New 11.1.2 Information

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!

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

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

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..

This cartoon I saw today says it all..

Kaleidoscope 2010 Registration - Discount Code

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

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.