, Mark and I get along quite well despite our debates over technology.

In any case, here is a link to the video:

http://www.livestream.com/odtug/video?clipId=pla_c4584e09-e206-46ef-ae33-ae47d3f9729d&utm_source=lslibrary&utm_medium=ui-thumb

Kscope11 Hyperion Midnight Madness

2011-07-14T23:37:00.002-05:00

I can't believe it has already been a couple of weeks since Kscope11; time just flies when you are having fun. In my case, I managed to get a couple of days of summer skiing in at Mammoth Mountain before heading home to the heat of Alabama. Since that time, I have been heads down catching up (and working hard on Dodeca 6). I need to make a few posts to summarize some of the fun things that happened at Kscope11 and, within a few days, to post my slides/sample code from my Java API session.

First, I thought I would talk about one of the unique networking events we have at Kscope, the annual Midnight Madness networking event. For the past couple of years, this event has featured a game show format and this year, it was Family Feud. Fellow Oracle ACE Director Glenn Schwartzberg acted as the master of ceremonies and played brilliantly the Richard Dawson game show host character. The funniest thing happened on one of the questions where Glenn totally lost it and literally couldn't get the words out because he was laughing so hard..

Another very funny thing happened during Family Feud. The survey question was "Name an Oracle ACE or Oracle ACE Director in the EPM/BI Space". Yes, I know, boring, right? Guess who was the top answer? Book author/Kscope Conference Chairman Edward Roske? Nope. He finished second to yours truly.. By the way, the screenshot below was sent to me by Edward..

So, in summary, my career is now officially a trivia answer!

Strange ASO Update Behavior

2011-07-13T19:03:00.002-05:00

We recently had a customer report an issue when writing back to an ASO database through Dodeca. The issue involved writing back #Missing to cells that previously had a value. Whenever the data was retrieved, the cell did not have a missing value, but rather the cell returned 0. They also reported that updating the same cells using the classic Excel add-in behaved exactly the same way. As it misbehaved in the classic add-in as well, we recommended to the customer that they file a service request with Oracle.

Today we heard the result from Oracle Tech Support:

“This is the expected behavior when you load #Missing cells through Excel Add-In or SmartView into an ASO application. The load operations through Excel Add-In loads data into an incremental slice using override mode. In this mode when you load #Missing values into cells that already have a non-missing value, they will be replaced with 0 values.“

Not many companies are writing back to ASO at this time and I wasn't yet aware of this behavior, but now we now another one of the limitations of ASO writeback.

ODTUG Hyperion SIG Nominations Close Today

2011-07-07T11:26:00.000-05:00

If you are interested in building the Hyperion user community, the ODTUG Hyperion Special Interest Group is a great place to start. The Hyperion SIG Board did some great work over the past year to create the great KScope conference last week in Long Beach and will, I am sure, work hard to create an even better conference next June in San Antonio, TX. Nominations are open through tomorrow (sorry for the late notice). This is the info posted on Network 54 about a month ago:

The ODTUG Hyperion SIG is currently seeking nominations for its board. There are three (3) open seats. 1 of these seats can be filled by a vendor/partner.

The board’s responsibilities are:

Enable communication with Oracle Corp on direction and strategy
Share information and experiences among Oracle Hyperion developers and database administrators
Facilitate training and education among the Oracle Hyperion developers and database administrators (DBAs)
Provide representation for the Hyperion SIG at Kaleidoscope and Oracle Open World
Develop the Hyperion tracks at Kaleidoscope
Maintain Hyperion SIG’s web page on ODTUG.com with relevant and informative content to the development community

Board member requirements include: current paid member of ODTUG; regular participation in board conference calls; coordinating/contributing to meetings and conferences including ODTUG Kaleidoscope and Oracle Open World.

As a board member, one needs to support and promote the Hyperion SIG goals by taking an enthusiastic role in the activities that help continually provide value to the technical community. Giving a presentation at ODTUG’s annual conferences, assisting with membership and awareness campaigns, mentoring new members and encouraging other developers/DBAs to participate in the Hyperion SIG are just a few ways that board members can display leadership and contribute to the SIG's growth and success.

If you would like to help shape the future direction of the Hyperion SIG by joining the board, please submit the following information to doug_burke@paramount.com:

Name
Company
Title
Address
Email
Phone Number
Head Shot (Photo)
Four to five sentence bio

Please be aware of the following rules/guidelines:

Candidates must be a current paid member of the Oracle Development Tools Users Group (ODTUG).
Elections are for individual volunteers, not the companies that employ them. The person elected will be a board member. It is recommended that individuals seek approval to run before submission as a candidate.
Board will consist of nine members with no more than 50% from employees of Oracle Vendors (50% vendor rule).
A board member’s term will last three years. At the end of their term, former members may choose to run for re-election after one year.
On any given year, there will be 3 open positions on the board.
If positions become open on the board during the year, board members may appoint members at their discretion as long as it does not violate the 50% vendor rule.
Nominations will be open now until July 8th.
Voting will be from July 11-25th on the ODTUG website.
Results will be published July 29th.

Volunteer and get involved!

Essbase Java API - Group Names When Using Shared Services

2011-07-06T18:51:00.001-05:00

One of our Dodeca customers had a question about support for Essbase group names when using Shared Services security. We did a bit of testing and found some interesting results to share.

One of the configuration settings in Dodeca allows Dodeca administrators to limit the sets of views/reports a user can see based on their assigned roles. The roles can be sourced from a number of places including the Essbase group names. That being said, with the advent of Shared Services, there is some confusion with the availability, to the Essbase Java API, of certain pieces of security information. Dodeca uses the following Essbase Java API code to get the group names:

// get the olap user object
IEssOlapUser user = olapServer.getOlapUser(username);

// get the groups for the user
IEssIterator groups = user.getGroups();

// loop the groups
for (int i = 0; i < groups.getCount(); i++) {
// get the group
IEssOlapGroup group = (IEssOlapGroup)groups.getAt(i);

// serialization code removed...
}

In testing this code in 11.1.2, we found that the group names are returned, but also have an '@' sign and the directory appended as well. Of course, Dodeca communicates via web services, so the XML stream we saw coming out of Dodeca looked like this:

So, the information is available to the Essbase Java API with the caveat that the group name is postpended with the directory (which makes sense).

Dodeca KScope Session - Extending Analytics Beyond Essbase at Wells Fargo with Dodeca

2011-06-27T15:59:00.000-05:00

If you are at KScope, make sure you attend our 'vendor session' Tuesday at 9:45 am in Room 101A. Wells Fargo has a large investment in Essbase and other Oracle technologies with a 14,000+ user community. Attend this session and learn how Wells Fargo turned financial data into integrated business processes using Dodeca.

The presenter, Jeff Barnes, is manager of the Essbase Development Group at Wells Fargo. Jeff and his team utilize a wide array of Oracle/Hyperion tools including, DRM, Essbase, and Financial Reporting as well as Applied OLAP’s Dodeca to meet the accounting and management reporting needs of the bank.

KScope Super Ambassadors

2011-06-02T15:14:00.000-05:00

If you are attending KScope and want an easy way to volunteer, sign up to be a Super Ambassador. Here is what a Super Ambassador does:

Commit to being present in the same presentation room for a half day (either morning or afternoon). You can pick the room where the sessions you were already planning on attending will be held.

Ambassador Shirt

Assist the speaker, if needed, remind the participants to fill out session evaluations, and complete the session information form for each session.
Report any problems/concerns to the conference staff.
Ask the presenter if the slides he/she is using are the same as what is loaded on the Web site. If not, copy them on to the Super Ambassador flash drive. If the presenter has not loaded the slides, copy them on to the flash drive and tell him/her that we will load the slides.

Login to the Attendee Portal to sign up as a Super Ambassador. As a reward for your hard work, you will receive a special T-shirt denoting your VIP status, will be invited to volunteer parties and receptions, and will have VIP access at the Grand Event on the Queen Mary.

If you are not registered for KScope, not only will you not be able to volunteer as a Super Ambassador, but you will also miss out on the most intensive Hyperion/Essbase technical gathering of the year. You can still sign up at http://www.kscope11.com/.

KScope Session Featuring Dodeca: Calix Networks

2011-05-27T13:04:00.000-05:00

Tony Banta, from Calix Networks, will discuss how Calix, an industry leader in providing cutting-edge telecommunications equipment and management software, wanted to expand their leadership in the supply chain by more effectively managing both strategic and day-to-day aspects of manufacturing operations. This week, Tony sent me his slides to review and they look really cool! The slides talk about how the company moved from a spreadsheet-based, labor-intensive system to a new, state-of-the-art performance management and cost modeling system. The new system combines a number of technologies including an Oracle database, Oracle Data Integrator (ODI), Oracle Essbase and Dodeca and compares/contrasts several Dodeca grids and charts with their OBIEE versions.
By the way, Tony is senior vice president of manufacturing operations for Calix with responsibility for all aspects of worldwide manufacturing and supply chain operations and will be a very animated and entertaining speaker. He is also a former test pilot, astronaut, and now a warbird pilot.

In fact, Tony gave me a ride in his P-51 Mustang before Open World last year. I blogged about it here: http://timtows-hyperion-blog.blogspot.com/2010/09/oracle-open-world-trip-day-3.html. Here is another video of the same flyover from another perspective; this was shot by my son Logan:

The week before my ride, he was out on a photo shoot in the Mustang. The photographer must not be the flying type:

http://vimeo.com/14912614

Finally, if you can't see videos at your place of business, here is a picture of me getting my pre-flight briefing before getting into the Mustang.

Early registration for KScope ends soon, so if you haven't registered yet, register today at http://www.kscope11.com/registration.

Essbase 11.1.2.1 Installation Notes

2011-05-18T14:33:00.002-05:00

I now have the Essbase 11.1.2.1 stack, including Essbase/Foundation Services/Provider Services/EAS/EIS on my new 64-bit Windows 7 laptop. My youngest son actually did the installation and, if I remember correctly, he only needed to configure the loopback adapter and turn off the UAC (User Access Control) in order for the components to install. He did run the install using the right mouse click 'Run as Administrator' option. The relational datastore on my machine is SQL Server.

I wanted to setup EIS on this new machine and build the sample cubes for our internal testing. A couple of months ago, I posted an article about a problem creating the EIS Sample database from the EIS menu. The same problem, which appears to be an XML parsing issue, still exists in 11.1.2.1. For my new laptop, however, I cheated and copied the TBC and TBC_MD relational databases from my old laptop. I was able to build sample cubes successfully.

My new laptop is a Dell Latitude 6520 with the fastest quad core chip currently offered by Dell. It has the maximum of 8 Gb of RAM and I opted for the 256 Gb SSD drive. This is a fast system and it really rocks! To give you an example, EAS launches in 4 seconds on this machine and Dodeca launches in about 1.5 seconds.

My QA team has also been pounding 11.1.2.1 very hard recently. They have setup a number of VMs internally and noted a couple of interesting things:

When installing with Oracle database as your relational repository, the installation requires the Oracle database to use the UTF-8 character set. I had the QA team search the installation readme's and they found a reference to this in the 11.1.2 readme files. Apparently, the UTF-8 character set was not enforced during 11.1.2 installs.
~~It appears that relational repository names can no longer contain underscores.~~ Correction: A reader commented that they had used underscores in both Oracle and SQL Server; I found my laptop also has an underscore in the repository name (in SQL Server).

I haven't personally seen these issues yet, but I thought I would alert everyone out there what my team is seeing you can prepare accordingly.

Essbase API - Ephemeral Port Issues/Resources

2011-05-17T11:54:00.001-05:00

One of the most popular posts on my blog has been the post where I showed how to open up the number of ports available to Essbase. This is necessary as the Essbase API is quite chatty and, when combined with the small number of available dynamic ports and the long default timeout on these ports in Windows, running out of ports has become an issue. Most users see this when running many, many repetitive API calls against Essbase.

One example is when users run the Essbase Outline Extractor against a large database.   Back in the old days when the Essbase API was designed, it probably wasn’t much of a consideration. These days, however, with million member outlines and really fast computers, it is very easy to run out of ports.

We are currently testing some new Dodeca functionality we plan to introduce this summer that optionally performs some intensive caching of the Essbase outline. Of course, we ran into the port issue very quickly and, in the course of looking at how the ports have changed in the new versions of Windows, found a couple of interesting links to pass along.

First, I found a nice link that explains how dynamic ports work. Better yet, this link covers dynamic ports on non-Windows operating systems. You can see this link at http://www.ncftp.com/ncftpd/doc/misc/ephemeral_ports.html.   This link also talks about the new, larger default dynamic port range in Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 which now feature a default range of 16,384 ports.

I also found a link to a Microsoft KnowledgeBase article that talks about the new defaults and shows ways to both display, and dynamically increase, the range of ports. The KnowledgeBase article is located at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929851/.   I ran the commands listed there on my Windows 7 laptop:

C:\Users\timt>netsh int ipv4 show dynamicport tcp
Protocol tcp Dynamic Port Range
---------------------------------
Start Port      : 49152
Number of Ports : 16384

I then increased the number of ports dynamically:

C:\Users\timt>netsh int ipv4 set dynamic tcp start=5000 num=60536
Ok.

