Essbase 11.1.1 Released

Oracle released the new version of Essbase / Planning / HFM yesterday; it is now available at http://edelivery.oracle.com/. My friend Edward Roske sent me an email at 2 am this morning telling me it is available. He has posted more detailed information about the release on his blog at http://looksmarter.blogspot.com/2008/07/epm-11x-generally-available.html.

I am downloading it now. I will have my infrastructure person build a VM Monday so we can compile/test our Essbase services against this version and provide support for Dodeca within the next few days.

Debugging Essbase Add-in Issues

Sorry I haven't posted in a while; I am still trying to recover from ODTUG (and am preparing to fly to Seattle to speak at the Oracle Days conference (http://www.oracledays.com/) next week. I have been trying to hit the forums and have seen a common theme that deserved a blog post to explain.

I have seen a number of posts relating to the Essbase Excel add-in that claim "XYZ functionality doesn't work in this machine but it works on every other machine we try it on..". You can sometimes debug those things until you are blue in the face and still not find the answer. That being said, these things are just computers and they do what they are programmed to do unless, of course, you believe in gremlins. What that means is that there is a cause to every issue and there is an answer.

The two most common things that could happen in this circumstance are that the files being loaded on not the right files or the configuration is not correct. In the first case, the most common thing is the client side files are not in synch with the Essbase server version and, of course, the fix is to upgrade the add-in. Another issue I have seen frequently is that the files are of *mismatched* versions which can cause some really serious and hard to debug issues. On the configuration side, I haven't seen issues that frequently and, when I have, a simple deletion of the ini file (for earlier versions of the add-in) or the related registry entries (for later versions) fixed those issues. I do remember seeing Excel crash due to ini file issues back in the version 5 or 6 timeframe; if I remember right, it was because I changed the Essbase options string stored in the ini file to contain 'bad' values (accidentally, of course!)

On to the impetus for this post... Whenever I have hear of people who are having problems debugging issues in the Excel add-in like this, of course I first tell them about our Dodeca product which doesn't have any of the numerous issues associated with the Excel add-in. Although most users who see Dodeca want it, they normally aren't in a position to purchase a replacement product no matter how good it is (or they probably wouldn't be the ones trying to debug these issues in the first place). The next steps in debugging the most difficult Excel add-in issues is to examine the files in memory on the 'bad' machine and compare them to the files in memory on a 'good' machine in their organization. This process is more involved than just comparing the files in a directory but, fortunately, there is a tool that can help.

I use the Process Explorer tool from SysInternals for this type of work. SysInternals is a company that has some very cool freeware utilities and they really know Windows inside/out. In fact, they know Windows so well that Microsoft purchased the company a couple of years ago. You can get the Process Explorer at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx. Here is a screenshot of the Process Explorer running on my machine with the Excel add-in (click on the picture to see a larger version):



Note: the View menu has 'Show Lower Pane' checked and the Lower Pane View is set to DLLs. Once you see the lower pane, you may have to click on the column headers to add the 'Version' and 'Path' columns.

The first thing I normally do is sort by the 'Path' column, scroll down and look at the versions of the files in the Hyperion directories. If the versions differ between the different Hyperion files, that itself may be the issue causing the problem.

I also sort by the 'Company Name' column and look for Hyperion files. I have seen many instances where some Essbase files are getting loaded from one place in the PATH and others are loaded from another place. This can happen when a developer that is not very familiar with Essbase incorrectly installs Essbase DLLs in Windows\System32 or some other common directory in the path. Windows searches directories in the PATH environment variable when it needs to load a file and then loads the first one it finds; Windows\System32 is commonly very early in the PATH so any Essbase files installed there would most likely get loaded before the version in your ARBORPATH\bin directory.

While you are reviewing files, also look at what other add-ins may be loaded in Excel. Occasionally other add-in's interfere with the workings of the Essbase add-in.

Finally, you can save this information to a file. Do the same thing for both the 'good' and 'bad' machines, compare the differences and you may find what is causing you user issues. If you can't find a solution, give me a call and I will show you how our Dodeca product can resolve these types of headaches for you!

Essbase 11.1.1 New Features - Date and Text Measures

Comments on my last post left by fellow Oracle ACE Glenn Schwartzberg has prompted me to expand on my comments about the Date and Text Measures features coming up in Essbase 11.1.1. This information if from a Collaborate 08 session by Aneel Shenker regarding future features of Essbase. This presentation, as any presentation you see from Oracle on unshipped product, has the following disclaimer:

"The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle."

