Monday! I got this done for Monday!
Hyperion EPM Patches and Updates:
No on-prem updates this week…but we have updates for the cloud!
First up, PBCS and EPBCS has a pretty good list of updates. The activity report is at the top of the list. This will show your users, how long their requests are taking, and general usage information. There are a bunch of other updates, but I’ll let you check out the PDF here. I will note that Workspace is dead…long live the simplified interface. Unless of course you are developing, in which case I recommend picking up a torch and pitchfork and going after Oracle due to the insane number of additional clicks required…
Next up, FCCS has some of the same updates, like the new activity report. I’m specifically interested in the new Sample Application. More on that later.
Both patches will be applied starting this Friday, September 2, 2016. Production patches will start hitting Friday, September 16, 2016.
Hyperion EPM Blog Posts:
Celvin shows us how to tell which version of Smart View was installed. Oracle forces us to the registry of all places to make this determination.
Keith tells us all about his transition from EPMA and to Classic Hyperion Planning. I imagine we’ll be seeing more and more of this as things move forward.
Jason has released an update to his Camshaft tool for executing MDX queries against Essbase.
Cameron has a recap of the South Florida EPM meetup from the 18th of August. We’ll be having another meetup here in the DFW area pretty soon (more on this later).
Opal gives us a recap of her first onsite visit to the Kscope17 venue. Like Opal, I’m very existing to have Kscope back in Texas for 2017. Can’t wait to see everyone again!
Harry takes a break from cubeSavvy and turns his attention to Power Query. This is a Microsoft product built into the new version of Excel. Interesting read.
Sibin has a pair of posts this week. First he covers the the Planning meta-data extract format. Specifically he is looking at a better way of parsing the CSV generated. Next he takes a look at the REST API for On-Prem Planning. Jake covers this topic for PBCS users here.
ODTUG GeekAThon
Another quick shout out for the ODTUG GeekAThon. For those of us real geeks out there, they have a competition worthy of the maker community. You can find the announcement here. You can find the competition website here. And a quick re-cap:
GeekAThon Announcement
GeekAThon Competition Website
A few important dates for those of you interested:
You must register by August 15, 2016, at 11:59 PM Pacific Time.
You must submit your video entry by September 23, 2016, 11:59 PM Pacific Time.
You must submit your solution document by September 23, 2016, 11:59 PM Pacific Time.
And for those of you who need a visual to assist in your procrastination, the red are the days past as of this post. The green is the day you should be ready for, but will likely need to work right up until 11:59 to meet. 😉
Now go build something awesome!
Brian Marshall
August 29, 2016
So…it’s technically Wednesday. Next week I’m totally shooting for Monday!
Hyperion EPM Patches and Updates:
No updates…
Hyperion EPM Blog Posts:
Tim has an extremely technical (and awesome) post on maintaining aggregate views after adding a dimension to an ASO cube. This is great for those of you adding a dimension and ties in nicely with his last post.
Jason has a pair of posts this week. His first novel post is about Dodeca’s dynamic grouping functionality with relational data. And while he is on the topic of relational data, he has another post about his Virtual Essbase JDBC driver (Vess) and Dodeca for the purpose of subvar management. Lot’s of great content.
Tim has a great post on using some of the often overlooked functionality of MDX. He focuses on dimension properties and the PROPERTY_EXPR function.
Harry has a new version of his cubeSavvy tool…in Russian. His post is also in Russian. I had to translate the post to make sure it was what I was expecting…
Sibin has a pair of posts this week as well. First he shows us how to install ODI 12c in standalone mode. Then he covers a migration problem with LCM in PBCS related to FDMEE. This is related to source systems not being created.
Kyle has a great set of slides about PBCS. These are really cool info-graphics that I plan on stealing borrowing for my own use. 😉 Remember…Kyle is awesome, so always give him credit for his amazing contributions to the EPM Community.
Ricardo has his first part in a series on some of the new features in ODI 12c. He’ starting off with Dimension and Cubes.