C:\Users\timt>netsh int ipv4 show dynamicport tcp
Protocol tcp Dynamic Port Range
---------------------------------
Start Port      : 5000
Number of Ports : 60536

The changes appear to permanent.  I rebooted my machine and found the new configuration remained.

Essbase JAPI 11.1.2.1 - Location of samples directory has changed

2011-05-14T10:13:00.000-05:00

I noticed when we were doing our initial work on our Dodeca servlet that the Essbase JAPI samples directory was not where it used to be. In 11.1.2, it was located at:

C:\Oracle\Middleware\EPMSystem11R1\products\Essbase\aps\samples

I am setting up my new 11.1.2.1 laptop today and found the samples directories, along with some of the other directories, have changed locations to live in the equivalent of the old HYPERION_HOME\common directory:

C:\Oracle\Middleware\EPMSystem11R1\common\EssbaseJavaAPI\11.1.2.0\samples

By the way, that is not a typo; the directory name does reference 11.1.2.0 although the accompanying lib\ess_japi.jar manifest.mf file does properly state the version as 11.1.2.1.

KScope11 - More new Hyperion sessions added

2011-05-11T20:58:00.000-05:00

As a member of the ODTUG Board of Directors and participant in the ODTUG Hyperion SIG, I can tell you many, many exciting things are happening with the upcoming KScope11 conference. I am planning a series of short blog posts to talk about each of these things.

This week, five new sessions were added to the KScope11 agenda. The conference now features over 100 Hyperion sessions and will truly be a gathering place for Hyperion experts and insiders. The new sessions are:

Commenting on Essbase Commentary Options at ConocoPhillips
Presenter: Henry Robin, ConocoPhilips

LROs, Cell Text, Related Content? Essbase provides many options for adding commentary to your reporting and analysis solutions. Join ConocoPhillips as they share how they provided an automated system for capturing and reporting variance commentary. We will discuss our current solution as well as possible future changes based on Oracle's direction for Essbase commentary. Don't miss this chance to learn more about ways to capture critical text information about your Essbase numbers!

(Planning OR Essbase) AND FDM) AND ERPi = Success!
Presenter: Anthony Scalese, Ranzal & Associates

This session will explore the capabilities of FDM, and now ERPi, to integrate with other target EPM applications such Essbase (BSO & ASO) and Strategic Finance. Out of the box features such as the ability to execute calc scripts before and after a load as well as leveraging load rules will be showcased. The session will highlight how the introduction of ERPi further expanded the already world class analysis & reporting capabilities of Essbase by adding drill through to transactional detail. This session will conclude with an overview of automation capabilities of FDM, discussion of use cases and thorough Q&A.

Essbase Custom Defined Functions are fun!
Presenter: Toufic Wakim, Oracle Corporation

This session will explore a number of interesting cases of Essbase CDFs used by Oracle customers explained by one of Oracle's most experienced Essbase CDF experts.

Using MaxL to Automate Essbase
Presenter: Natalie Delemar, Ernst & Young

What is this thing called MaxL (and why the funny capitalization)? All will be revealed through practical code samples and interactive examples that show why MaxL is an essential Essbase tool. You will see: the many ways to invoke MaxL, driving MaxL scripts via the OS shell, Essbase database manipulation with error checking, encryption, script nesting and logging.

Mission Critical! Deploying Highly Available Oracle EPM Systems
Presenter: Eric Helmer, Linium

Mission Critical implementations of the Hyperion Enterprise Performance Suite are becoming more commonplace. As corporations are turning to global integration and follow-the-sun real time analytics, Hyperion applications must accommodate thousands of users 24x7. Join Oracle ACE Director Eric Helmer as he dissects larger Hyperion implementations and strategies to achieving a global, highly available enterprise. Learn how many Fortune 500 companies achieve world class availability through clustering and failover techniques, disaster recovery procedures, load balancing, and virtual machines.

If you haven't registered for KScope11 yet, you can register at http://www.kscope11.com/.

Do You Have A Killer EPM Application?

2011-05-03T18:14:00.000-05:00

My friend Ron Moore from Marketing Technologies Group in New York is currently doing an on-line survey to find out who has the best EPM applications deployed. He, in turn, plans to use this information during a panel discussion at the ODTUG KScope11 conference in Long Beach.

If you think you have a 'Killer App', please take the survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/odtug.

Smart View Private Connection Issue - Resolved!

2011-04-19T20:09:00.000-05:00

I had managed to go for the past 5 months, since I moved to Windows 7 64-bit on my laptop with Essbase 11.1.2, without the need to connect to Smart View. This week, I decided I wanted to test something in Smart View and compare it with Dodeca but, low and behold, I could not create a private connection with Smart View to save my life. After some investigation, I found some nasty messages in my apsserver.log (or, more specifically, in C:\Oracle\Middleware\user_projects\domains\EPMSystem\servers\AnalyticProviderServices0\logs\apsserver.log):

[2011-04-16T20:34:42.184-05:00] [AnalyticProviderServices0] [ERROR] [] [oracle.EPMOHPS] [tid: 18] [userId: ] [ecid: 0000IxX6708EgKWzLwyGOA1De^CQ000001,0] [APP: APS#11.1.2.0] [[
java.lang.NullPointerException
at com.hyperion.dsf.server.framework.BaseLogger.writeException(Unknown Source)
at com.essbase.smartview.util.EssLogger.writeException(Unknown Source)
at com.essbase.smartview.xml.XmlHandler.invoke(Unknown Source)
at com.essbase.smartview.xml.XmlHandler.invoke(Unknown Source)
at com.essbase.smartview.xml.XmlHandler.invoke(Unknown Source)
at com.essbase.smartview.xml.EssbaseSmartView.doPost(Unknown Source)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:727)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:821)
... blah, blah, blah!

I did a quick search of the web and found nothing relevant, so I turned to my friend and fellow ACE Cameron Lackpour.. Cameron had just finished working his way through the Oracle Knowledgebase notes on Smart View on Oracle support. He came up with this nugget:

https://support.oracle.com/CSP/main/article?cmd=show&type=NOT&id=1098634.1

It told me the cause of my ills was an incomplete configuration and gave me a couple of different methods to complete the configuration. I chose to export and edit the datasources.xml file.

In the xml, I simply had to add my Essbase server name:

Once that was complete, I was able to create a private connection:

KScope Hotels

2011-04-18T08:46:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, I found out during the ODTUG Board Meeting that the hotels for KScope11 are starting to fill up. I will staying at the Renaissance Long Beach Hotel as most of the Hyperion focused events, including Hyperion Midnight Madness, will be there. Many of the other Hyperion attendees will be there as well, so I am sure there will be many, many networking opportunities which can be just as valuable as the conference sessions themselves. Does anyone remember the spirited games of Jenga at the hotel in Monterrey? Jenga Joe, are you staying at the Renaissance?

EPM 11.1.2.1 on the cloud

2011-04-12T08:57:00.000-05:00

11.1.2.1 has now been out a week and thus should not be news to anyone here. One interesting thing different about this release, however, is the cloud instance that has popped up so that anyone can easily take advantage of giving 11.1.2.1 a test drive.

Emerging Solutions' John Booth has put an Amazon cloud instance online. John has also worked hard on the cloud instance that will be used for hands-on labs at KScope 11. For the latest details, see John's blog at http://www.metavero.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=51:epm-test-drive&catid=1:latest-news&Itemid=50.

If you have never used the Amazon cloud, Cameron Lackpour has posted a blog on how to get started with John's image. See Cameron's blog post at http://camerons-blog-for-essbase-hackers.blogspot.com/2011/04/yeah-yeah-11121-is-here-so-what_12.html.

As for me, I am getting busy providing Dodeca support for 11.1.2.1. It should be available either late this week or early next week.

Test, Test, Test

2011-03-30T15:02:00.000-05:00

I am working on some of the relational code in our server and decided to test performance of a small function to see which alternative was faster. The function tests if a string contains all whitespace and I thought one alternative may be much faster than the other.

The first alternative uses regular expressions. It does look more elegant, but I didn't look at the Java source code to see what it is actually doing. Further, I don't use regular expressions much and thought I would take the opportunity to see if it would help me in my quest for performance. Regular expressions can do some complex processing, so it makes sense they may not be real fast, but for some reason I thought this option may be better.

The second alternative merely trims the string and evaluates whether the length of the trimmed string is zero (in which case, of course, the original string was all spaces). This alternative creates a new String object each time it is called and thus I thought it may have some performance problems.

Here is the code:

public static void main(String[] args) {
  performanceTest("   ", 1000000, 1);
  performanceTest("   ", 1000000, 2);
  performanceTest(" bogus ", 1000000, 1);
  performanceTest(" bogus ", 1000000, 2);
}

static boolean isWhiteSpaces( String s ) {
  return s != null && s.matches("\\s*");
}

static boolean isWhiteSpaces2( String s ) {
  return s.trim().length() == 0;
}

public static void performanceTest(String s, int loops, int version) {
  long start = System.currentTimeMillis();

  for (int i = 0; i < loops; i++) {
    if (version == 1) {
      isWhiteSpaces(s);
    } else {
      isWhiteSpaces2(s);
    }
  }

  System.out.println("Total time for " + loops + 
                     " loops using algorithm #" + 
                     version + ": " + 
                 (System.currentTimeMillis() - start));
}

I was surprised at the difference in the performance:

Total time for 1000000 loops using algorithm #1: 1042
Total time for 1000000 loops using algorithm #2: 41
Total time for 1000000 loops using algorithm #1: 991
Total time for 1000000 loops using algorithm #2: 41

The second option, which trims the string, then compares the length, wins hands down. Now I know which option I will use in my code.

New Dodeca Training Video Online: Creating an Essbase Excel View, Part 1

2011-03-15T16:22:00.000-05:00

We have a new training video online that shows how to convert a simple Essbase-aware Excel template to a Dodeca report in minutes.

Adding the Essbase Retrieve Range

This 23 minute video, which is part 1 of 2, is posted on the Applied OLAP YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/appliedolap#p/c/5BF8FA7D57B7EF19/0/x4S6IxX45pM. The first video covers basic Excel template preparartion concepts, such as retrieve ranges and tokens, importing the Excel template into Dodeca, creating the View object for configuration settings and deployment.

The second video in the series, which will be posted soon, will continue building the view and will show how to make the template cascadable.

Enjoy!

Hacking EIS for Fun (and Profit)

2011-03-05T16:56:00.000-06:00

I have been doing some cool work on our Dodeca Essbase server and am at the point where I am working on Linked Reporting Objects. Of course, one type of LRO is the EIS Drillthrough Report. It has been years since I had EIS running on my machine, so I decided to get it running to help my development efforts.

Needless to say, this is the first time I have installed EIS since I converted my laptop over to Essbase 11.1.2 running on Windows 7 64-bit. Everything seemed to be going along very smoothly building the EIS Sample until I ran the Create Sample menu entry in the EIS console. Error! And it was a very strange one at that:

Contact your AIS administrator because the Java runtime environment may not be set appropriately on the server machine.., IMPORTMODEL failed NULL.

After some quick research, I found I am not alone with this issue as there are a couple of posts on OTN on the subject. With a bit of searching, I found this item on support.oracle.com:

Contact your AIS administrator because the Java runtime environment may not be set appropriately on the server machine..." EIS XML Import /Export Fails on Unix [ID 1086979.1]

The symptoms listed include:

Cannot use the Import/Export feature of Models from the AIS console.
The XML import/export feature in 64bit EIS 11.1.2 on 64bit Windows 2008 doesn't work.
When trying to import or export any OLAP model or metaoutline to a XML file, the following error occurs: "Error -1: Contact your EIS administrator because the Java runtime environment may not be set appropriately.."

I finally got it to work by going to a 32-bit Essbase 11.1.2 VM, configuring the TBC and TBC_MD DSN’s to point to the relational database on my 64-bit server, then running the Create Sample menu item on the 32-bit machine. The import worked and inserted the data into the tables on my 64-bit system.

Once this was complete, I opened the TBC metaoutline and tried the Verify menu item. OUCH! I remember hating this issue:

According to my friends in tech support, I needed to create the tables under the TBC username. In other words, wipe the databases and start over. It was painful enough getting to this point, so I decided to figure out why the TBC username was required.

I looked at the data in all of the tables of the TBC database and found some columns where the TBC prefix existed in the data.

As this is just a test system, I decided I would try to modify the data in my effort to get the EIS sample application to work. In the end, I had to update the ‘TBC’ string to ‘dbo’ in the following tables/columns:

OA_INFO – PHYSICAL_TABLE
OA_INFO – ATTRIBUTE_EX_RULE
MO_INFO – MO_OWNER
OM_INFO – MODEL_OWNER
OVP_REL_INFO - PHY_TABLE_1
OVP_REL_INFO - PHY_TABLE_2

Hopefully, I didn’t miss any of the changes I made as I put this list together after getting the Verify function to work. Once this was complete, the TBC sample loaded successfully. After this brief distraction, back to work on my Java code!

Dodeca 5.3.0.2646 Available for Download!

2011-02-28T04:40:00.001-06:00

We have been busy working on some new functionality for our 5.3.0 release and have finally got it out the door! This release features a number of new capabilities requested by customers along with other product improvements. Our release notes contain an exhaustive list of the changes, but here are some of the highlights:

Support for PDF

We have added native capability to write data in a grid or Excel based Dodeca view directly to a PDF file. The output PDF file is PDFA-1b compliant. Additionally, the generated PDF file can be opened locally in a Dodeca WebBrowserView or externally in the default PDF viewer. We have also added programmatic support for PDF by way of the SaveWorkbookAsPdf method (or "action") and the BeforeSaveAsPdf and AfterSaveAsPdf event links.

