It seems like everyone has finished their Kscope presentations but me…as this was the busiest week I’ve encountered since I started doing my week in review.
Patches and Updates:
On-Prem:
The Planning 11.1.2.4.005 patch has been released. This includes a laundry list bug fixes. We’ve waited a while for this one…
The FR 11.1.2.4.702 patch has been released. When I looked at the readme, I only saw the 701 notes…so I’m not entirely sure what this fixed.
Cloud:
As of July 1st, you should see the updates coming for PBCS, EPBCS, and FCCS in your test environments. This is the giant PBCS update we’ve all been waiting for that adds literally thirty (yes 30!) pages worth of new functionality and fixes to both PBCS and EPBCS. Check out the official PDF’s here:
PBCS July Update
EPBCS July Update
FCCS July Update
New Blog Posts:
This week I started my series on building your own NAS server with FreeNAS. I also mentioned my upcoming presentations at Kscope.
Gary has published the first release of his new SV++ utility. This is an entirely new interface for the Smart View plug-in for Excel. I’m pretty impressed. I have dozens of clients that will find this very, very useful. Think of this as the new generation of the In2Hyperion add-in (thanks Kyle!). We do need to talk to Gary about his marketing, as he didn’t even post a screenshot of the tool. So I’ll help him out a little:
The DEVEPM team is on their way to Kscope from a combination of Brazil and Ireland. I wish I was going to be there longer this year so that I could try to meet up with everyone. Perhaps I should organize and EPM bloggers lunch on Tuesday.
Keith takes us through the differences in rounding using FDM Classic with VB and FDMEE with Jython. For all you coding nerds…good stuff. For everyone in general, great information.
Sibin, whose Exploits in Hyperion blog was just added to the EPM Blog page, has two posts this week. First he covers an issues with Weblogic that looks like loads of fun. Next he shows us a bug in PBCS that he discovered. Hopefully this gets fixed…in the August push? Or is this Smart View? Good luck Sibin!
Speaking of Kyle, he has an entire blog post devoted to Jake Turrell. We do need to work on his spelling of Jake’s last name…and maybe I need to get Kyle to drive traffic to my blog? Kyle? Mind sending some people my way? 😉 But in all seriousness, you should definitely check out Jake’s presentations. He does an amazing job and I can guarantee that you will learn something useful.
Jason is doing his best Opal impression this week with a blog-a-day leading up to Kscope. He is traveling today, so we’ll give him a pass for missing Friday. Here’s a recap of the cool stuff he covered this week:
Multiple Retrieves in Dodeca
Cascading Report Summary Sheets in Dodeca
PBJ PBCS Client GitHub repository
Advanced integration with PBJ Java PBCS REST API library
Cascading Reports with Dodeca
Kscope16 is almost here!
Tim is getting ready for Kscope as well. Another person I should probably at least try to say hello to next week. He gives us a few of his selections and let’s us know when he is presenting.
Francisco has a ridiculously detailed post on loading cell text into HFM from flat files. Like…all the steps…ever. Impressive stuff.
Celvin shows us how to get Text ID’s from PBCS. This is way easier on-prem, but handy info with so many new projects going to the cloud.
Sarah shows us how to install Oracle’s REST Data Services (ORDS) in Standalone mode. She too is getting ready for Kscope. Based on her post, we can assume she REALLY like Kscope. If you are a first-timer to the conference, this is a definite must-read. The list of people I need to say hello to at Kscope continues to grow out of control.
Robert has a very detailed guide on using Essbase calc scripts with FDMEE. He even shows us how to use parameters with those calc scripts. I’m sure I’ll be referencing this later down the line.
Vinjay has a follow up to his earlier post on Groovy and REST. This time he shows us how ODI can use our Groovy code. Very cool.
Opal again had a busy week. Perhaps not as blog-happy as Jason, but she has some great news:
Opal’s book on EPRCS has been released! Congrats Opal!
