KScope11 - More new Hyperion sessions added

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?

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!

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

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

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

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

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!