Summer has a great post on deleting orphaned users from the Planning Repository. I’m actually working on an in-depth article on the topic of how security is stored in the Planning Repository, but her use is probably more widely useful than mine.
Opal, not to be outdone, also has a pair of posts this week. First she covers her journey of going from the “check-in” to a “carry-on” bag. I now know far too much about her toiletries…but otherwise a cool non-EPM topic. She also has the final post in the year-long ODTUG Member Series. So go find out about Jayson and his drones.
Cameron has the second part of his series on Dynamic Load Rules in Essbase. And Glenn, we can never have too much content out there…even on Dynamic Load Rules.
Celvin has an update to his NUMSysCMDLauncher utility that adds some great functions around user security. Clearly I need to get to know Celvin more so I can get him to add cool functions to his already cool tools for me. Perhaps I can have him add a -ForBrian? Just a thought Celvin!
John has a post for those of you running Essbase 12c. Don’t stop reading yet! This will eventually apply to 11.1.2.4, Oracle is just a little…behind on adding that into Provider Services. The functionality in question? Smart View and Runtime Subvars with Calc Scripts.
Jake has Groovy new post on using the REST API’s in PBCS with LCM. As we have come to expect from a Jake, a very thorough and detailed post with a ton of great ready-to-steal content. My question is…do I really need EPM Automate if I have mastered the REST API’s? Also…I wonder if the REST API could let us clear ASO regions? So many fun and interesting questions…so little time. Oh, and don’t miss Jake at Oracle Open World this year! He will be in the Moscone South, Room 303 on Sunday, September 18th at 1PM. His presentation will cover Hybrid Essbase. Chances are, after you attend you will be an expert.
Gary tells us how to disable annoying upgrade messages in Smart View when connecting to HFM 11.1.2.4. Note that this only applies to HFM, not Planning, Essbase, or any other Smart View connectable product.
ODTUG GeekAThon
Another quick shout out for the ODTUG GeekAThon. For those of us real geeks out there, they have a competition worthy of the maker community. You can find the announcement here. You can find the competition website here. And a quick re-cap:
GeekAThon Announcement
GeekAThon Competition Website
A few important dates for those of you interested:
You must register by August 15, 2016, at 11:59 PM Pacific Time.
You must submit your video entry by September 23, 2016, 11:59 PM Pacific Time.
You must submit your solution document by September 23, 2016, 11:59 PM Pacific Time.
And for those of you who need a visual to assist in your procrastination, the red are the days past as of this post. The green is the day you should be ready for, but will likely need to work right up until 11:59 to meet. 😉
Now go build something awesome!
Brian Marshall
August 24, 2016
Welcome to an extremely late edition of the Hyperion EPM Week in Review. Let’s get right to it.
Hyperion EPM Patches and Updates:
Shared Services 11.1.2.4.004 is now available. Looks like a few bug fixes.
Hyperion EPM Blog Posts:
Sarah has a post about calculations in Data Viz and playing with the settings to make sure you get the right answer.
Celvin has a tip for those of us that switch between Oracle Cloud instances. If you ever accidentally hit the button to save the domain when logging into Smart View, this will help you out.
John Goodwin has an excellent post on using the new EPM Automate replay functionality. I love load testing. So does John…and here is part 2.
Neha shows us how to use calculation manager variables with Essbase calc scripts. Pretty cool stuff including a CDF.
Vijay shows us some sample code for streamlining exports with some cool shell calls with MaxL.
Will shows us how to reduce the size of the run time prompts in Planning. This is great for those of us with clients using monitors from 1999.
Pete has a quick post telling us about his experience with the 1002023 Essbase error. Can’t beat the vague and sometimes inaccurate error messages of Essbase.
Justin has a post about using FDMEE and the JAPI for Essbase to create dynamic calculation scripts.
Harry highlights some of the new features in his newly productionized cubeSavvy tool.
Ricardo shows us a little bit of architecture around integrating PBCS, BICS, DBCS, ODI, and ABCDE. Ok, so I added the last one, but that is a lot of acronyms.
Gary helps us find the logs on an Exalytics T5 box. Solaris…fun.