FCCS First Look: Creating an Application
EPBCS Series: Navigation Flows
Other News:
Can there really be any news left? I expect next week to be full of “I’m at Kscope” blogs. So brace yourself for another long blog post. Everyone travel safe to Chicago and I hope to see you all there!
Brian Marshall
June 25, 2016
It’s that time of year again…Kscope! Unfortunately, Kscope always occurs during my busy season. As a result, much like last year, this will be a very quick in and out trip. I’ll be there Tuesday, June 28th only. Luckily, both of my presentations happen to be on that day, so it worked out nicely for me. I also have a few meetings with Oracle that I’m not allowed to talk about that occur on that day as well. Here are my presentations:
PBCS is Still Hyperion Planning
Jun 28, 2016, Session 9, 11:15 am – 12:15 pm
With Oracle’s release of PBCS, many service companies have started releasing their one-size-fits-all implementations. The unfortunate truth is that PBCS is still Hyperion Planning. This presentation discusses the best practices around implementing PBCS and how to avoid the pitfalls of implementations offered at insanely cheap (and underestimated) pricing. Attend this session if you don’t want to have your PBCS project “land and expand.”
The Planning Repository Revisited: Beyond the Basics
Jun 28, 20165, Session 10, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
If you’ve enjoyed my past presentations on the Planning repository, you should enjoy this presentation even more. We’ll take a step beyond the basics and provide a whole new set of examples that take a leap into real-world use. Whether it’s synchronizing metadata across applications or deleting dimensions, this presentation will dive deeper than ever before into the repository. But wait…there’s more. This presentation will have full samples in both Transact SQL for SQL Server users and PL/SQL for Oracle users. That’s two languages for the price of one (shipping and handling not included).
And of course, you can find me on the Kscope16 site here.
I hope everyone enjoys the content!
Brian Marshall
June 22, 2016
This week was again on the slower side. Opal tried to make up for it all on her own…
Patches and Updates:
Notta…
New Blog Posts:
This week I continued my Essbase performance series with another set of baseline benchmarks. After Kscope I’ll be able to dedicate a lot more time to continuing this series. I also created a new page dedicated to providing a list of bloggers and blogs in the EPM community.
Gary shows us around the Essbase 12 docs. An interesting read, though I’m not sure I agree with all of his conclusions.
Jason talk about spreadsheet management. He has some great thoughts on how spreadsheets themselves are not necessarily the problem, but rather how we manage those spreadsheets. Planning helps in one way while Dodeca helps in another.
Dmitry has perhaps the longest blog post of all time. While it may be long, it is definitely worth the read as he describes how to use Essbase with a statistical application named R. Very, very interesting stuff.
Dayalan has an in-depth article on installing 11.1.2.4 on Windows 2012. He covers Planning, Essbase, R&A, and FDMEE. I get the impression he might be covering DRM next.
John Goodwin gives us part three of his DRM and FDMEE series. I know a lot of us have met him, but are we sure he is just one guy? Are there John Goodwin clones running around learning things for him? Seriously…
Cameron shares his “must see” sessions at Kscope16. One day I’ll make the list…oh who am I kidding.
Harry has yet another beta release of his web-based Essbase interface. This thing keeps getting cooler and cooler. This time has added ad-hoc grid creation and modification for end-users.
And now on to Opal, who decided to do a seven-day series on EPBCS. That’s seven blog posts in seven days…nice job Opal. Great content…and lots of it!
Other News:
Not that you could, but don’t forget about Kscope16! This time next week the EPM world will descend on Chicago. Watch out Chicago!
Happy Father’s Day to all you Dad’s out there!
Brian Marshall
June 19, 2016
Welcome to part three of a series that will have a lot of parts. In our we took a look at our test results using the CrystalDiskMark synthetic benchmark. Today we’ll be looking at the test results using a synthetic benchmark tool named Anvil. As we said in part two, the idea here is to see first how everything measures up in synthetic benchmarks before we get into the actual benchmarking in Essbase.
