Essbase Docs Now Included!

This morning I needed to look at the Essbase docs and remembered that I didn't select an option to install the docs when I did the Essbase 11.1.1 install. In the System 9 (and earlier) days, the doc installer was a separate download and separate install. This created a number of questions on the forums as to where to find the docs.

I took a quick look in the directory structures for 11.1.1 and didn't initially see the docs anywhere. A quick search, however, revealed the docs for the server were installed automatically to C:\Hyperion\products\Essbase\EssbaseServer\docs. This is certainly an improvement over previous versions.

Random thoughts on differences in APS 11.1.1

I have come along on my Essbase 11.1.1 install and plan to start a series on the installation but, at this point, I started looking at Analytic Provider Services ("APS") to setup my development environment. Our Dodeca product talks to Essbase through APS and, although I have compiled our Essbase service against 11.1.1, I am starting work to support the new features of Essbase. These are just some random notes I had while reviewing APS.

The directory structures for the Essbase product appear to have been reverted back to the pre-System 9 naming conventions which is great. I never liked the 'Analytic Administration Services' subdirectory name and highly prefer 'eas'.

The essbase.properties file is much more organized than in 9.3.1 but has significantly fewer configurations that in the previous version.

Tomcat is still the 'batteries-included' application server for now. I wonder how long it will be until some version of WebLogic is delivered 'out-of-the-box'. The version of Tomcat that is shipped has changed from 5.0.28 to 5.5.17. Further, it appears that support for running Tomcat in a Window is no longer delivered. This last item is going to have a significant effect on me as I normally run Tomcat in a window during development so I can see my web services data flowing in/out of the server. Tomorrow, I will have to look at how 5.0.28 was configured in 9.3.1 and emulate that in this version. Ironically enough, the infrastructure for 5.0.28 is still delivered in the aps subdirectory structure but it looks like it is not used anywhere.

The APS command line console is available and works but it looks like the default username/password has changed. It used to be that you had to login with the system/password combination, add a username that matched a username in your Essbase system, disconnected and logged back in using the new username. In 11.1.1, I logged in using admin/password. I don't know, however, if that is the default username or if it is the username/password combination I used during my setup/configuration.

Numerous times during my work so far, I have seen numerous references to the previous product numbering system. For example, in the APS\bin directory there is a file named css-0_9_5.dll which, of course, refers to the fact that EPM 11.1.1 originated as System 9.5.0. I have seen a number of people say they would wait on installing 11.1.1 as they wouldn't install a initial release; I wonder if their opinion would be different if it were still named 9.5.0?

There are a number of new external libraries shipped with APS now. The jar files that look new to me include ldapbp.jar, commons-codec-1.3.jar, commons-httpclient-3.0.jar, jakarta-regexp-1.3.jar, jakarta-slide-webdavlib.jar and (maybe) jdom.jar. Most of these are from the Apache project including the commons and jakarta jars.

My first compile of our Essbase servlet with the 11.1.1 client jars worked without a hitch. In the next day or so, I will be updating our build scripts for building a production version of our servlet with 11.1.1 support. As the code hasn't changed, I don't expect any issues during our QA testing cycles.

Committed to Essbase 11.1.1

Sorry it has been so long since I posted but I have been working on some non-Essbase product development area of our product. Specifically, I have been working on FIPS-140 (“Federal Information Processing Standards”) compliant computing required for Federal government computing systems. So if anyone wants to know about SHA-1 hashing (FIPS compliant) vs MD5 hashing (not FIPS compliant) or TripleDES encryption algorithms, I may be able to help them.

I have had some other things going on as well. I was interviewed by my local newspaper for the front page of the business section. The topic was businesspeople who fly their own airplanes on business which I do nearly every trip east of the Rockies. In fact, I flew myself and my family to New Orleans for the ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference. If you are interested in reading about my '15 minutes of fame', here is a link to the story: http://www.al.com/huntsvilletimes/stories/index.ssf?/base/business/1218993308126870.xml&coll=1

Now, on to Essbase stuff..

I haven't been writing much about Essbase 11.1.1 as I haven't had it installed on my laptop. Instead, I had one of my assistants create a VM with Essbase 11.1.1 on it.. Well, despite the fact that I have a laptop with 4 Gb of RAM, of which only 3 Gb is usable as I have XP Professional for my OS, VMWare ran very sluggishly on my system. Perhaps it is because I also had the entire Essbase stack, Oracle 11g Enterprise and SQL Server 2005 all running in addition to VMWare that made it slow, but still it was painful to turn all of that stuff off before firing up the VMWare image. Thus, I tended not to run it much and, in fact, ran it just enough to make sure Dodeca ran on 11.1.1.

Have you ever heard the old story about commitment? It goes something like 'a chicken and a pig were discussing their importance to breakfast and the chicken claimed it was more important as it contributed eggs. The pig replied that it made more of a commitment to breakfast when it provided bacon..' Well, translating that to my Essbase situation, I have committed to working with Essbase 11.1.1. Last night, I completely removed Essbase 9.3.1 from my system and will install 11.1.1 today. How is that for commitment?

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.