Opal has a great post on clearing data out of PBCS using a job. This should enable EPM Automate to do partial ASO data clears if I understand it correctly. Unfortunately I have had several people confirm that this is a “bug” and not yet available in EPM Automate. September is right around the corner…hopefully this fix will make it in.
ODTUG GeekAThon
Another quick shout out for the ODTUG GeekAThon. For those of us real geeks out there, they have a competition worthy of the maker community. You can find the announcement here. You can find the competition website here. And a quick re-cap:
GeekAThon Announcement
GeekAThon Competition Website
A few important dates for those of you interested:
You must register by August 15, 2016, at 11:59 PM Pacific Time.
You must submit your video entry by September 23, 2016, 11:59 PM Pacific Time.
You must submit your solution document by September 23, 2016, 11:59 PM Pacific Time.
And for those of you who need a visual to assist in your procrastination, the red are the days past as of this post. The green is the day you should be ready for, but will likely need to work right up until 11:59 to meet. 😉
Now go build something awesome!
Brian Marshall
August 16, 2016
The North Texas Hyperion User Group (NTxHUG) has a quarterly meeting this Friday, August 12, 2016 at 4:00 PM in Grapevine. With Kscope16 having just wrapped up, they have opted to just go with a social hour for this quarter. You can join everyone here:
Brian Marshall
August 9, 2016
I included the content of this post in my Week In Review, but I think it deserves a separate post altogether. ODTUG GeekAThon is the first contest of this type that ODTUG has conducted, so let’s make it a success. This way we get more contests, more awesome ideas, and more prizes.
So what’s this contest about? I don’t want to re-cap the entire GeekAThon website, but essentially they want you to build something out of the Beacon that you received at Kscope16. Using the Bluetooth Low Energy technology of the Beacon…solve a problem. Then show us how to do the same things. Go check out the site to find out more:
GeekAThon Announcement
GeekAThon Competition Website
A few important dates for those of you interested:
You must register by August 15, 2016, at 11:59 PM Pacific Time.
You must submit your video entry by September 23, 2016, 11:59 PM Pacific Time.
You must submit your solution document by September 23, 2016, 11:59 PM Pacific Time.
And for those of you who need a visual to assist in your procrastination, the red are the days past as of this post. The green is the day you should be ready for, but will likely need to work right up until 11:59 to meet. 😉
Now go build something awesome!
Brian Marshall
August 8, 2016
It was another light week in the Hyperion EPM blog community. Oracle however, did not help out with any new product releases.
Hyperion EPM Patches and Updates:
None…
Hyperion EPM Blog Posts:
I posted about converting your applications to Hybrid Essbase this week.
Vijay tells us about a error in the Oracle documentation for DRM. I’m certain you are all surprised that any of the Oracle docs could have mistakes. No? I guess I’m not either.
Celvin shows us where Oracle hid the Migration button for environments where no application has yet been created. He also has a great post on making LCM content readable. Given the movement to the cloud and lack of accessibility to the repository in the future…this is great content. And it should work on-prem as well…if you were no inclined.
Sibin tells us about the Essbase application log parser he is working on. He then tells us that it is actually available on GitHub. Go break it for him!
John has a great post on cloud to cloud data movement. This has a massive amount of potential as clients start to have FCCS and multiple instances of PBCS.
Jason continues his blog series on Dodeca. This time he shows us how to use SQL and Essbase in a single view.
Cameron has a great post on dynamic load rule columns in Essbase load rules. Looks like more to come soon as well.
Tim has a message to all of you OTDUG community members. Read it…and decide what you want to do. Will you be the next members of the board? Will you apply for the leadership program?
ODTUG GeekAThon
Another quick shout out for the ODTUG GeekAThon. For those of us real geeks out there, they have a competition worthy of the maker community. You can find the announcement here. You can find the competition website here. And a quick re-cap:
GeekAThon Announcement
GeekAThon Competition Website
A few important dates for those of you interested:
You must register by August 15, 2016, at 11:59 PM Pacific Time.
You must submit your video entry by September 23, 2016, 11:59 PM Pacific Time.