Also as discussed in part two, we have three basic local storage options:
- Direct-attached physical storage on a physical server running our operating system and Essbase directly
- Direct-attached physical storage on a virtual server using VT-d technology to pass the storage through directly to the guest operating system as though it was physically connected
- Direct-attached physical storage on a virtual server using the storage as a data store for the virtual host
As we continue with today’s baseline, we still have the following direct-attached physical storage on the bench for testing:
- One (1) Samsung 850 EVO SSD (250GB)
- Attached to an LSI 9210-8i flashed to IT Mode with the P20 firmware
- Windows Driver P20
- Four (4) Samsung 850 EVO SSD’s (250GB)
- Attached to an LSI 9265-8i
- Windows Driver 6.11-06.711.06.00
- Configured in RAID 0 with a 256kb strip size
- One (1) Intel 750 NVMe SSD (400GB)
- Attached to a PCIe 3.0 8x Slot
- Firmware 8EV10174
- Windows Driver 1.5.0.1002
- ESXi Driver 1.0e.1.1-1OEM.550.0.0.139187
- Twelve (12) Fujitsu MBA3300RC 15,000 RPM SAS HDD (300GB)
- Attached to an LSI 9265-8i
- Windows Driver 6.11-06.711.06.00
- Configured three ways:
- RAID 1 with a 256kb strip size
- RAID 10 with a 256kb strip size
- RAID 5 with a 256kb strip size
So what benchmarks were used?
- CrystalDiskMark 5.0.2 (see part two)
- Anvil’s Storage Utilities 1.1.0.337
And the good stuff that you skipped to anyway…benchmarks!
Now that we’ve looked at CrystalDiskMark, we’ll take a look at Anvil results. While Anvil results include reads and writes in megabytes per second, we’ll instead focus on Inputs/Outputs per Second (IOPS). Here we see that the Intel 750 is keeping pace nicely with the RAID 0 SSD array. In this particular test, even our traditional drives don’t look terrible.
Next up we’ll look at the random IOPS performance. So much for our traditional drives. Here we really see the power of SSD’s versus old-school technology. It is interesting that all three solutions hover pretty closely together. But this is likely a queue depth issue.
Let’s see how things look with a queue depth of four. Things are still pretty clustered here, but much higher across the board.
And now for a queue depth of 16. Now this looks better. The Intel 750 has, for the most part, easily outpaced the rest of the options. The RAID 0 SSD array looks pretty good here as well.
That’s it for the read tests. Next we move on to the write tests. We’ll again start with the sequential writes. Before we expand our queue depths, the RAID 0 SSD array is looking like the clear winner.
Our random write test seems to follow closely to our random read test. The Intel 750 is well in the lead with the other SSD options trailing behind. Also of interest, the Intel 750 seems to struggle when physically attached and as a data store in these tests. We’ll see if this continues.
When the queue depth increases, to four, we see the Intel 750 continue to hold its lead. The RAID 0 SSD array is still trailing the regular single SSD. As with the previous random test, the Intel 750 continues to struggles, though the physical test has improved.
Finally, we’ll check out the queue depth at 16. It looks like our physical Intel 750 has finally caught up to the passthrough. This feels like an odd benchmark result, so we’ll see how this looks in real Essbase performance. We also finally see that the RAID 0 SSD array has pulled ahead of the single drive by a large margin.
Next up…we’ll start taking a look at the actual Essbase performance for all of these hardware choices. That post is a few weeks away with Kscope rapidly approaching.
Brian Marshall
June 14, 2016
This was a really, really slow week for blogging. It’s almost like something is happening that is occupying everyone’s time. Drop me a line if you know what’s going on.
Patches and Updates:
I mentioned last that Essbase 11.1.2.4.010 had been released. It finally made its way to the Proactive Support Blog.
