Ephemeral Port Issue with Essbase Has Been Fixed!

The issue that has plagued a number of Essbase customers over the years related to running out of available ports has finally been fixed!

This issue, which often manifested itself with errors in the Essbase error 10420xx range, was caused by how the Essbase Java API communicated with the server. In essence, whenever a piece of information was needed, the Essbase Java API grabbed a port from the pool of available ports, did its business, and then released the port back to the pool. That doesn’t sound bad, but the problem occurs due to how Windows handles this pool of ports. Windows will put the port into a timeout status for a period of time before it makes the port available for reuse and the default timeout in Windows is 4 minutes! Further, the size of the available pool of ports is only about 16,000 ports in the later versions of Windows. That may sound like a lot of ports, but the speed of modern computers makes it possible, and even likely, that certain operations, such as the outline APIs, that call Essbase many, many times to get information would be subject to this issue. Frankly, we see this issue quite often with both VB and the Java Essbase Outline Extractors.

We brought this issue to the attention of the Java API team and assisted them by testing a prerelease version of the Java API jars. I am happy to report the fix was released with Essbase 11.1.2.3.502. In addition, there is a new essbase.properties setting that allows you to turn the optimization on or off:

olap.system.socketoptimization=false

It is our understanding that this optimization is turned on by default. I also checked the default essbase.properties files shipped with both Essbase 11.1.2.3.502 and 11.1.2.4 and did not see that setting in those files. It may be one of those settings that is there in case it messes something else up. The work of our own Jay Zuercher in our labs and searching Oracle Support seems to have confirmed that thought. There is apparently an issue where EIS drill-through reports don't work in Smart View if socket optimization is turned on. It is documented in Oracle Support Doc ID 1959533.1.

There is also another undocumented essbase.properties setting:

olap.server.socketIdleTime

According to Oracle development, this value defaults to 300 ms but there should be little need to ever change it. The only reason it is there is to tune socket optimization in case more than 2 sockets are used per Java API session.

Jay also tested the 11.1.2.4 version in our labs with the Next Generation Outline Extractor. With the default settings, one large test outline we have, "BigBad", with about 120,000 members in it, extracted in 1 minute and 50 seconds.  With socket optimization turned off, the same outline was only about 25% complete after 2 hours.   In summary, this fix will be very useful for a lot of Oracle customers.

Essbase VB API is Officially Dead

It is with a sad heart that bring you the news that, as of Essbase 11.1.2.4, the Essbase VB API is officially dead.  I cut my teeth in Essbase working with that API way back in the mid-1990's, but the writing had been on the wall for some time.  Microsoft stopped supporting VB years ago, so it was only a matter of time before this time would come.  That being said, I haven't used the VB API for any new Essbase work since about 2001; the Essbase Java API is alive and growing so my efforts have been there.

Here is the official notification:

You can read the notification yourself in the Essbase 11.1.2.4 Readme.

File Encoding in the Next Generation Outline Extractor

We had a couple of issues reported with the output of the Next Generation Outline Extractor where the exported file did not work properly as a load file. After some investigation, we found that the file encoding was incorrect. We were encoding the files using the Unicode/UTF-8 format. We chose this encoding so that we could write all characters in all languages, but we did not consider that UTF-8 is only valid for loading Unicode databases in Essbase.

To resolve this issue, we decided to add a configuration to the Next Generation Outline Extractor to allow users to select the file encoding. Here is a screenshot showing the new configuration setting.



As of yesterday, December 8, 2014, the updated Next Generation Outline Extractor is available on our website. The first version to feature this functionality is version 2.0.2.692. Version 2.0.2.692 is available for all Essbase versions from Essbase 9.3.1 forward. We are also happy to announce that his version of the Next Generation Outline Extractor is the first version to support the recently released Essbase 11.1.2.3.505.

If you encounter any issues with the Next Generation Outline Extractor, please don't hesitate to contact our support team at support@appliedolap.com.

Are you ready for Windows 10? Dodeca Is Ready!