As I have said before, the fact that you hear it from me certainly doesn't change the above disclaimer as I can't/don't speak for Oracle (sorry I had to start this post with the same disclaimer again, but it is just something I think I have to do to prevent angering the Oracle legal gods).

This new feature coming in Essbase will enable you to do new things that you really couldn't do before in Essbase. Under the covers, the data will still be stored numerically but numbers, or ranges of numbers, appear to be mapped to text or date labels on the client side. Here is a screenshot from the presentation:



The 'Satisfaction' and 'Transaction date' columns in this screenshot both come from Essbase but have associated labels. This functionality will also work on summaries and averages:

I haven't seen how they plan to provide this functionality 'under-the-covers' at the API level; to warn you, it gets a little geeky past this point. In the current version of the Essbase Java API, the data is provided in a multiple 2-dimensional arrays. The member names and data is in one array of strings, and returned as an int, the cell types are returned in an array of bytes and the attributes, which hold the information such as dimension numbers, read/write status and LRO information that make Excel add-in 'Styles' work (and is used in our datapoint mapping work in our Dodeca product) are returned in an array of int types.

I doubt they add another layer for for date/text measures to work as it seems like a whole bunch of overhead; the date/text labels could possibly be repeated many, many times in the array. I guess it would be easier to work with from the programming side if it is in a array. The other option they may implement would be to provide a mapping of the values to the strings at retrieve time. If this were the case, the network traffic would be reduced at the cost of programmers ease of use. I guess I will find out soon enough; when I get a build of 11.1.1 to play with, I will need to look at how they implemented this new feature to make sure we support it properly in our Dodeca product.

Collaborate 08 - Essbase New Features Presentation

As promised, I am starting a series on the Collaborate 08 presentation by Aneel Shenker that discussed new features scheduled for the next version of Essbase. This presentation, as any presentation you see from Oracle on unshipped product, has the following disclaimer:

"The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information
purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle."

The fact that you hear it from me certainly doesn't change the above disclaimer as I can't/don't speak for Oracle.

That being said, here is a list of the things presented with a brief description of benefits of these features:

1. Varying Attributes (aka Slowly Changing Attributes) - Slowly changing attributes let you change how members rollup based on time. A common usage scenario would be in a corporate reorg where 'Dept 100' rolls up to 'Mgr A' until July 2007, then it rolls up to 'Mgr B'. Without slowly changing attributes, a 'reorg' in the Essbase outline moves all history to roll up to 'Mgr B'.
2. Time Intelligence enhancements in block storage. These were introduced in 9.3 but were ASO only; now some of that same functionality will be available throughout Essbase.
3. Date and Text Measures - Allows you to display text instead of a value as the result of an Essbase query. To me, it looks like an enhanced 'Missing Text String' type of functionality except the 'text' values are controlled by the database designer.
4. Improvements to backup and logging. The thing that stands out for me on this is the ability to audit logging capabilities. It appears Essbase will now track all write operations to the database including outline changes, data load, calculations and lock and send. Further, there will be new 'replay' feature that lets you 'replay' these 'writes' to your database; it looks very useful in the case where you have to restore from a backup.
5. ASO Improvements including the ability to do a 'Partial Clear' of the database and ability for ASO databases to be the target of a partition.
6. Essbase can be a physical database source in the OBIEE BI Server. For those of you that have always wanted to use SQL to go against Essbase, essentially the BI Server layer will allow you to do that; I would guess they are putting a virtual star-schema layer on top of Essbase in the BI Server layer.
7. XOLAP or 'eXtending OLAP on a relational database'. Essentially, XOLAP is dynamically sourcing the cube from a relational datasource. I think this could be a very exciting development that could allow us to write some very cool applications in the future that were difficult before. For example, payroll planning applications where the user wanted to add, on the fly, new employees to plan for may be much easier in XOLAP. I can't wait to get my hands on it so I can see how far we can push it.

The presentation also talked about Essbase Studio and some future Essbase things as well. I plan to post a bit more on this topic and include some screenshots as time allows.