Dodeca SQL Excel View Rendered as PDF (click to enlarge)

Excel AddIn Mode

Dodeca was created to target the need for a bulletproof spreadsheet environment for planning, analysis and reporting on Essbase and relational data sources, but we have had requests to make Dodeca work even more like the classic Excel add-in. We are happy to announce this new release features our new Excel AddIn mode. This mode, which is implemented as an optional configuration setting on our Adhoc Essbase view type, allows an end user much more flexibility to choose their own Essbase connection, load their own Essbase-aware Excel workbooks from their hard drive and retrieve/drill just like they are using the classic addin (except without the bugs!)

Copy Comments

We have had many customers ask if they could copy their analytic commentary from one set of datapoints to another. For example, one customer wanted to copy their comments relating to January Forecast for their 25 assigned markets to the February Forecast. In response, we have added server-side support for copying comments. Additionally, we have added the CopyComments workbook script method/action to facilitate end users initiating the copy comment process.

CopyComments Workbook Script Method (click to enlarge)

Support for Adding and Removing UDAs

User Defined Attributes are often used to mark Essbase members for special usage in an Essbase application. This new functionality provides a new workbook script method, SetUDA, with both AddToMember and RemoveFromMember overloads. The workbook script method allows an adminstrator to include functionality in an application to add, or remove, one or more UDAs from one or more Essbase members in a single call to the server. Of course, with any workbook script, the functionality may be attached to a toolbar button, menu item or context menu item to make it easy for users to complete the task.

Improvements Working with Stored Procedures

In a Dodeca SQLPassthroughDataSet object, the select, insert, delete, and update statements defined for the object can be defined to execute a stored procedure. Here is an example of a typical stored procedure:

execute @argument1,@argument2,…

Inside Dodeca, we take the SQL statements, parse them, and create prepared statement objects. In this process, we also modify insert SQL on the fly to eliminate columns for which there is a parameter defined,

but which do not have a parameter passed for the record. We did this to allow for database default column values to be returned after an insert statement. Nice feature and I had just bunches of fun writing that one! It works very well except, for stored procedures, arguments are typically required (vs. SQL which is very flexible). We have changed the behavior of an insert when we detect a stored procedure to not modify the SQL.

Other New Workbook Script Events

BeforeDataTableRangeAddRow / AfterDataTableRangeAddRow - Occurs before / after a row (or rows) is added to a DataTableRange either by a user adding/inserting a row(s) or when an empty row is automatically added.

BeforeDataTableRangeDeleteRow / AfterDataTableRangeDeleteRow - Occurs before / after a row (or rows) is deleted from a DataTableRange.

Other New Workbook Script Methods

SaveDataTableRangeRow supports saving the changes to a specified row within a DataTableRange. The row can be an added (or inserted) row or a modified existing row.

Other New Workbook Script Functions

The DataTableRangeRowHasChanges function returns True or False based whether a row within a DataTableRange contains unsaved changes, which includes a new row and a modified existing row.

The DataTableRangeRowState function determines whether a row was Added, Modified, or Unchanged.
This is a summary of some of the new things in the Dodeca 5.3.0 release. We have worked hard to get this release out the door. Next on our agenda, we expect to release a 5.3.1 version with some functionality that didn't meet the deadline for 5.3.0. We are also working in the background on our next big release; we hope to start talking about the contents of that release in the not too distant future.

Essbase Java API bug: IEssCubeOutline.executeQuery()

2011-02-22T18:33:00.000-06:00

I have been working on some cool new things in our Dodeca Essbase web services server using the Java API and have found a few interesting things that I will try to post over the next couple of weeks.

I found this first item about a month ago when I was working on member information. If you have read my blog for a while, you may remember my comments last summer on how getting all information about a member can be quite hard and that you have to really open the outline to get the information. I wish it had only been that easy.

One of my thoughts was to use the executeQuery method on the IEssCubeOutline object to query the data. Theoretically, the members that are returned from that call should be 'opened' from the outline and thus all of the information is available for the member. I say 'theoretically' because I couldn't get it to work. No matter how I tried, the method always throws an EssException with the following error message:

Cannot query members by name. Essbase Error(1060000): Invalid outline handle

I wrote some sample code, against Sample Basic in version 11.1.2, and sent it over to some friends in Oracle tech support and they confirmed it was a bug within a couple of days. This won't help me though as we support all versions of Essbase back to 6.5.3. Even if they get a fix into the upcoming 11.1.2.1 release, it will be 5 to 10 years before I could consider using it.

Here is the code I sent to Oracle:

import com.essbase.api.base.*;
import com.essbase.api.session.*;
import com.essbase.api.datasource.*;
import com.essbase.api.metadata.*;

public class EssQueryOverOutline {
  private static String _username = "admin";
  private static String _password = "password";
  private static String _url = 
                 "http://localhost:13080/aps/JAPI";
  private static String _server = "localhost";

  public static void main(String[] args) {
   IEssbase ess = null;
   IEssOlapServer server = null;

   try {
    // Create API instance.
    ess = IEssbase.Home.create(IEssbase.JAPI_VERSION);

    // connect to the Essbase server
    server = ess.signOn(_username, _password, false,
                 null, _url, _server);

    // get the cube
    IEssCube cube = server.getApplication("sample")
                        .getCube("basic");

    // get the outline
    IEssCubeOutline outline = cube.openOutline();

    // Note: the next line throws the following 
    //exception:
    // com.essbase.api.base.EssException: Cannot query 
    // members by name. Essbase Error(1060000): 
    // Invalid outline handle
      
    // execute the query
    IEssIterator members = outline.executeQuery("Diet",
         IEssMemberSelection.QUERY_TYPE_DESCENDANTS,
         IEssMemberSelection.QUERY_OPTION_MEMBERSONLY,
         null, null, null);

    for (int i = 0; i < members.getCount(); i++) {
      // get the member
      IEssMember member = (IEssMember)members.getAt(i);

      // print some properties
      System.out.print("Member:");
      System.out.print(member.getName());
      System.out.print("; Parent:");
      System.out.print(member.getParentMemberName());
      System.out.print("; Is opened from outline:");
      System.out.print(member.getParent() instanceof 
                       IEssCubeOutline);
      System.out.print("; Parent from 
                       getRelatedMembers():");
      System.out.print(member.getRelatedMemberNames()[0]);
      System.out.print("\n");
    }
  } catch (EssException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
  } finally {
    try {
      if (server != null && server.isConnected())
        server.disconnect();
    } catch (Exception e) {
      e.printStackTrace();
    }

    try {
      if (ess != null && ess.isSignedOn())
        ess.signOff();
      } catch (EssException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
      }
   }
 }
}

And due to the wrapping problems, here is a jpg of the code from my Java dev environment, IntelliJ:

Oddly enough, the same week I was working on this, another Essbase Java API fan, and friend, Joe Aultman, gave me a call and asked me if I had ever successfully got executeQuery to work.. Boy, was I ever prepared for that question!

A Geek's Valentines Day

2011-02-14T16:09:00.000-06:00

Probably many of you have read my bio and have read how great my wife is, but few of you know that our wedding anniversary is Valentines Day. Darlene and I were married twenty one years ago today on Valentines Day of 1990. Of course, we had to get married on a Wednesday to make it Valentines Day. I am actually heading home early today (before 4 pm!) to take a walk on the nearby greenway with Darlene, but first I thought I would leave a little Valentine for all my fellow Essbase devotees..

Back when I was 13 years old, I had my first job pumping gas in my Grandpa's gas station. Between customers, I always tried to read the newspaper and even had a favorite columnist. I know what you are saying, what a geek, right? The columnist was Sidney J Harris and my favorite column ran every Monday. It was always entitled "Things I Learned En Route To Looking Up Other Things." This nugget fits into that category.

I was recently looking for some specific documentation on the Oracle website when I ran across this gem, a PDF full of Tallyrand (11.1.2) infrastructure tips. It also has some answers to questions where I have not previously seen documentation.

Here is a link to the file:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bi-foundation/tallyrand-tips-157617.pdf

I thought that perhaps I was just late to the party finding this information, so I pinged my friend Cameron Lackpour. He was aware of a version for 11.1.1.1. I did a search and found a few other similar documents on the Oracle website:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bi-foundation/epm-tips-issues-1-40-167121.pdf
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bi-foundation/epm-tips-issues-40-up-167122.pdf

Enjoy!

Brief Interview with new ODTUG Board Member, and Friend, Cameron Lackpour

2011-02-10T14:48:00.000-06:00

Here is a short video clip of a brief interview with friend, fellow blogger and fellow ODTUG Board Member, Cameron Lackpour at the recent ODTUG Board Meeting near Oracle Headquarters in Redwood City, California.

I was on-site at the hotel when this video was recorded, but was (luckily) working on my laptop in my room. They did, however, get me to record some things that will be on-screen, apparently, at KScope11 this summer.

Good job Cameron!

KScope 2011 Discount Code

2011-02-09T16:20:00.002-06:00

As a vendor supporting the KScope conference, Applied OLAP is able to offer this discount code for the best Hyperion conference in the world. The Applied OLAP discount code, AOLA, will entitle you to an extra $100 off a conference pass. Further, if you come to the Hyperion Networking Event at the conference, let me know you registered using the AOLA code and I will buy your first drink!

As a reminder, to get the lowest price on the conference pass, be sure to register before the Early Bird registration deadline of March 25th. See you in Long Beach!

Getting back to SQL - Copying Dodeca commentary

2011-02-08T13:29:00.000-06:00

I have been working on a new feature in Dodeca that relies heavily on SQL processing on the server, so I had to brush up on some of the SQL skills that I had not used much since I started with Essbase 16 years ago. Only a few of my friends know that, before focusing exclusively on Essbase, I worked on an Oracle Financials project at the last 'real' job I had at Intergraph here in Huntsville, AL. I got pretty good at SQL in that position and even architected and implemented an entire royalty processing module that bolted onto Oracle Financials Inventory, interfaced with the Oracle General Ledger package, and was fed by a Microsoft Access driven user interface that talked directly to the Oracle tables (back in 1994!)

The SQL knowledge came in handy when I started working on the Dodeca feature which will allow users to copy comments from one set of key combinations to another. We have had a number of requests for this functionality over the years and I have read many requests from frustrated Hyperion Planning users who desperately needed that functionality.

In our case, we store commentary in a relational table on the Dodeca server. The comments table has the COMMENT_TENANT and the COMMENT_ID fields as the primary key. The tenant code is a unique identifier for a Dodeca application. The comment ID is a GUID (Guaranteed Unique ID) obtained from the operating system. Here is a screenshot of the COMMENTS table.

The key/value pairs that identify the datapoint, or partial datapoint, that identify the comment are stored in a separate table that has a one-to-many relationship. Here is a screenshot of the COMMENT_KEY_ITEMS table.

The SQL problem I needed to solve was ‘How do I get a list of comment ID’s that have, for example, both the Scenario equal to Budget and the Year equal to Apr? My initial thoughts focused on the fact that no matter how I wrote the where clause, I would still get two rows back if my query returned the rows that I wanted. Myopia nearly got the best of me until I remembered the SQL GROUP BY clause. Using the GROUP BY clause, I could flatten the two rows into one. I still needed to make sure the original query, however, returned two rows, so the SQL HAVING clause did exactly what I wanted.

The next complication is that we use Hibernate Object-to-Relational Mapping technology in our server in order to support many relational data sources. This technology handles the translation of Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs) to, and from, relational sources. So, I had to write my Hibernate Query Language, or HQL, using GROUP BY and HAVING clauses:

select c.CommentId 
from Comment c join c.keyItems i 
where c.Tenant = 'SAMPLE' 
and (i.Key = 'Scenario' and i.Value = 'Budget')
or (i.Key = 'Year' and i.Value = 'Apr') 
group by c.CommentId 
having count(c.CommentId) = 2

Of course, in my code this HQL is created on the fly based on tenant code and the variable number of key/value pairs passed into the routine. Hibernate, in turn, writes the SQL. Here is an example of the SQL in SQL Server syntax:

Select comment0_.COMMENT_ID as col_0_0_
from COMMENTS comment0_ 
inner join COMMENT_KEY_ITEMS keyitems1_
on comment0_.COMMENT_TENANT=keyitems1_.COMMENT_TENANT
and comment0_.COMMENT_ID=keyitems1_.COMMENT_ID
where comment0_.COMMENT_TENANT='SAMPLE'
and keyitems1_.KEY_ITEM_KEY='Scenario'
and keyitems1_.KEY_ITEM_VALUE='Budget'
or keyitems1_.KEY_ITEM_KEY='Year'
and keyitems1_.KEY_ITEM_VALUE='Apr'
group by comment0_.COMMENT_ID
having count(comment0_.COMMENT_ID)=2

This SQL gave me the comment ID’s I needed to copy which was just the start. To complete the project, I also had to update the comment ID with a new Java UUID, update the related KeyItem records with the new UUID, recompute the COMMENT_KEY_HASH that is used to reduce the network traffic and required server resources by allowing for a query filter based on a single column value instead of a one-to-many join, and track/update the comment ID’s in the PARENT_ID field which is used to track threaded comments.