HPCM 11.1.2.4.121 has been released. There appears to be a massive amount of new features, including a new REST API. Check out the readme.
Calc Manager 11.1.2.4.006 has been released. This appears to be general bug-fixes. Hopefully it fixes your bug! Check out the readme.
I’ve heard that the Planning 11.1.2.4.005 patch was due out in the next week or so…until they delayed it to add one more bug fix. That bug fix should only take a week or so to add according to my source, so we might get this patch prior to Kscope…we’ll just have to wait and see.
New Blog Posts:
This week (5 minutes ago), I posted part 2 of my Essbase performance series.
Cameron is a little survey-happy in advance of Kscope. He has a blog about the future of Planning (PBCS) and this survey. Be sure to take the survey!
Chris has a blog post showing off the new attribute functionality that was added to PBCS in the June July and then June again release. I’ve heard the 06 patch may be the 07 patch…but for those whose pods were purchased after the patch was actually ready. We’ll see what changes in 07…
Dayalan talks about the Outline Load Utility. He has a ton of code samples related to SQL with the utility. Good stuff.
Harry has yet another beta release of his web-based cubeSavvy UI. I wish Oracle could release updates this fast. This week he brings us the ability to execute calc scripts when you submit data!
John Goodwin has part 2 of his FDMEE and DRM integration series. I know I saw this every time he has a blog post, but…good stuff. Posts so detailed a caveman can do FDMEE and DRM integration.
Other News:
There’s a minor get-together of Oracle professionals in Chicago in a few weeks. Can’t wait to see everyone…and I mean everyone will be there. Even though its minor.
Brian Marshall
June 11, 2016
Welcome to part two of a series that will have a lot of parts. In our introduction post, we covered what we plan to do in this series at a high level. In this post, we’ll get a look at some synthetic benchmarks for our various local storage options. The idea here is to see first how everything measures up in benchmarks before we get into the actual benchmarking in Essbase.
As we discussed in our introduction, we have three basic local storage options:
- Direct-attached physical storage on a physical server running our operating system and Essbase directly
- Direct-attached physical storage on a virtual server using VT-d technology to pass the storage through directly to the guest operating system as though it was physically connected
- Direct-attached physical storage on a virtual server using the storage as a data store for the virtual host
For the purposes of today’s baseline, we have the following direct-attached physical storage on the bench for testing:
- One (1) Samsung 850 EVO SSD (250GB)
- Attached to an LSI 9210-8i flashed to IT Mode with the P20 firmware
- Windows Driver P20
- Four (4) Samsung 850 EVO SSD’s (250GB)
- Attached to an LSI 9265-8i
- Windows Driver 6.11-06.711.06.00
- Configured in RAID 0 with a 256kb strip size
- One (1) Intel 750 NVMe SSD (400GB)
- Attached to a PCIe 3.0 8x Slot
- Firmware 8EV10174
- Windows Driver 1.5.0.1002
- ESXi Driver 1.0e.1.1-1OEM.550.0.0.139187
- Twelve (12) Fujitsu MBA3300RC 15,000 RPM SAS HDD (300GB)
- Attached to an LSI 9265-8i
- Windows Driver 6.11-06.711.06.00
- Configured three ways:
- RAID 1 with a 256kb strip size
- RAID 10 with a 256kb strip size
- RAID 5 with a 256kb strip size
So what benchmarks were used?
- CrystalDiskMark 5.0.2
- Anvil’s Storage Utilities 1.1.0.337
And the good stuff that you skipped to anyway…benchmarks!
We’ll start by looking at CrystalDiskMark results. The first result is a sequential file transfer with a queue depth of 32 and a single thread. There are two interesting results here. First, our RAID 10 array in passthrough is very slow for some reason. Similarly, the Intel 750 is also slow in passthrough. I’ve not yet been able to determine why this is, but we’ll see how it performs in the real world before we get too concerned. Obviously the NVMe solution wins overall with our RAID 0 SSD finishing closely behind.