You must submit your solution document by September 23, 2016, 11:59 PM Pacific Time.
And for those of you who need a visual to assist in your procrastination, the red are the days past as of this post. The green is the day you should be ready for, but will likely need to work right up until 11:59 to meet. 😉
Now go build something awesome!
Brian Marshall
August 8, 2016
Hybrid Essbase is the biggest advancement in Essbase technology since ASO was released. It truly takes Essbase to another level when it comes to getting the best out of both ASO and BSO technology. Converting your application from BSO to Hybrid can be a long process. You have to make sure that all of your calculations still work the way they should. You have to make sure that your users don’t break Hybrid mode. You have to update the storage settings for all of your sparse dimensions.
I can’t help you with the first items, they just take time and effort. What I can help you with is the time required to update your sparse dimensions. I spend a lot of time hacking around in the Planning repository. I suddenly found a new use for all of that time spent with the repository…getting a good list of all of the upper level members in a dimension. If we just export a dimension, we get a good list, but we have to do a lot of work to really figure out which members are parents and which are not. Luckily, the HSP_OBJECT table has column that tells us just that: HAS_CHILDREN.
Microsoft SQL Server
The query to do this is very, very simple. The process for updating your dimensions using the query takes a little bit more explanation. We’ll start with SQL Server since that happens to be where I’m the most comfortable. I’m going to assume you are using SQL Server Management Studio…because why wouldn’t you? It’s awesome. Before we even get to the query, we first need to make a configuration change. Open Management Studio and click on Tools, then Options.
Expand Query Results, then expand SQL Server, and then click on Results to Grid:
Check the box titled Include column headers when copying or saving the results and click OK. Why did we start here? Because we have to restart Management Studio for the new setting to actually take affect. So do that next…
Now that we have Management Studio ready to go, we can get down to the query. Here it is in all of its simplicity:
SELECT
o.OBJECT_NAME AS Product
,po.OBJECT_NAME AS Parent
,'dynamic calc' AS [Data Storage (Plan1)]
FROM
HSP_OBJECT o
INNER JOIN
HSP_MEMBER m ON m.MEMBER_ID = o.OBJECT_ID
INNER JOIN
HSP_DIMENSION d ON m.DIM_ID = d.DIM_ID
INNER JOIN
HSP_OBJECT do ON do.OBJECT_ID = d.DIM_ID
INNER JOIN
HSP_OBJECT po ON po.OBJECT_ID = o.PARENT_ID
WHERE
do.OBJECT_NAME = 'Product'
AND o.HAS_CHILDREN = 1
We have a few joins and a very simple where clause. As always, I’m using my handy-dandy Vision demo application. A quick look at the results shows us that there are very few parents in the Product dimension:
Now we just need to get this into a format that we can easily import back into Planning. All we have to do it right-click anywhere in the results and click on Save Results As…. Enter a file name and click Save.
Now we should have a usable format for a simple Import to update our dimension settings. Let’s head to workspace and give it a shot. Fire up your Planning application and click on Administration, then Import and Export, and finally Import Metadata from File:
Select your dimension from the list and then browse to find your file. Once the file has uploaded, click the Validate button. This will at least tell us if we have a properly formatted CSV:
That looks like a good start. Let’s go ahead and complete the import and see what happens:
This looks…troubling. One rejected record. Let’s take a look at our logs to see why the record was rejected:
As we can see, nothing to worry about. The top-level member of the dimension is rejected because there is no valid parent. We can ignore this and go check to see if our changes took affect.
At first it looks like we may have failed. But wait! Again, nothing to worry about yet. We didn’t update the default data storage. We only updated Plan1. So let’s look at the data storage property for Plan1:
That’s more like it!