The code is now complete and will be checked into our source code control system today. QA can then get started with their testing so this feature can be released in the next Dodeca release.

Oracle Technology Network's Virtual Developer Day

2011-01-27T10:30:00.000-06:00

At the IOUC meeting, Tobin Gilman did not mention this session when he talked about the Virtual Tradeshow. Maybe he did not mention it due to the fact that most of the user groups at the IOUC are oriented towards Oracle applications instead of Oracle technology, The Virtual Developer Day event, which is on February 1, is targeted towards us geek types. When I saw this in the Oracle Partner Newsletter, I thought that many of us technologists in the Hyperion world would be interested due to its focus on WebLogic.

As you may know, WebLogic is now the lead application server technology for the Hyperion product line. The Virtual Developer Day is all about WebLogic and I plan to attend. It also has coverage on the latest J2EE features some of which, for example, persistence, are used in the Dodeca server. Here are the details with a link to register:

http://eventreg.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=129505&src=7011174&src=7011174&Act=115

Note to those of you in Europe and India, the Virtual Developer Day will be presented live in your time zones on February 10th and February 17th, respectively.

See you there!

Oracle Applications Virtual Tradeshow

2011-01-26T01:18:00.000-06:00

There were some excellent sessions presented by Tobin Gilman at the IOUC today. I have known Tobin since his days at Hyperion and, ironically, he also worked at Intergraph in Huntsville, AL when I worked at Intergraph.

One of the things in his presentation was an ad for a virtual tradeshow where you can see some Hyperion related customer success stories. The virtual tradeshow will be on Feb 3, 2011. This event has two sessions on EPM/BI. At 1 pm eastern, there is is session "Better performance visiblity With Oracle Business Intelligence Applications" featuring a company named Automatic Weapons. At 1:30 pm eastern, there is a session entitled "Leveraging your ERP Investments with Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management Solutions" with General Dynamics. Is it a bit ironic that both of these companies are defense related entities?

More information is available at http://blogs.oracle.com/UPK/2011/01/oracle_applications_virtual_tr.html.

Dodeca Videos Online

2011-01-20T07:17:00.000-06:00

If you have not had a chance to see Dodeca, we have put an introductory video online. To see the video, go to http://www.appliedolap.com/dodeca/videos. I even narrated the introductory video.

For those of you are preparing for a Dodeca evaluation, or if you think you may be interested in a Dodeca evaluation, my team has also posted installation videos online. The installation videos show you how to install and deploy the Dodeca server in either Tomcat or in WebLogic. There are also videos that show how to setup and run the sample application. These videos are located at http://www.appliedolap.com/dodeca/videos/68 and http://www.appliedolap.com/dodeca/videos/70.

We are working to get a Dodeca tutorial video series online. Look for that soon!

ODTUG Board Meeting

2011-01-18T08:46:00.000-06:00

After spending the 2 weeks visiting a customer site in Switzerland, then becoming a work hermit for a month, I am off to the ODTUG Board Meeting this weekend in San Francisco. The Board Meeting also marks my return to official responsibilities representing the Hyperion community. On my ODTUG agenda, I have a couple of Hyperion-related goals:

To make the KScope conference the best national education conference for Hyperion customers; and
To clarify the Oracle concepts of user groups for the user community.

Oracle has a plethora of user groups and often there are overlaps in what these groups do, thus it can be really confusing for end users. As a result, attendance at the user group conferences as dropped to a fraction of the attendance back in the Hyperion Solutions days. Much of the drop is due to the fact that in the Oracle world, the conferences are put together by the user groups themselves versus organized by the company. Oracle does have the Oracle Open World conference, which is huge, but the Hyperion portion last year had, maybe 500 people. By contrast, some of the Hyperion Solutions conferences had 7,000 people with a common focus.

To achieve these goals, I need your feedback to take to our Board. Several of you have reached out to me with your thoughts on how I can help the user community in general using my position on the Board. Please send me your feedback/ideas via email at timtow@appliedolap.com.

Accounting Jobs and Software

2010-11-23T18:25:00.002-06:00

I got an email recently from another blogger, Hunter Richards, who manages the site at http://www.softwareadvice.com/accounting/. He recently published a study on accounting-related technical skills sought by employers. I got my start as an accountant, so I found this study very interesting. I started out my technical career doing international consolidations in spreadsheets. At the time, I was using Supercalc 5 on a Unix workstation with a 640K DOS partition and 2 diskette drives. The consolidation macros I wrote prompted me to change diskettes twice for the Balance Sheet and twice for the Income Statement. Later, I was involved in both an Oracle Financials project and an SAP project at the same company. I also got really good at Excel and ended up writing Excel books.

Technology certainly made it possible to get me from my accounting background to where I am today. That being said, the time I spent in accounting was also extremely important as it gave me domain experience in a given field and I use that experience nearly every day. Lesson from it all? If you an accountant and you learn a technology, you end up an Oracle ACE Director and blog on your experiences? Well, you never know!

Here is a link to the blog entry. Enjoy!

http://www.softwareadvice.com/articles/accounting/which-tech-skills-help-accountants-land-jobs/

Goodbye to Microsoft Analysis Services? Part 2

2010-11-19T09:10:00.000-06:00

I got a follow up email from a friend who asked if I had seen a follow-on post to the original blog entry. I had not, but here is is:

http://cwebbbi.wordpress.com/2010/11/14/pass-summit-day-2-the-aftermath/

It sounds a little like back pedaling from Microsoft but, if you read the comments, it doesn't look like the Microsoft crowd feels very comfortable. My favorite comments posted there is this one.

"Well, it looks like Microsoft talked to you and and wants to “assure” everyone that all is well. Yeah, just like ProClarity, right? I think that a new technology direction is a good thing. But not when you push the timeline out many years to get a good stable solution. Long term, this is probably a good thing, but short term, msft will see a loss in market share….. When the client tools AND server techonology are in flux, how many customers will want to invest in that dream? Check back with msft in about 5 years and they will be winners."

And it isn't that Essbase customers have been immune as there was much uncertainty after the Oracle acquisition. As I am someone who, more than anyone I know, is all in for Essbase, it is very comforting that storm has passed and Essbase is becoming a featured component deep in the heart of the Oracle Fusion strategy.

Goodbye to Microsoft Analysis Services?

2010-11-16T16:39:00.000-06:00

In a series of recent Twitter tweets, fellow Oracle ACE Director Mark Rittman posted the following (pasted/edited) statement referring to a post by a Microsoft BI person at http://cwebbbi.wordpress.com/2010/11/11/pass-summit-day-2/:

"History repeating itself. MS doing to MSAS what Oracle did to Express Server . So with MS abandoning AS and MDX, will Oracle (through Essbase) be the main sponsor and supporter of MDX going forward? Oh the irony."

Ironic? Certainly.. I was actually there at the initial XML for Analysis Advisory Council meeting when Microsoft announced to the world that MDX would be the foundation of the XML/A standard. It had already been discussed with Hyperion but, as it was 9/11, yes, that 9/11, I was the only "Hyperion" representative in the room as the entire Hyperion team was grounded by the terrorist attacks. In the past 9 years, it has now come full circle that Oracle, apparently, will be the standard-bearer for MDX.

Maybe it is my good fortune, then, that I haven't worked extensively with MDX, not that I didn't have the opportunity. I remember exactly when I got my first copy of the precursor to Analysis Services. I was at my first Arbor Dimensions conference in Santa Clara in the fall of 1996. I remember being invited to a private Arbor executives party at the hotel and hearing the rumor about Microsoft buying an Israeli company that was an Arbor competitor. Little did anyone at the party know that I had an alpha version of the software in my computer bag. But, you know what? I never installed it. I am a loyal Essbase fan to the core and, despite the fact that the consulting firm I worked for at the time actually wrote most of the interface that Microsoft shipped, it just wasn't my cup of tea.

Over the years, a number of our competitors went off and re-wrote their interfaces to use XML/A so they could expose their products to other databases. When they did that, they were forced to stop supporting some of the features that make Essbase magic. You don't hear about most of them anymore. Proclarity anyone? Purchased by Microsoft and now on the trash heap. Temtec? Acquired by IBM where, apparently, software goes to die (remember Lotus 1-2-3? Alphablox?); Clarity recently joined them at IBM which means, strategically, their days in the Essbase world are numbered.

If you read through the comments at the end of the blog post referenced above, it looks like Microsoft is positioning Excel PowerPivot to be the ultimate BI user interface.. That is great for spreadsheet jockeys, but will lose many, many users who don't want, or need, to look through the raw data for their summarizations.

After reading all of this, I am thankful for a few things. I am thankful we:

Are exclusively focused on Essbase and that Essbase is very well tied in with the Oracle Fusion strategy and will continue to grow.
Invested heavily in Dodeca.
Focused Dodeca on the end user.

ODTUG Election - Thank You!

2010-11-09T09:30:00.001-06:00

Thank you to everyone who trusted me with their vote for the ODTUG Board of Directors. I will continue to work hard for the whole Oracle development community and, especially, for my fellow Hyperion professionals.

When you have ideas you believe can help the Hyperion user community as a whole, please don't hesitate to contact me or fellow ODTUG Board-electee, and old friend, Cameron Lackpour. Serving on the Board of Directors provides us direct contact with Oracle management on behalf of the user community and we are here to serve you.

Thank you again for the honor.

Off Hours: The Southeast Climbers Coalition Entry in the Pepsi Refresh Challenge

2010-11-01T22:33:00.000-05:00

As many of you know, one of my other passions (besides Essbase) is rock climbing. I have been a member of Southeast Climbers Coalition since it was formed. Further, a number of other Applied OLAP employees are also climbers and members of the SCC.

This month, the SCC is competing in the Pepsi Refresh Challenge. Winning this challenge would give the SCC the resources necessary to continue our mission of conservation and access and I am asking for your help. First, watch the video we entered for the contest: http://www.refresheverything.com/seclimbers. Then vote for our idea at this site.

On the video, be sure to watch for 2 shots of me and one of Applied OLAP installation guru Derek Hill. Here is Derek at the 0:05 mark in the video at the first crux of Rave at Sandrock, AL. Rave is the *only* 5.12 rated climb that I have climbed cleanly. That rating is the very beginning of the expert level and it took me 6 months of work to get this climb:

I am at the far left of this picture, taken at the Little River Canyon near Ft. Payne, AL, at the 0:41 mark in the video:

I am also in the film of the Yellow Bluff ribbon cutting at 2:19. Yellow Bluff is 16 miles from my house and I climb there often. In fact, I was there yesterday.

If you can spare a few minutes, please visit the Pepsi Refresh Challenge site and vote. You can vote once per day for the next 30 days; you can bet I will be!

Killer App? Show It Off at KScope 2011!

2010-10-20T08:54:00.000-05:00

So you think you have a killer Essbase, HFM, Planning or OBIEE application that everyone would envy? Please share with us and show it off at KScope 2011 in Long Beach. Time is running out and the last day to submit an abstract is October 26. You can find more information at http://www.kscope11.com/content/technical-content.

Oracle Open World Trip - Day 4

2010-10-11T22:52:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the delay in posting but you know how time flies when you are having fun!

Sunday, September 19 consisted of two big events in my mind, the User Group forums and the Oracle ACE Dinner. The best thing about the forums is hearing from Oracle Development on upcoming plans. I jotted down a bunch of notes on the Essbase Roadmap. Here are the notes with my comments in italics..

Essbase Roadmap - OOW 2010

General

Calc extensions within ASO - The effort seems to be focused on making allocations much easier in ASO in order to better integrate Essbase with Oracle E-Business Suite and other Oracle general ledger products. This seems to me to be a great usage of Essbase in the Oracle Fusion strategy. Further, it may lead to ASO being a viable option

In-Memory Analytics - Not much was discussed on this point but my gut feel is this is a competitive response to both TM/1 and Qlikview.

Integration

Migration of OFA/OSA - Great news for Oracle Financial Analyzer/Oracle Sales Analyzer users as they will now have the power of Essbase backing them.
Studio/OBIEE integration - I don't recall exactly how this will work.. Sorry!
Essbase web services layer - Yeah! Finally, a real way to get to Essbase via web services (besides XML/A which originated as the way to get to Microsoft Analysis Services data..)
Essbase ADF control - I have heard about this one now for 2 1/2 years.. I don't know what, exactly, to expect when we do finally see it. It is a tool for Essbase/Java developers only, though.

Enterprise Scalability and Reliability

Agent re-write - The Essbase Agent will be rewritten into Java to make it work natively within an application server and to provide better scalability.

High availability/Continued focus on performance and scalability - Better clustering/rollover capability including (if I remember correctly) deployment within Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC).

Improved Administration Experience

Thin client Studio - Pure HTML administration application.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Integration - Oracle Enterprise Manager is the main application for administering Oracle databases and will now add Essbase functionality.

My evening featured one of the highlights, for me, of Open World. The annual Oracle ACE Dinner was held on a cruise boat out in San Francisco Bay. I got to spend a bunch of time with some of the other Oracle ACE's including Edward Roske, Glenn Schwartzberg, Mike Riley and Jerry Ireland. Unlike the ACE Dinner at Kaleidoscope, where I arrived just as dessert was finishing up, I actually made the boat launch this time and it was a great time.