Next we’ll look at a normal sequential file transfer. We’ll see here that all of our options struggle with a lower queue depth. Some more than others. Clearly the traditional hard drives are struggling along with the Intel 750. The other SSD options however are much closer in performance. The SSD RAID 0 array is actually the fastest option with these settings.
Next up is a random file transfer with a queue depth of 32 and a single thread. As you can see, on the random side of things the traditional hard drives, even in RAID, struggle. Actually, struggling would probably be a huge improvement over what they actually do. The Intel 750 takes the lead for the physical server, but it actually gets overtaken by the RAID 0 SSD array for both of our virtualized tests.
Our final read option is a normal random transfer. Obviously everything struggles here. A big part of this is just not having enough queue depth to take advantage of the potential of the storage options.
Next we will take a look at the CrystalDiskMark write tests. As with the read, we’ll start with a sequential file transfer using a queue depth of 32 and a single thread. Here we see that the RAID 0 SSD array takes a commanding lead. The Intel 750 is still plenty fast, and then the single SSD rounds out the top three. Meanwhile, the traditional disks are still there…spinning.
Let’s look at a normal sequential file transfer. For writes, our traditional drives clearly prefer lower queue depths. This can be good or bad for Essbase, so we’ll see how things look when we get to the real-world benchmarks. In general, our top three mostly hold with the RAID 0 traditional array pulling into third in some instances.
On to the random writes. We’ll start off the random writes with a queue depth of 32 and a single thread. As with all random operations, the traditional disks get hammered. Meanwhile, the Intel 750 has caught back up to the RAID 0 SSD array, but is still back in second place.
And for our final CrystalDiskMark test, we’ll look at the normal random writes. Here the Intel 750 takes a commanding lead while the RAID 0 SSD array and the single SSD look about the same. Again, more queue depth helps a lot on these tests.
In the interest of making my blog posts a more reasonable length, that’s it for today. Part three of the series will be more baseline benchmarks with a different tool to measure IOPS (I/O’s per second), another important statistic for Essbase. Then hopefully, by part four, you will get to see some real benchmarks…with Essbase!
Part five teaaser:
Brian Marshall
June 11, 2016
Patches and Updates:
Dodeca Spreadsheet Management System Version 7 has been released. The new Dodeca Excel Add-In comes long for the ride.
Smart View 11.1.2.5.600 is finally out! It has a long list of changes. If only the PBCS update was here to make the most of it…
New Blog Posts:
John Goodwin gives us a great post on FDMEE and DRM integration. This is Part 1…so more greatness to come!
Vijay writes about Groovy, REST, and HPCM. Groovy is pretty cool and now that HPCM has a REST API, this is a nice introduction to the combination.
Harry has another update to his web-based Essbase front-end. You can now have multiple Essbase environments!
Cameron has a blog post about Hybrid Essbase and interacting with our friends at Oracle. Check it out. You will also see a link below about the survey.
Glenn talked about the DataExport command. This is a great reference for how the format of the export file is actually derived (from your outline) and can be modified (with data export options).
Gary has a great bit of information about a new feature in the 11.1.2.4.010 patch for Essbase. We can finally use MDX queries to pull data from Essbase in a usable format! I’ll be trying this out soon, I’m sure.
A different Gary broke the news that the 11.1.2.5.600 version of Smart View had been released. Thanks for the heads up!
Opal has a quick tip for those of us with multiple cloud instances. Since everything is labeled PBCS, this is definitely useful. Hopefully Oracle will fix this in the near future…maybe in the June July update.
Other News:
Jon Booth, Tim German, Mike Nader, and Cameron Lackpour are conducting an online survey about Essbase Hybrid. Be sure to head over here and fill it out.
Kscope16 Advance Registration Ends on June 9th!
Komal Goyal has been named the ODTUG 2016 Women in Technology Scholar. Congrate Komal!
Brian Marshall
June 4, 2016