Oracle Database
But wait…I have an Oracle DB for my repository. Not to worry. Let’s check out how to do this with Oracle and SQL Developer. First, let’s take a look at the query:
SELECT
o.OBJECT_NAME AS Product
,po.OBJECT_NAME AS Parent
,'dynamic calc' AS "Data Storage (Plan1)"
FROM
HSP_OBJECT o
INNER JOIN
HSP_MEMBER m ON m.MEMBER_ID = o.OBJECT_ID
INNER JOIN
HSP_DIMENSION d ON m.DIM_ID = d.DIM_ID
INNER JOIN
HSP_OBJECT do ON do.OBJECT_ID = d.DIM_ID
INNER JOIN
HSP_OBJECT po ON po.OBJECT_ID = o.PARENT_ID
WHERE
do.OBJECT_NAME = 'Product'
AND o.HAS_CHILDREN = 1
This is very, very similar to the SQL Server query. The only real difference is the use of double quotes instead of brackets around our third column name. A small, yet important distinction. Let’s again look at the results:
The Oracle results look just like the SQL Server results…which is a good thing. Now we just have to get the results into a usable CSV format for import. This will take a few more steps, but it still very easy. Right click on the result set and click Export:
Change the export format to csv, choose a location and file name, and then click Next.
Click Finish and we should have our CSV file ready to go. Let’s fire up our Planning application and click on Administration, then Import and Export, and finally Import Metadata from File:
Select your dimension from the list and then browse to find your file. Once the file has uploaded, click the Validate button. This will at least tell us if we have a properly formatted CSV:
Much like the SQL Server file, this looks like a good start. Let’s go ahead and complete the import and see what happens:
Again, much like SQL Server, we have the same single rejected record. Let’s make sure that the same error message is present:
As we can see, still nothing to worry about. The top-level member of the dimension is rejected because there is no valid parent. We can ignore this and go check to see if our changes took affect.
As with SQL Server, we did not update the default data storage property, only Plan1. So let’s look at the data storage property for Plan1:
And just like that…we have a sparse dimension ready for Hybrid Essbase. Be sure to refresh your database back to Essbase. You can simply enter a different dimension name in the query and follow the same process to update the remaining sparse dimensions.
Celvin also has an excellent Essbase utility that will do this for you, but it makes use of the API and Java, and generally is a bit more complicated than this method if you have access to the repository. So what happens if you can’t use the API and you can’t access the repository? We have another option. We’ll save that for another day, this blog post is already long enough!
Brian Marshall
August 2, 2016
It was a light week in the Hyperion EPM blog community. Oracle helped out a bit with some updates.
Hyperion EPM Patches and Updates:
Tax Provision 11.1.2.4.103 has been released. As previously mentioned, totally out of my area of knowledge.
The Oracle support site was updated this week. You can find out more here.
Kash sent out updates for both PBCS and FCCS. Data management was added to FCCS, so that’s pretty huge. The PBCS updates aren’t too earth-shattering.
cubeSavvy is officially production-ready! Harry has released version 6.0.0. Get your web-based Essbase going in production!
Hyperion EPM Blog Posts:
Sarah has a guide on installing Oracle 12c on Windows. Her sample covers the multi-tenant version of 12c. If you’d like a single-tenant version, you can always check out Jake’s post here. She also has a post on BICS data sync. Both very thorough posts.
Tim reflects on his time spent at Kscope and the preparations that go into it. I’d encourage everyone to read his comments and consider submitting an abstract for Kscope17.
Francisco has an very in-depth article about using the on-prem REST API’s for Planning to load meta-data. One word of caution…this is still unsupported as I understand it. That doesn’t mean it won’t work, just that they might change the API without notice.
Cameron continues his Kscope in Snaps series. I really should take more pictures at these things…
Dmitry has an update to his Essbase Scrambler. This is an awesome tool and he gives us a few API tips along the way.
Gary has a helpful tip for those of us using Firefox as our Hyperion EPM browser of choice.
Harry not only had his production release of cubeSavvy, but also a few beta releases this week: 9.6 and 9.7.
ODTUG GeekAThon
Another quick shout out for the ODTUG GeekAThon. For those of us real geeks out there, they have a competition worthy of the maker community. You can find the announcement here. You can find the competition website here. And a quick re-cap:
GeekAThon Announcement
GeekAThon Competition Website
Now go build something awesome!
Brian Marshall
August 1, 2016