Oracle Open World Trip - Day 3

2010-09-23T13:10:00.001-05:00

Saturday, September 18 was basically an off-day (or a travel day) for most Open World attendees, but it was one of the best days of my life.

My wife and I stayed out in the East Bay with my best friend from college, Mark, who is the chief pilot for North Face. Mark and I are both die-hard Michigan football fans, so we got to watch the Michigan game together. We did not, however, expect the game to be such a thriller, so my adrenaline was running high during and after the game, but the best adrenaline rush was yet to come.

After the game we drove down to Livermore airport to meet with one of my customers, Tony Banta. Tony is quite an interesting guy in that he was an air force test pilot, was in the astronaut corps, and later went on to be the director of worldwide manufacturing for Cisco Systems. His current company, Calix, recently implemented Dodeca for production forecasting and Tony raves about the cost savings it has generated. In fact, he gave us this quote:

"Dodeca can answer simply the questions that can't be answered simply"

He was literally talking about their implementation and said that line; I stopped him so I could write it down word-for-word.

Tony and I also get along because he is also a pilot. I have a pretty cool plane, a Cessna 210, but Tony has some really cool planes. Saturday afternoon I got to fly in one of them. Here is a video my wife, Darlene, took when we flew over them after takeoff. The best part of the video, frankly, is her scream and laugh..

In case you don't recognize the plane, it is a P-51 Mustang which is the airplane that saved Europe in WWII. A picture of one of these airplanes has hung over my desk for many years now as a reminder to work hard so I can earn one, but this is the first time I have actually been in one. My laptop machine name is Mustang. This flight confirms it.. I want one! I told my wife I will now have to double the hours I work (from 12/day) in order to earn one..

I will post more video from the ride after Open World.

Oracle Open World Trip - Days 1 and 2

2010-09-19T17:11:00.000-05:00

I have blogger credentials for Oracle Open World 2010 and thus hope to do at least daily posts.

My trip started earlier in the week with the Oracle ACE Directors meeting at Oracle corporate headquarters. The ACE Directors meeting gives Oracle an opportunity to gather all of the ACE Directors together for a couple of reasons:

To communicate upcoming announcements at Open World.
Give this group of experts in the Oracle community an opportunity to talk directly with the appropriate Oracle executives to better understand Oracle's direction and to give feedback from the community directly to Oracle management.

Of course, this session was under NDA but there are a couple of things that are very apparent.. First, Oracle is committed to the future of Java (and to it's future as open source) and will make announcements at Open World to show their commitment.

Second, the Hyperion applications look to me like they will be integrated into WebCenter; Hyperion Financial Close Manager already requires it if I am not mistaken. WebCenter is essentially the Oracle equivalent of Microsoft Sharepoint and will add good value to the stack.

Relational Functionality of Dodeca 5.0 - How To, Part 3

2010-09-17T18:15:00.000-05:00

In my previous post, I showed how to create the Excel template for a Dodeca relational view. In this post, I will complete the series by creating the SQLExcel view that will join together the SQLPassthroughDataset from part 1 and the Excel template from part 2 to display and summarize Essbase performance data.

To create the new, select the New button from the View Editor to see the New View dialog. I gave my view the ID and Name ‘Essbase Performance’ and chose the SQLExcel ViewType.

Once the view is created, the property set for the new view is displayed in the editor. There are four mandatory properties for this view type. The ExcelTemplateBinaryArtifact property is an object that wraps the Excel file that is used as the template for the view. The ViewToolbarsConfiguration and the WindowsViewUIObjectTypeID specify the set of toolbars to use for the view and the type of display window. The WorkbookView WindowsViewUI specifies the view to be rendered with a single workbook resized to the entire size of the view window.

The most important property, however, is the DataSetRanges property. The DataSetRanges property specifies the data to be retrieved along with the sorting, grouping and other display options.

The DataSet Range editor is used to specify one or more data set ranges that will be retrieved into the worksheet or workbook. In turn, each DataSet may contain one more DataTables. Each DataTable contains the data retrieved from a single SQL statement.

The DataTableRanges property is defined where each DataTable is placed on the worksheet.

This dialog dictates how and where the data is place into the worksheet. The key property is the DataSheetRangeProperty which defines where the rows returned in the DataTable are placed into the worksheet. Optionally, the data rows can exclude column headers and can insert cells into the range. This latter setting is very useful when you want to use Excel formulas in your group subtotal blocks as it is the key to having the spreadsheet engine automatically adjust the formulas. The GroupStartCell property specifies where Dodeca will start building the group blocks, if any. The groups are specified using the RowSortAndGroupByInfoList property. The editor for the RowSortAndGroupByInfoList specifies, obviously, how the rows are sorted and grouped.

The RowSortAndGroupByInfo Editor not only specifies the sorting and grouping of the data, but also specifies the Excel Outlining configuration and the range name used to identify the block. With these point and click configurations complete, here is what the completed view looks like.

The completed view shows metric information about the Essbase operations conducted through Dodeca. Essbase administrators have, over the years, tried to get this type of information by parsing the Essbase logs. Dodeca, however, provides a much simpler solution.

Relational Functionality of Dodeca 5.0 - How To, Part 2

2010-09-13T21:55:00.000-05:00

In my previous post, I covered the first part of three parts on how to create and deploy a relational view in Dodeca. In this post, I will cover creation of the Excel template. For my example, I am going to write a simple report from the Dodeca Essbase Performance logging table.

Dodeca exposes a tremendous amount of Excel functionality to the relational view type. One of the most common things that most customers leverage is the ability to use Excel formulas in the subtotal blocks. One of the challenges most developers have when adding formulas, such as the SUM() function 'on-the-fly', is determining the range address for the formula. We made it very easy to use formulas as we insert rows to contain the actual data. This approach leverages the built-in spreadsheet functionality which adjusts the range addresses automatically.

Another useful Excel functionality that is available in Dodeca is grouping. Grouping provides users a way to tie a range of cells together so they can be easily collapsed or expanded. It supports the ability to automatically sort and group data based on column values and expressions. Additionally, up to 8 levels of grouping is supported and each level can be configured to initially display expanded or collapsed.

The requirements for the Excel template are simple. First, there must be a range defined for the data. The range must be exactly the number of columns returned by the SelectSQL of the SQLPassthroughDataSet object. The range must also be exactly 2 rows tall or, if you intend to show the column headers returned by the relational query, exactly 3 rows tall. This range can optionally contain formulas which will automatically be both preserved during the retrieve process and copied to each data row inserted into the worksheet.

Optionally, you can also include subtotal blocks. The subtotal block typically includes the entire data range and may include one or more rows, and or one or more columns, before and/or after the data range. This subtotal block typically contains formulas and labels to summarize the detail rows contained within the data range.

The range names should be defined with sheet level scope. Sheet level names are mandatory when the relational view is cascaded. Here is a screen shot showing the data range name definition.

DataRange definition in the Excel template

For my example, I am going to insert subtotal blocks to summarize the operation and break on the server / application / database. The operation block will contain a row for the average, minimum and maximum values for each operation. Here is my completed spreadsheet template.

Completed spreadsheet with OperationBlock range selected

In the final post of this series, I will setup the SQLExcel view that will join together the SQLPassthroughDataset from part 1 and the Excel template from part 2 to display and summarize Essbase performance data.

Relational Functionality of Dodeca 5.0 - How To, Part 1

2010-08-05T10:27:00.000-05:00

In my last post about the relational functionality of Dodeca, I talked about why the relational integration is necessary and discussed some of the features. In this post, I am going to walk through a simple how-to to show how easy it is to setup a relational view in Dodeca. For my example, I am going to write a simple report from the new Dodeca Essbase Performance logging table that is part of the application. In practice, however, you can use any relational data source that you can connect to via JDBC from our server.

There are four steps I need to follow to set up this relational view:

Determine the SQL data you want to display, and then set up the corresponding SQL Connection and SQL Passthrough DataSet objects in Dodeca.
Design a simple Excel template to display the data.
Set up the view definition and any related objects.
Deploy it on a View Hierarchy.

In this post, I will cover step 1 of the process. For my relational view/report, I am going to use a table in the Dodeca metadata database that tracks Essbase performance. Here is the SQL Query I created in SQL Server to get the data I want to display.

(click to enlarge)

To get access to the data in Dodeca, first I must create a SQL Connection object. The SQL Connection object defines all of the parameters necessary to connect to the target relational database from the server and, as the server connects to the database using Java JDBC technology, the parameters are specified in JDBC format. Below is a screenshot of the parameters in the Dodeca SQL Connection editor. Note that the Username and Password are masked in the editor and are stored using industry-standard TripleDES encryption.

(click to enlarge)

The next step is to define a SQL Passthrough DataSet object in, of course, the SQL Passthrough DataSet editor. This editor allows the Dodeca administrator to create new SQL DataSet objects. Each SQL Passthrough DataSet object may contain multiple Query objects which will be executed against the database in a single trip to the server. In my example, I am going to create a single Query object the editor. The SQL may optionally contain tokens which are string substitutions that are used a placeholders for user selections; in my case I did not choose to tokenize my SQL. Further, if I were planning to allow users to write back to the relational tables, I could also provide insert, update and delete statements. Here is a screenshot showing the SQL Passthrough DataSet definition including the SelectSQL property of the Query object.

(click to enlarge)

Once I have entered the SelectSQL and the SQLConnection property values, I can close the Query Editor and test it using, of course, the 'Test Data Set' button. Here is what my test looks like:

(click to enlarge)

I have covered quite a bit in this post, so I will stop here for now. In the next blog post, I will cover designing the Excel template for the Dodeca view/report.

Essbase Windows 7 Installation Issue - Resolution

2010-08-02T10:17:00.000-05:00

One of my sons worked with a partner last week who was having problems installing 64-bit Essbase on 64-bit Windows 7. It took a little bit to get the issues ironed out, but here is a summary of what happened. Hopefully this post will prevent similar problems for you.

On the initial installation, the partner tried to install Oracle EPM System without using UAC (a/k/a right click, Run as Administrator) to run the installtool.bat. This caused the installation to be incomplete and the subsequent configuration thus failed.

To try to fix the installation, the first thing that was attempted was an uninstall. The uninstallation appears to complete successfully, but on the subsequent reinstall, not all of the components, specifically the http server, were not enabled for selection. Of course, this did not look right, so upon further investigation, it was found that the uninstaller did not remove the dirty folder C:\Oracle\Middleware. We manually removed the C:\Oracle\Middleware directory, which was improperly installed in the first place, and then installation/configuration completed without a problem.

Relational Functionality of Dodeca 5.0

2010-07-26T09:38:00.000-05:00

Dodeca 5.0 shipped about a month ago, so I will expand on some of the new features in a few blog posts. I will start with the most expansive new capability which is the comprehensive new relational functionality.

Back in the old days with Essbase, relational technology was almost considered a dirty word. In fact, the Arbor product manager who I worked for on my first Essbase project, which was demoware for Arbor, told me I couldn't use a relational database on the project and, in fact, never to mention the word relational in their office! Of course, they were competing heavily against relational systems at the time so I can understand his position. Still, he didn't have a good answer for me when I asked where he would recommend storing addresses in Essbase. Of course, at the time it was not uncommon to see dummy Essbase outlines with this type of information but it was probably one of the worst cases of 'when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail' that I have ever seen. These days, with Oracle in the picture, there is much more opportunity to use Essbase for what it does best, storing and aggregating dimensional data, and to use relational technology for what it does best which is storing and retrieving transactional data for running businesses.

As the technology has evolved over the years, there have been a number of ways to bring together the power of Essbase with the details stored in relational databases. The first major effort to accomplish this task was Essbase Integration Server ("EIS"). By my rough estimate, EIS was used by less than 10% of Essbase customers to provide drill-through. Other Hyperion/Oracle products such as Financial Data Quality Management ("FDQM"), Essbase Studio and the new ERPi provide drill-through capability as well but have some limitation, version requirements or require a number of Oracle products, including Oracle eBusiness Suite in the case of ERPi, to work. While I am thrilled to see Oracle innovate in these ways, my thought is that is should be easier, faster and less expensive to provide drill-through to customers. This is what led us to invest so much time in relational technology for Dodeca.

The idea for drill-through in Dodeca is that you can target any relational database directly from any Essbase database. With this design goal in mind, we set out to make it reality and what we ended up with exceeds even my expectations. Some of the features we implemented include:

One or more queries on a worksheet
Automatic grouping based on column values or expressions
Use any Excel function in subtotal header/footer blocks
Write back data to the relational database (optional)
Relational query ranges on the same sheet as Essbase data ranges
Cascade based on relational values

Here is a screenshot of a relational view that shows a view with 2 different worksheets containing the results of 2 different queries. The first tab has data grouped by product and the second tab is grouped by salesperson. The grouping automatically included the Excel grouping controls which were configured to be collapsed; I expanded open the 'Classic Vest, L' group to display the details. The selected subtotal cell is an Excel SUM() function that was placed in the template by the view developer and whose range was automatically expanded when the data rows were inserted into the view. The performance, though, is the really amazing thing. This view, which runs a query for each sheet that together return over 120,000 rows, generated and displayed in 25 seconds. When it displays in Dodeca, the data and formatting is in the native Excel xls or xlsx format, so 'exporting' to Excel means that Dodeca saves the Excel file it is displaying as a temp file, then opens it in Excel.