Microsoft recently released its first preview version of their next desktop operating system, Windows 10. In our business, we have seen many large companies just migrate to Windows 7 and the general consensus seems to be that Windows 8 is a 'consumer' operating system. In other words, it will be a while before you have to think about Windows 10, but it is our business to be thinking about this now. We have the Windows 10 preview downloaded and installed in our labs. We made a very smart decision years ago when we decided to write the Dodeca client layer in .NET technology because it works in Windows 10 unchanged!

We are ready. Will you be ready?

Kscope15 Abstract deadline is Wednesday, October 15!

Kscope15 abstract submission will close in just a few days and the ODTUG content teams want you!

I am sure there are many of you who have never done a presentation at a conference and may not feel comfortable speaking in public. Well, I have a secret for you, despite the fact that I won the Best Speaker Award at Kscope14, I share your discomfort with speaking. What works for me, however, is that I only speak about topics that I know very well. Do you have some area of expertise that you know really well? If you do, please share it! It will be fun and all of your peers who learn something new, from you, will appreciate it!

With that, take the next step and click here to submit session!

Next Generation Outline Extractor Webcast - Oct 8th!

I am doing a repeat of my Kscope15 'Best Speaker' award-winning presentation as part of the ODTUG webcast series. Here is the official announcement from ODTUG:

Wednesday, October 8, 2014 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM EDT

Next Generation Essbase Outline Extractor Tips and Tricks
Tim Tow, Applied OLAP

The Next Generation Outline Extractor is the follow-up to the classic OlapUnderground Essbase Outline Extractor used by thousands of Essbase customers. This session, which was the highest-rated session at Kscope15 in Seattle, explores some of the new capabilities of the Next Generation Outline Extractor, including command line operations exported directly to a relational database. Attend this session to learn how to leverage this free utility in your company.

Make you you sign up to join my on October 8th; you can register here!.

What's New in Dodeca 6.7.1?

Last week, we released Dodeca version 6.7.1.4340 which focuses on some new relational functionality. The major new features in 6.7.1 are:

• Concurrent SQL Query Execution
• Detailed SQL Timed Logging
• Query and Display PDF format
• Ability to Launch Local External Processes from Within Dodeca

Concurrent SQL Query Execution

Dodeca has a built-in SQLPassthroughDataSet object that supports queries to a relational database.  The SQLPassthroughDataSet functionality was engineered such that a SQLPassthroughDataSet object can include multiple queries that get executed and returned on a single trip to the server and several of our customers have taken great advantage of that functionality.  We have at least one customer, in fact, that has some SQLPassthroughDataSets that execute up to 20 queries in a single trip to the server.  The functionality was originally designed to run the queries sequentially, but in some cases it would be better to run the queries concurrently.  Because this is Dodeca, of course concurrent query execution is configurable at the SQLPassthroughDataSet level.

Detailed SQL Timed Logging

In Dodeca version 6.0, we added detailed timed logging for Essbase transactions.  In this version, we have added similar functionality for SQL transactions and have formatted the logs in pipe-delimited format so they can easily be loaded into Excel or into a database for further analysis.  The columns of the log include the log message level, timestamp, sequential transaction number, number of active threads, transaction GUID, username, action, description, and time to execute in milliseconds.

Below is an example of the log message.

Click to enlarge

Query and Display PDF format

The PDF View type now supports the ability to load the PDF directly from a relational table via a tokenized SQL statement.  This functionality will be very useful for those customers who have contextual information, such as invoice images, stored relationally and need a way to display that information.  We frequently see this requirement as the end result of a drill-through operation from either Essbase or relational reports.

Ability to Launch Local External Processes from Within Dodeca

Certain Dodeca customers store data files for non-financial systems in relational data stores and use Dodeca as a central access point.  The new ability to launch a local process from within Dodeca is implemented as a Dodeca Workbook Script method which provides a great deal of flexibility in how the process is launched.

The new 6.7.1 functionality follows closely on the 6.7.0 release that introduces proxy server support and new MSAD and LDAP authentication services.  If you are interested in seeing all of the changes in Dodeca, highly detailed Dodeca release notes are available on our website at http://www.appliedolap.com/resources/downloads/dodeca-technical-docs.