If you want to learn more about Essbase 11.1.1, I would urge you to attend the ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference in New Orleans. The Essbase Symposium on Sunday, June 15 is dedicated exclusively to 11.1.1 and future versions of Essbase; speakers for the day are all from the Essbase development organization and it will give you the unique opportunity to get your questions answered directly from the developers. Information on Kaleidoscope is located at http://www.odtugkaleidoscope.com/hyperion.html.

Collaborate Thoughts

Sorry I have been so busy and not able to post a play-by-play account of Collaborate. My friend Edward Roske did manage to post often from Collaborate and I recommend you read his comments at http://looksmarter.blogspot.com/. I don't know how he kept up; he must have been blogging the entire time he wasn't presenting..

As for my overall impression.. It does seem to me, and to others I talked with, like this is the replacement for the Hyperion Solutions conferences of the past. It did seem a bit light on 'how customer A implemented Hyperion product XYZ' types of presentations but hopefully there will be more submissions in future years. Edward Roske and Tracy McMullen from interRel did many, many presentations; they did invest a bunch of time in submitting/writing many of the presentations. The best presentation I saw was, however, a non-technical presentation by John Scott of interRel about the good, bad and ugly of budget and forecasting systems. John used to be the Global Domain Lead for Hyperion Planning and talked not only about how budgets can be good, but also on how they can lead to 'bad' behavior such as causing people to protect their budget dollars even when the business could be optimized by a lower budget..

The OAUG SIG meeting was interesting; Edward wrote about many of the details but there is one thing I wanted to point out about the benefits of SIG membership. Oracle E-Business Suites customers were facing a deadline on upgrading a specific version before it went to 'Sustaining Support' which is the lowest level on their support matrix; the SIG convinced Oracle to extend that support by (at-least) one year. The lesson? Those of you on Essbase 7X may want to join the OAUG SIG 'in-force' and together work to make sure 7X does not go to 'Sustaining Support'.

On the Essbase roadmap topic, there was an excellent presentation made by Aneel Shenker; he was gracious enough to give me a copy of the slides and I will post a my thoughts of the new features coming in Essbase 11.1.1, formerly known as "Kennedy" and "Essbase 9.5" next week. That being said, if you want to know the real scoop on this release, the ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference in New Orleans will dedicate the entire day Sunday, June 15, to the topic and will feature the Hyperion developers who wrote the product and know it through and through. I encourage you all to register for this conference soon as there is limited space available. Information on this conference is at http://www.odtugkaleidoscope.com/hyperion.html.

Advanced Security Manager Update - Call for testers

There was a comment on one of my earlier posts asking the status of the Advanced Security Manager. My developer is still working on the code although it is not on the top of his priority list. After a brief discussion, it appears the code changes, as requested by the OLAP Underground team as a condition for releasing the code, is complete and he has been working on properly commenting the code. I have directed him to make sure our automated build processes for ASM are in place and, once that is done, I would like to have some users start testing. If you are interested in testing the ASM, please drop me an email at timtow@appliedolap.com; it will probably be a week or two before I get anything out.

I also intended to blog 'real-time' about the Collaborate conference. Unfortunately, I didn't even have time to eat most of the time I was there. I will try to post something soon (after a few Dodeca installs this week, reviewing a couple of patent filings, doing a bunch of followup calls, etc).

Collaborate - OAUG Hyperion SIG Meeting

I am leaving this afternoon to attend Collaborate. Actually, that isn't quite true as I am skiing in Vail tomorrow before heading back to Denver for Collaborate. In any case, I was asked to help spread the work about the Hyperion Special Interest Group meeting on Sunday afternoon. I will be there as I have been asked to serve as a 'Domain Lead' for Essbase (along with my friend Edward Roske). Here is the agenda:

• 1:00 – 1:15 OAUG Hyperion SIG Welcome and Introductions


• SIG Board members
  
• Domain Leads
  
• Web Cast Series


• 1:15 – 2:15 Oracle Key Note Speaker: Fred Richards, Oracle – Senior Director, BI Product Marketing


• 2:15 – 2:30 OAUG Board Member Speaker: Ray Payne, OAUG - Vice President, Global Outreach & Transition


• 2:30 – 2:45 Collaborate Hyperion Presentations Overview


• 2:45 – 3:15 SIG website overview and Q& A for ideas


• 3:15 – 4:15 Cocktail & Appetizer Reception

Anyone attending Collaborate who is interested in Hyperion technology is invited to attend. I hope to see you there.