Dodeca Relational View (click to enlarge)

Though this screenshot does not show an Essbase drill-through, the Intelligent Navigation feature of Dodeca makes drill-through almost trivial and I will show an example in an upcoming blog post. I also plan a post or two to talk about the technical aspects of how the relational functionality works.

Kaleidoscope 2010 - Java API Session Slides / Source Posted

2010-07-16T07:41:00.000-05:00

As promised, I have posted the slides and source code examples from my Introduction to Development with the Essbase Java API session at Kaleidoscope 2010. There is a readme file that gives you the basics of how to run them from the command line. If you are serious about learning the Essbase Java API, I strongly recommend you download one of the free Java IDE's available. My favorites are:

IntelliJ
Oracle JDeveloper
Eclipse

You can download the files from the Blog-Content section of the Applied OLAP website at http://www.appliedolap.com/downloads.

Kaleidoscope 2010 Review

2010-07-12T09:50:00.000-05:00

Kaleidoscope 2010 wrapped up a week ago Thursday and, not surprisingly, I haven’t had time to write about it until now. Here is a summary of some of the highlights.

Community Service

The Community Service project this year provided labor to the Ronald H Brown Middle School in northeast DC. The school is was named for a US Secretary of Commerce who was killed in a plane crash in 1996 in Croatia. The ODTUG crew worked on refurbishing a playground, did landscaping and sorted books in the library. Joe Aultman from AutoTrader, Jeff Sims from Tethsys and I worked on the basketball courts which literally had no lines or layout when we started. Cameron Lackpour and my son Billy worked in the library and Whitney, my daughter, worked on the hopscotch and four-square areas with an EPM consultant I had never met before, Jessica Cordova. Here is a picture (thanks to Larissa Stamey from ODTUG and Wayne Van Sluys for the picture).

For what it is worth, I placed the basketball in the center of the circle for this picture (and laid out the lines and painted much of the blue court. I am standing on left end just in front of my daughter, Whitney. My son, Billy, who labored for weeks on the Windows 7 installation blog, is standing just in front of the guy holding the letter 'B'.

Sunday Symposium

The Sunday EPM Symposium is one of the unique things about Kaleidoscope as it is the only forum where customers and consultants can meet the Hyperion development teams face-to-face. There was some great exchanges of information but, of course, as Oracle was talking about futures, everything presented came with heavy disclaimers.

During the Symposium last year, the product manager from Smart View held an impromptu ‘tell me why you like the classic add-in better than Smart View’ session that lasted nearly his entire allotted time. From his presentation this year, it is very apparent that he listened to the feedback. The Smart View team is working hard on classic add-in parity and are they are starting to get Smart View much closer to the point where it will gain more widespread acceptance.

Keynote / General Session

The General Session had a huge announcement for us Hyperion people as one of our own, Edward Roske from interRel, is the Conference Chair for Kaleidoscope 2011 in Long Beach. Edward has worked very hard on the previous conferences and has thus earned his way to a very tough job. For us Hyperion people, however, having a Hyperion person as the Conference Chair shows the importance of Hyperion in the ODTUG world. I expect that next years conference will have even more Hyperion content and will be even more of a can’t miss event.

The keynote was by Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project. Lee discussed some very interesting facts gathered from their research. One interesting trend he discussed is ‘lifelogging’ where people document everything they do on-line. I instantly recognized my daughter follows this tendency and, if fact, we always kid her about her natural ability to take pictures of herself with her iPhone for her Facebook page. I encourage you to read the findings at http://www.pewinternet.org/Presentations/2010/Jun/The-Future-of-the-Internet--National-Geographic.aspx. This presentation features the same content contained in the keynote

Sessions
I normally don’t get the opportunity to go to many sessions other than my own and this year was no exception. I did get to attend the Smart View sessions on Thursday and they were all very good and thought provoking.

I gave three presentations in DC as well. The first session was a vendor session which highlighted the features and benefits of Dodeca. It was well attended and we gave away a bunch of Dodeca T-Shirts at the end.

The second session was a new presentation intended to educate Oracle database developers about Essbase and where it fits into the enterprise. This was a fun topic and I think it is becoming more relevant with each passing day as Essbase gets integrated deeper into the Oracle stack.

The last session was a fill-in session on the Java API. My friend Jason Jones was scheduled to do the session but, at the last minute, was unable to attend. This session was the most fun for me as I really dig into Essbase at the API level and foster new understanding of how Essbase works ‘under the covers’ to even experienced Essbase people. A number of people of have asked for the sample code from this session; I will make it available on our website soon.

Overall / The Future

This Kaleidoscope was the best one yet but I still expect it to be bigger and better next year, but there is still a lot of work to do. Many people, including me, still long for the days of the Hyperion Solutions conference. The Solutions conference had the advantage of being run by the vendor, so the marketing department could devote many dollars to make sure it was ‘the place to be’ for Hyperion people.

In the Oracle world, the comparable conference is Oracle Open World but, as Hyperion is a small percentage of Oracle as a whole, Open World will never have the Hyperion focus that Solutions had or that Kaleidoscope has today. Kaleidoscope, on the other hand, is run by the Oracle Development Tools User Group which means that it is completely controlled, and funded, by the users. That means you can make difference on the direction of this conference. To help make Kaleidoscope even better, I plan to run for the ODTUG Board of Directors in order to provide Hyperion users a voice on the governing body. Elections are coming up in the fall and paid members are eligible to vote. I encourage everyone to join, participate and please vote for me for the Board of Directors!

Essbase Outline Performance Testing - Do It Yourself Kit

2010-06-14T10:19:00.000-05:00

I decided I would post my code for the Essbase Outline Performance Testing for a couple of reasons:

So you can try it on your own outlines; and
To make more Essbase Java API examples available online.

To use the code below, follow these steps:

Make sure you have a Java JDK installed on your system and referenced with the JAVA_HOME environment variable.
Make sure you have a backup of your Essbase outline (just in case).
Create two text files; name on file 'EssOutlineOpenTimingsTest.cmd' and the other 'EssOutlineOpenTimingsTest.java'.
Copy the following to code to the EssOutlineOpenTimingsTest.cmd (and I apologize in advance for the small size of the code; I had to shrink it for the blogger software to properly display all of the code):

@echo off

rem Change the directory below to point to your jar file 
set CLASSPATH=%CLASSPATH% ;C:\Hyperion\products\Essbase\aps\lib\ess_japi.jar;
echo Compiling ...

"%JAVA_HOME%\bin\javac" *.java -d .

echo Running test class ...
echo . 
"%JAVA_HOME%\bin\java" -ms128m -mx512m EssOutlineOpenTimingsTest

echo . 
echo . 
echo Done ... 
pause

Copy the following code to the EssOutlineOpenTimingsTest.java file:

import com.essbase.api.base.*;
import com.essbase.api.session.*;
import com.essbase.api.datasource.*;
import com.essbase.api.domain.*;
import com.essbase.api.metadata.*;
import java.text.DecimalFormat;

public class EssOutlineOpenTimingsTest {
    // TODO: CHANGE THE VARIABLES BELOW TO USE YOUR INFORMATION
    private static String _user = "timt";
    private static String _password = "essbase";
    private static String _server = "mustang";
    private static String _url = "http://mustang:13080/aps/JAPI";

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        IEssbase ess = null;
        IEssOlapServer server = null;

        try {
            // create api instance
            ess = IEssbase.Home.create(IEssbase.JAPI_VERSION);

            // signon to the domain
            IEssDomain dom = 
                ess.signOn (_user, _password, false, null, _url);
            
            // connect to the server
            server = (IEssOlapServer)dom.getOlapServer(_server);
            server.connect();
 
            // print the column headers
            System.out.println(
        "Try #|Application|Cubename|Milliseconds|Filesize (Mb)|Members"
            );

            // TODO: CHANGE THE NUMBER OF LOOPS BELOW AS DESIRED
            // open each outline 3 times in a loop
            for (int i = 1; i <= 3; i++) {
                // TODO: CHANGE THE APPLICATIONS/DATABASES BELOW, 
                // AND ADD/DELETE OPENOUTLINE CALLS, AS DESIRED
                openOutline(i, server.getApplication("Sample")
                    .getCube("Basic"));
                openOutline(i, server.getApplication("ASOSamp")
                    .getCube("Sample"));
                openOutline(i, server.getApplication("Big1")
                    .getCube("Big1"));
                openOutline(i, server.getApplication("BigASO")
                    .getCube("BigASO"));
                openOutline(i, server.getApplication("BigASO_C")
                    .getCube("BigASO_C"));
                openOutline(i, server.getApplication("zzz")
                    .getCube("zzz"));
                openOutline(i, server.getApplication("zzz_C")
                    .getCube("zzz_C"));
            }
        } catch (EssException e) {
            System.out.println("Error: " + e.getMessage());
        } finally {
            try {
                if (server != null && server.isConnected() == true)
                    server.disconnect();
            } catch (EssException e) {
                System.out.println("Error: " + e.getMessage());
            }

            try {
                if (ess != null && ess.isSignedOn() == true)
                    ess.signOff();
            } catch (EssException e) {
                System.out.println("Error: " + e.getMessage());
            }
        }
    }

    static void openOutline(int tryNumber, IEssCube cube) 
        throws EssException {
        
        IEssCubeOutline outline = null;

        try {
            // stop/start the cubes to get a fair timing
            try {
                cube.getApplication().stop();
            } catch (EssException e) {
                // fails if not started, so just ignore
            }

            // start cube
            cube.start();

            // let the machine catch it's breath
            try {
                Thread.sleep(3000);
            } catch(InterruptedException e) {

            }

            // get the start time
            long startMillis = System.currentTimeMillis();

            // open the outline
            outline = cube.openOutline();

            // compute the time to open
            long totalMillis = System.currentTimeMillis() - startMillis;

            // declare variables for the output string
            int memberCount = 0;
            String filesize = "";

            if (tryNumber == 1) {
                // get the dimensions
                IEssIterator dims = outline.getDimensions();

                // loop the dimensions
                for (int i = 0; i < dims.getCount(); i++) {
                    // get the dimension
                    IEssDimension dim = (IEssDimension)dims.getAt(i);

                   // count the members
                    memberCount += dim.getDeclaredSize();
                }

                // get the size of the outline file
                byte[] bytes = cube.copyOlapFileObjectFromServer(
                    IEssOlapFileObject.TYPE_OUTLINE, 
                    cube.getName(),
                    false);

                // count the bytes
                filesize = new DecimalFormat("0.0")
                    .format(bytes.length / (1024 * 1024));
            }

            // print the result
            System.out.println(tryNumber + "|" + 
                               cube.getApplication().getName() +
                               "|" + cube.getName() + "|" + 
                               totalMillis + "|" + filesize + "|" + 
                               memberCount);
        } finally {
            // cleanup
            if (outline != null && outline.isOpen())
                outline.close();
        }
    }
}

Modify the parameters in the Java code were noted. These parameters will set the code to user your server, username, password and databases.
Save both files, then double click the cmd file to run.

Remember to backup your Essbase outline file before you start as, by using this code, you acknowledge that you are responsible for the result and agree to hold me and my company harmless for any use of the code, in whole or in part.

Let me know your results!

Essbase Outline Performance Testing - Exciting Update

2010-06-11T11:12:00.000-05:00

I had a number of comments and emails following my post the other day about the performance of opening an outline. Many of them shared their belief that ASO databases did open more slowly, and why, and I had a couple of suggestions:

Try converting the Big1.Big1 outline to ASO using the wizard, then compare performance; and
Try compacting the outlines using the free Oracle ESSCMDQ utility that Oracle QA uses for testing.

I did that and here is the result.

Updated Analysis (click image to view in a larger window)

As you can see, converting Big1 to ASO caused the outline to grow by over 300% and the time to open to grow over 600%. Subsequent compacting of BigASO did not cause that much of a decrease in size or time to open.

There was, however, a big impact on the zzz outline that was generated by Essbase Studio. The filesize was reduced by 91% and the time to fell by an average of 75% (or nearly 45 seconds).

The customer who provided the zzz outline compacted their outline and have reported it opens much faster in their environment. As a result, it looks like compacting may have an impact on outline open operation performance with more significant results on Essbase Studio generated outlines.

Thanks to my friends Glenn Schwartzberg and Edward Roske for pointing out the availability of ESSCMDQ which is available at http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bi/esscmdq_sampleapps.html. I would heavily recommend you backup your outlines before running this utility as it is not available for every minor version of Essbase and I had it crash on my laptop a couple of times. By the way, on my 11.1.1.0 laptop, I had to use ESSCMDQ 9.3.1 as ESSCMDQ 11.1.1.1 threw an exception.

Finally, I am thinking of doing a poll on the blog about results you see when compacting your outlines. Would you like to participate in that poll? Also, would you be interested in the Java code I used to run the testing? If so, I will do another blog post to explain how it works and will make it available from our website.

New Functionality in Dodeca 5.0

2010-06-09T13:35:00.000-05:00

We have been hard at work on Dodeca 5.0 for nearly a year now, and it is nearly ready to ship. Some of our customers have heard about the significant new functionality coming in this release and some have used it in our beta. To summarize, there is a lot of excitement about this release. This blog post will summarize the changes; later blog posts may delve deeper into individual items.

Relational Functionality

Probably the biggest feature coming in Dodeca 5 is new and expansive relational capabilities. We have a number of customers who have used the SQLPassthroughDataset capabilities of Dodeca 4.1, so we listened to their feedback and desires to add to these capabilities. This new functionality includes a new Dodeca view type, the SQLExcel view type, which allows administrators to configure one or more SQL retrieval ranges, from one or more SQL databases, on each worksheet in a workbook template. The configuration supports automated, data-based Excel grouping with any Excel formula allowed in the group summary blocks. Further, the administrator can configure the ranges to allow direct writeback to the relational database. The same relational capabilities are also fully supported in the Essbase Excel view type; you can have Essbase and relational data on the same worksheet and can even cascade sheets with both Essbase and relational data.

Here are a couple of sample screenshots of the relational capability.

Relational View with multiple levels of grouping (click to expand)

Relational View with Excel-based grouping subtotals (click to expand)

We expect the relational capability will be used heavily by Essbase customers who want to implement drill-through to relational sources without the need to go through EIS or Essbase Studio. Further, we believe the Dodeca relational capability may be some of the most robust spreadsheet relational technology available anywhere, so we expect this functionality to be a popular even among non-Essbase customers.

Essbase Clustering

We have implemented robust Essbase clustering in our Dodeca-Essbase services. The clustering functionality reads the APS cluster definitions and manages connections to the appropriate clustered databases. Clustering is supported on both stateful and stateless connections. The stateful connection clustering connects to a given server/application/database and stays connected to the same database until that database becomes unavailable. In that case, the connection rolls to the next available cube in the cluster. Based on a customer request, stateful clustered connections can be configured to optionally throw an Exception if the 'originally' connected database becomes unavailable so they can guarantee a number of sequential operations occur against the same database.

Essbase Selector Improvements

We have made a couple of important improvements to Essbase selectors. First, we optimized the search algorithm for our find dialog and made it up to 90% faster. This optimization really isn't that exciting unless you have really large outlines and have configured your selectors to show limited numbers of members such as would be the case if you were using metaread filter security in Essbase (which Dodeca selectors honor automatically).

The second improvement is that we now have exposed associated attributes in our MemberTips. Here is a screenshot that shows a MemberTip with attributes displayed.

MemberTips displaying Attributes

Request/Response Logging

Ever wonder how Dodeca is communicating via web-services with our server? This new functionality will tell you. The request/response logging feature traps all xml inbound requests, and all xml outbound responses, to xml files on the server for the Dodeca service, the Dodeca-Essbase service, or both. The logging can be enabled or disabled by the administrator for the entire application and/or for individual Essbase connection definitions plus it can be enabled 'on demand' for an individual user.

Another use for these xml files is in stress testing your system. We have created a stressor that will resend the captured requests to the server using a specified number of threads. We use this stressor internally for stress testing our servers and, although we are not yet packaging the stressor with Dodeca, we will make it available to customers upon request.

Essbase Performance Logging

The Essbase performance logging tracks the performance and associated metrics, such as the Essbase server, application and database, username, number of threads active on the server during the transaction, size of the grid before and after the call, number of filled cells in the grid before and after the call and number of members returned, if any, along with the number of milliseconds it takes to complete. This data is stored in a relational database for later analysis. Like the request/response logging feature discussed above, performance logging can be enabled or disabled for individual Essbase connection definitions plus it can be enabled 'on demand' for an individual user. Ever want to know who is hitting Essbase and how much data they are pulling back? Here is your way to find out.

Installation Improvements

We have made a number of installation improvements including the elimination of the requirement for a Java JDK and the .NET SDK on the machine used to prepare the Dodeca service Web Archive ("war") file for deployment. We have a utility that does this preparation and it previously used the JDK for packaging the war file and the .NET SDK for digitally signing our deployment. The utility now supports these capabilities without the need for the SDKs and yes, we are creating a Java war file in .NET code!

We also made some minor adjustments to our core Framework code that will allow customers to run multiple Dodeca versions simultaneously and to fully support SSL for all transactions. We are introducing a new utility that helps customers determine the appropriate connection string for the Dodeca data store.

Cultural Settings

We have done some infrastructure work to assure that Dodeca is Locale aware. The work covers all aspects of Dodeca including the Essbase view types, SQL view types and workbook scripts.

Summary

There are dozens of other minor new features that we added to the software such as improvements to the paste options available where, for example, you can configure paste special, values to be the default paste action or improvements to the documentation which is now part of our automated build process. I plan to blog in more detail on some of the new features in the near future. Meanwhile, we expect to release Dodeca 5.0 on or around June 11.

Essbase Outline Performance Testing

2010-06-08T11:56:00.000-05:00

I posted a blog entry last week about getting member information in the Essbase API and made a comment about how opening an Essbase outline can be slow. We have seen anecdotal evidence over the years that outlines created in EIS/Essbase Studio seem to open more slowly which, incidentally, led us to write metadata caching into our Dodeca-Essbase service years ago. If I remember correctly, the Java API developers told me back then that opening the outline copies the outline file to the client machine, so some of the performance problem may be due to the file size that must be passed across the network; this is the same with the C and VB APIs. Based on these things, I decided to do some testing to try and get to the bottom of it (and perhaps help our friends at Oracle understand how the APIs are used out here 'in the wild' so they can better optimize the operations).

For my test, I wrote a Java method to open an outline and output the time it takes to complete the action. I then wrote code to call the method 5 times for each of four cubes/databases to make sure I was getting consistent timings. The testing was done completely on my laptop with the Java code, Essbase 11.1.1.0 and APS 11.1.1.0 all running on the same machine. I picked these four cubes for different reasons. The four cubes are:

Sample.Basic. I picked this cube as everyone has it and it can provide a comparison baseline. The filesize for the test was 9.1 Mb.

ASOSamp.Sample. I picked this cube as it gave me an ASO comparison baseline with 17,711 members in 14 dimensions. The filesize for the test was 5.2 Mb.

Big1.Big1. I picked this (renamed) customer cube as it is a very large BSO outline, built with build rules, with 337,272 members in 6 dimensions including 45,985 Accounts and 331,226 entities. The filesize for the test was 64.1 Mb.

zzz.zzz. I picked this (renamed) customer cube as it is an average ASO cube built by Essbase Studio with 55,284 members in 11 dimensions. The filesize for the test was 133 Mb.

Here are the results of my test summarized in a pivot table; click on the graphic to view the entire sheet.

I found the zzz.zzz outline was, by far, the slowest to open. When compared to the ASOSamp baseline outline, it took approximately 9 times longer to open zzz.zzz despite the fact that it has only 3 times more members. Big1.Big1, which has 6 times more members than zzz.zzz, opened in just over 50% of the time. Based on my tests, it appears the filesize is a major factor in the performance and that the outline built with Essbase Studio is significantly larger than the outline built with build rules.

So, how does outline performance affect you? Other than the obvious wait times in EAS, there may be some things that are not as obvious. The two most glaring examples are the inability to get all of the available information about associated attributes and the inability to get member comments. In any case, wouldn't it be great if all member queries were equal and outlines opened really fast?

How To Trash An Essbase Database (and how to fix it)

2010-06-07T19:06:00.001-05:00

I was stress testing some new Essbase clustering functionality that we put into Dodeca this weekend and decided to let it run on my laptop for a couple of hours while I relaxed at home. However, I had forgotten that the new battery on my laptop seems to act strangely and not alert my system that it is running out of juice and, as a result, it just immediately turns off.. This is definitely *not* what you want to do to Essbase, especially when you are changing the configuration.

In my testing, I wrote a little C# routine that retrieved data into a grid every 1/2 second. The application also had a background thread that was running a maxl script every 3 seconds to turn off one active database in my cluster and start the other database in the cluster. I doubt anyone would need to swap clusters this fast, but I wanted to make sure it worked, so I wrote the test routine.

It just so happened that my machine quit in the middle of one of these maxl runs. I didn't think anything of it and put my laptop away until this morning when I noticed my Essbase service wasn't running. When I tried to start it, it immediately shut down. I started Essbase in a command window and it looked like it was working, but it didn't behave properly when I tried to connect to it.

Apparently, several files got trashed when the laptop ran out of power. To get everything back to normal, I basically had to create a new application and copy the files from the old application over to the new application. Not very pretty but it worked. Thank goodness it was only my laptop system and not a production system.

Lesson to be learned.. Make sure your production systems have good UPS's or other backup power behind them.

When Is A Member Not A Member?

2010-06-03T10:50:00.001-05:00

When is a member not a member? Sometimes in the Essbase Java API, that's when. Depending on how you obtained your IEssMember object instance, it may only partially describe the member. What I mean by that is that is that some properties are not available, and are thus either blank/null or throw an Exception when you try to access them. This is why it can be frustrating to work with the Essbase API. For what it is worth, this problem is not limited to the Essbase Java API but is also a present in the C and VB APIs as well. In this blog, I will focus on the Java API but for those of you using the C and VB APIs, see if you can spot the corresponding API calls in those languages.

To start, let's look at 3 common ways to get an IEssMember object in the Essbase Java API:

IEssCube.getMember()
IEssMemberSelection.executeQuery()
IEssCubeOutline.findMember()

Each of these methods have their advantages and their disadvantages. The IEssCube.getMember() method is fast but doesn't return all properties. IEssMemberSelection.queryMembers() allows you to find multiple members based on relationships or wildcard searches but, again, doesn't return all of the properties; it also will cause hanging Essbase connections if you don't properly close the IEssMemberSelection object. IEssCubeOutline.findMember() gives you basically all of the information but requires that you open the outline. Opening the outline can be terribly slow if you have a large outline or, in our experience, if the outline is built using EIS or Essbase Studio. The fact that there are multiple ways to get the member information can certainly be frustrating.

One example of frustration occurred this spring when we decided to add attribute information to the MemberTips we optionally display in a Dodeca member selector. We uncommented our server code that calls the IEssMember.getAssociatedAttributes() method and were not surprised that this method threw an Exception. We have gone to great lengths to make Dodeca performant and, for the most part, don't open the outline. As a test, however, we decided to open the outline only when the query was returning this information. As soon as we tested this on one of our larger customer outlines with 385,000 members in the Entities dimension, we knew this approach would be much too slow to put into production. Upon further testing, we found that we could get 2 of 4 attribute-related properties without opening the outline and that is what we have now implemented.

Dodeca MemberTips

This summer, I have my lucky intern working on a research project with Essbase member information with the Java API. The first thing I had him do was to write some Java code that used reflection to attempt to find which properties were available to each method of obtaining an IEssMember object. Here is a summary of that work using 11.1.1.3 run against Sample Basic using 100-10 as the target member. An 'x' in the cell indicates that the property value appears to have been returned properly; a blank indicates either an error occurred or, perhaps, that the method didn't work due to member 100-10 not being a dimension root member, etc.

MethodName	Cube	Member Selection	Outline
getAggregationLevelUsage	x	x	x
getAssociatedAttributes			x
getAttributeAssocLevel	x	x	x
getAttributeMemberDataType	x	x	x
getAttributeValue	x	x	x
getChildCount		x	x
getChildMembers			x
getConsolidationType	x	x	x
getCountChildMembers	x	x	x
getCountOfDupMemberNameInDim*
getCurrencyCategoryOrName		x	x
getCurrencyConversionType		x	x
getDescription	x	x	x
getDimensionCategory		x	x
getDimensionName	x	x	x
getDimensionNumber	x	x	x
getDimensionSolveOrder	x	x	x
getDimensionStorageCategory		x	x
getDimensionStorageType		x	x
getFirstChildMemberName	x	x	x
getFormatString	x	x
getFormula	x	x	x
getGenerationNumber	x	x	x
getHierarchyType*		x	x
getLastFormula	x	x	x
getLevelNumber	x	x	x
getLinkedAttributeAttachLevel	x	x	x
getMemberComment			x
getMemberId	x	x	x
getMemberNumber	x	x	x
getMemberType*
getName	x	x	x
getNextSiblingMemberName	x	x	x
getOriginalMemberName	x	x	x
getParentMemberName	x	x	x
getPreviousSiblingMemberName	x	x	x
getPropertyDataTypes	x	x	x
getPropertyModes	x	x	x
getPropertyNames	x	x	x
getRelatedMemberNames			x
getRoot	x	x	x
getShareOption		x	x
getSmartList*
getSolveOrder	x	x	x
getTimeBalanceOption		x	x
getTimeBalanceSkipOption		x	x
getUDAs		x	x
getUniqueName		x	x
isAttributesAssociated	x	x	x
isClientCachingEnabled	x	x	x
isDimensionRootMember	x	x	x
isExpenseMember		x	x
isFlowType	x	x	x
isIndependentDim	x	x	x
isInitialized	x	x	x
isMemberNameUniqueWithinDim*
isNameUnique		x	x
isRelationalDescendantPresent	x	x	x
isRelationalPartitionEnabled	x	x	x
isTwoPassCalculationMember		x	x

* Indicated results may be due to the member tested, 100-10, instead of the availability of the information exposed by the IEssMember.

As it appears that basically every property value is available when the outline is open, my intern is now working on prototyping a faster methodology for getting member information that I engineered. I will discuss this methodology once we have it implemented and shipping in Dodeca.

Speaking of Dodeca, we have been hard at work on Dodeca 5.0 and are now at the beta 2 milestone (which explains the sparseness of my blogging). I plan to start blogging on the numerous new features of Dodeca 5.0, along with continuing the Dodeca architecture overview I started in the fall, within the next few days.

Kaleidoscope 2010 Keynote - Not More of the Same

2010-05-19T09:28:00.000-05:00

The keynote at the two Kaleidoscope conferences I have attended have been Oracle executives which is quite different than the keynotes at the Solutions Conferences. My favorite keynotes at Solutions were both by John Cleese of Monty Python fame.

This year, ODTUG is changing things up a bit and, although it probably won't be comedic, it certainly should be interesting. Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, will deliver the keynote this year. The Pew Internet & American Life Project is a non-profit, non–partisan organization that studies the social impact of the Internet. During his Keynote, Lee will discuss findings of a survey of experts about the social impact of the Internet and cell phones as technology continues to improve and provide more opportunities for users. I look forward to it.

In other Kaleidoscope news, the agenda for the Hyperion Symposium has been published. Friend and fellow blogger Cameron Lackpour has posted the agenda on his blog at http://camerons-blog-for-essbase-hackers.blogspot.com/2010/05/kalidoscope-2010-symposium-agenda-is_18.html.

How You Can Make Kaleidoscope Better

2010-05-05T11:13:00.000-05:00

Since the acquisition of Hyperion by Oracle, I have worked with the Oracle Development Tools User Group ("ODTUG") to make their conference, Kaleidoscope, a home for the Hyperion community. I believe my efforts, along with the efforts of some other dedicated individuals have paid off and this summer Kaleidoscope 2010 is shaping up to be the best Hyperion conference ever. The dedicated individuals who have had the most impact on the success of the Hyperion content at the conference is the ODTUG Hyperion Special Interest Group ("Hyperion SIG"). You have a chance now to join this group of individuals as nominations are now open for three directors to fill expiring terms on the board.

The nominations are open to both Hyperion end users and partners. The board by-laws do, however, state that at least 50% of the board membership must be from the end user community.

Current board member (and friend) Natalie Delemar is the person responsible for gathering the nominations. She has volunteered many hours and very hard for the Hyperion SIG over the past couple of years and deserves a big round of applause from our community. You can send the nominations to her at Nadelemar@yahoo.com.

For more information on the qualifications, please see this Network54 forum post.

New 11.1.2 Information

2010-04-27T23:26:00.000-05:00

I was talking with one of my contacts this week and learned some things that would be of interest to those of you working with 11.1.2. Keep in mind that, in regards to products/service packs that have not shipped, Oracle makes no guarantees of what will ship until it has actually shipped, so plan your actions accordingly. The things I learned include:

There are known issues with the install but many of them are documented in either the epm_1112000_readme.pdf or in the readmes for the individual products.
Release 11.1.2 really is for new installs only and there are no provisions for upgrade or migration from any previous version. Upgrade and migration capabilities are planned for a point release later in the year.
Essbase 11.1.2 is not compatible with any other version. While it will be tempting to use the new separate installer for the Excel Add-In with previous versions of Essbase, there's no guarantee it will work. The contact continued to say it should as there haven't been any new features in the Add-In for a while now, but it would definitely create an officially unsupported environment.
There are service packs in the works for the 9.3.1.x and 11.1.1.3.x codelines to add a stand-alone Add-In installers.
As widely reported in other Hyperion blogs, Release 11.1.2 introduces support for Internet Explorer 8.
Not all the products shipped with EPM 11.1.2. There is no 11.1.2 version of Essbase Analytics Link for HFM (formerly HyperRoll), and Data Integration Management 11.1.1.1 is certified to run with EPM 11.1.2.

I have some people on my tech support team currently working on installations of both the 32-bit and 64-bit Essbase stack on Windows 2008 and Windows 7. We should be starting our Dodeca QA tests on 11.1.2 either tomorrow or the next day. We already have customers asking for our Dodeca-Essbase services for 11.1.2; we promise shipment within 2 weeks of 11.1.2 shipment.

Of course, as I learn more that I can share with you, I will post it here.

Oracle EPM System 11.1.2 has shipped!

2010-04-21T08:59:00.000-05:00

My team is already downloading EPM 11.1.2 from http://edelivery.oracle.com and we will have some VMs up and running by this afternoon with the Essbase stack. I have a few initial observations from looking at the contents of eDelivery.

Download packages are currently available for HP-UX Itanium (but not HP-UX PA-RISC 64-bit), IBM AIX on POWER Systems (64-bit), Linux x86, Linux x86-64, Windows 32-bit, Windows x64 64-bit (but not Windows Itanium 64-bit), Solaris on SPARC 64-bit (but not Solaris on x86 (64-bit).

There is also a separate part number labeled "Oracle Essbase Spreadsheet Add-in Release 11.1.2.0.0 for Microsoft Windows" under 32-bit Windows. This part number appears to be a standalone Excel add-in that weighs in a 145 Mb. This is a significant decrease for installing the Excel add-in but still is about 4x the size of the Dodeca footprint. The Smart View standalone download is 79 Mb.

It looks like all of the products shipped together. This is something that Hyperion was working to do before the merger and I don't remember if it actually worked out that way. Additionally, back in the Hyperion days, Windows 32-bit shipped first and the remainder of the OS support shipped later.

I will report more once we start the installs.

Oracle EPM System New Release Webcast Tomorrow

2010-04-06T11:27:00.000-05:00

Oracle is holding a webcast tomorrow about the new version of the Oracle EPM System at 8:30 am Pacific time. You can register for the webcast at http://ow.ly/1uURo.

I would expect that perhaps the new 11.1.2 may also show up on eDelivery as early as tomorrow. As soon as we get it in-house, I will have my people doing installations. We will then add 11.1.2 to our build scripts for our Dodeca-Essbase service and plan to have it available within a week.. Ah, the beauty of the web-service architecture!

OpenLDAP Startup Issues

2010-04-03T10:44:00.001-05:00

I had a problem with OpenLDAP this week after I accidentally did a 'hard boot' of my laptop. I fiddled around with it for a while and did some research on the web, then I finally a reference to 'error 21'. This was an error code that indicates the OpenLDAP database has become corrupted. Thankfully, OpenLDAP ships with a database recovery tool.

The webpage I found appears to have been written by me! It is from an archived section of OTN and no longer has the usernames associated with the posts. Funny, if you post enough information on the internet long enough, you start to get your own answers back from Google.. I did think about the OpenLDAP corrupt database issue when I had my issue this week but didn't try that fix first. The reason is that I have not had much of a problem with OpenLDAP in 11.1.1 although it seems that OpenLDAP corruption was a weekly thing for me with 9.3.1.

In any case, to correct the problem, I created a cmd script to run the db_recovery tool:

set OPENLDAP_DIR=C:\Hyperion\products\Foundation\openLDAP %OPENLDAP_DIR%\bdb\bin\db_recover -v -h %OPENLDAP_DIR%\var\openldap-data -t 04101200
I ran this script and was back running in minutes. In my case, I ran this on my development laptop. If you are running a production environment, at a minimum, I would recommend backing up the OpenLDAP directories before you start so you can restore the files if there are any errors.

Story of My Life..

2010-04-02T12:53:00.000-05:00

This cartoon I saw today says it all..

Kaleidoscope 2010 Registration - Discount Code

2010-03-30T09:25:00.000-05:00

A bunch of Hyperion people have been talking to their friends and have heard about how much they learned at previous Kaleidoscope conferences; it is starting to show. I heard that the Kaleidoscope registration count to date is significantly higher than at the same time last year. Applied OLAP is again sending at least four people to the conference including two of us who will be leading some hands-on labs.

As a sponsor of Kaleidoscope, we also have been given a discount code that you can use to save $300 on registration. The discount code is valid until April 23 so don't miss your opportunity to attend the most concentrated Hyperion and Essbase information exchange anywhere. Register today at www.odtugkaleidoscope.com and use the discount code OLAP to get your discount.

I hope to see you there.

Cool New Excel 2007 Ribbon

2010-03-25T16:44:00.000-05:00

I ran across a utility on the OTN Essbase forum a couple of days ago that sounded very useful. It is a Excel 2007 Ribbon UI for the classic Essbase add-in. Before this ribbon was available, it was a pain to access the classic Essbase add-in in Excel 2007 as it is hidden away on a sub-Ribbon as shown here.

The new Ribbon UI is from a group known as In2Hyperion (In-to Hyperion, get it?). I had read a few things on their blog at http://www.in2hyperion.com in the past but took a closer look when I heard about the Ribbon UI. I looked at the authors of In2Hyperion and I know a couple of people on the list from their days at WhittmanHart (now part of TUSC/Rolta). I downloaded and tried out the Ribbon and, in my limited testing, I found it very useful. Below is a screenshot of the Ribbon; click on the picture to see a larger version.

Their blog post that discusses the Ribbon, and has installation instructions and a download link, is at http://www.in2hyperion.com/post/2010/03/21/Hyperion-Excel-Add-in-Ribbon.aspx. Thanks to the In2Hyperion team for their contribution to the Essbase community. Hopefully you will find the Ribbon UI useful too.

Classic Excel Add-in in Windows 7

2010-03-23T14:46:00.000-05:00

Since my post on how to install the Essbase stack on Windows 7, I have had a few people tell me that the classic Essbase add-in doesn't work on Windows 7. We took a look at the issue and found that the classic add-in now needs modification to three environment variables instead of two. The classic add-in has always required two environment variables:

ARBORPATH - Set to the Essbase home directory (ex. C:\Hyperion\products\Essbase\EssbaseClient)
PATH - Set to %ARBORPATH%\bin

The add-in now requires a third environment variable which was not properly setup by the installer on Windows 7:

ESSBASEPATH - Set to the same directory as ARBORPATH.

I don't know for sure when (or why) they added this new environment variable, but in the cases we have worked with, if manually add the variable to your system (and, perhaps, reboot afterwards), the classic add-in should work for you.

HUGmn techday2010 - March 11 in Minneapolis

2010-03-04T09:44:00.000-06:00

I will be presenting next week at the Hyperion User Group - Minnesota 'TechDay 2010' event next week in Minneapolis. The user group has lined up a number of great speakers including fellow Oracle ACE Directors Edward Roske from interRel Consulting and Eric Helmer from The Hackett Group. Oracle Essbase product managers Alan Lee and Karen Zubetz and HFM product manager Mike Malwitz will also be doing presentations along with a number of other consultants.

Alan Lee will be speaking on the new features coming in Essbase 11.1.2 and Karen Zubetz will discussing the new OBI Applications Essbase Integrator which will, in essence, spin Essbase cubes from Oracle BI Server sources. Mike Malwitz will talk about what is new, and what is coming, with HFM. My presentations are on Essbase 11 installation and on converting a VBA application to Dodeca. Here is the full agenda for the meeting: http://www.harbinger-group.com/HUGpage.html#.

I will be in Minneapolis for a couple of days and I have promised myself I would take a bit of time to enjoy my trip. I am planning to visit the climbing gym in St Paul on Wednesday night (Vertical Endeavors - http://www.verticalendeavors.com/st_paul/index.html) and am planning to ski on Thursday night (Afton Alps - http://www.aftonalps.com). Anyone interested in joining me?

Wisdom of Crowds BI Market Study

2010-03-02T09:01:00.000-06:00

Howard Dresner, formerly the Chief Strategy Officer at Hyperion, is now an independent BI Strategy consultant and is currently conducting a BI market survey. His “Wisdom of Crowds” Business Intelligence Market Study is not underwritten or sponsored by any vendors and no detailed data will be shared with the outside world. If you are interested in having your opinions help shape the BI market, you can participate in the study at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/QMZTVSV.

I have known Howard for a number of years and we became fast friends when we learned we were both pilots. For some reason, however, my 210 is faster than his airplane although I didn't buy his explanation that salaries for 'Chief Strategy Officers' are not that high.. Rather, I think it boils down to the fact that I spend a greater part of my salary for the care and feeding of my plane!

Win a Free Kaleidoscope Registration

2010-03-01T21:56:00.000-06:00

ODTUG is set to announce a new contest that gives you a chance to win a free registration to Kaleidoscope or, alternatively, a suite upgrade at the Marriott Wardman Park.

All you need to do is create a 3 minute (or less) YouTube video on “Why You Need to Attend ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010”. Make it funny, musical, or informational. Mostly, make it memorable. Make it viral and we will see you in DC!

To qualify, make sure to include the ODTUG Kaleidoscope logo and submit your video for consideration by emailing you name and YouTube video link to Crystal Walton at crystal@odtug.com. By the way, Crystal works on the small team of full-time ODTUG people who work very hard to make Kaleidoscope the best Hyperion conference in the world.

Video Contest Guidelines: Video must be three minutes or less, contain no inappropriate content, and be posted publicly to YouTube by March 31, midnight EST. All videos must remain in public domain until after July 1st, 2010. The winning video will be selected from among all the entries. The judges’ decision will be final. Judges may include members of the ODTUG Kaleidoscope Conference Committee and others. Winner will be notified by April 2nd, 2010. Winner will have the choice of a complimentary non-transferable registration to ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010 or a suite upgrade at the Marriott Wardman Park.