Voting ends today for the ODTUG Board of Directors. This may seem familiar, but with voting coming to an end today…here it is one more time:
It’s that time of year. Election season. No, not THAT election. The ODTUG Board of Directors election! You can see the very long list of 16 nominees along with their campaign statements and bios here. I urge you to pay special attention to Jake Turrell. Jake has been contributing to the ODTUG community for as long as I can remember. He has multiple best speaker awards and a great deal of passion for what we do. He also has a fantastic blog that I reference multiple times a month. I can’t imagine a better candidate for the ODTUG Board of Directors. If Jake were more self-promoting, he would have let me put up an amazing campaign site.
But as I mentioned before, that’s not his style. Instead I’ll list off some of the contributions from Jake over the years:
- Oracle ACE Associate
- Speaker at Kscope in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2016.
- Top Speaker Award (Planning Track) – Kscope16
- Best First-Time Speaker Award – Kscope10
- Co-Editor – Developing Essbase Applications
- Blogger – EPM Adventures
- Kscope12 – Content Lead for EPM/BI Apps
- Kscope13 – Content Team for EPM/BI Apps
- Other Conferences: OpenWorld, NTxHUG, Infratects Top Gun, Solutions, etc.
Jake also has the added benefit of being an independent contractor. This means that he gets to sit on the fence between Oracle customers and Oracle partners. But don’t quote me on that in case I ever decide to run for ODTUG BOD again.
Voting ends today, October 25, 2016 at 11:59 PM Pacific Daylight Time!
VOTE FOR JAKE!!!
Brian Marshall
October 25, 2016
So now I’m extremely late… On the bright side, there is a ton of great content, including several Hyperion Patches!
Hyperion EPM Patches and Updates:
Hyperion Essbase 11.1.2.4.013 has been released. This patch includes almost all products (Server, RTC, Client, MSI, EAS Server, EAS Console, and APS). The notable exception is Essbase Studio.
Hyperion Smart View for Office 11.1.2.5.610 has been released. This patch has some pretty cool features. The most notable that I’ve seen fixes a giant issue with Smart View. They have added a VBA function that will allow you to submit a range of cells without doing a refresh. This means that you can now send out your templates, get back numbers, and not have it blow them away!
HFM 11.1.2.4.203 has been released. This has a variety of defect fixes, including a sizable number related to performance.
The OBIEE 16108 patch is now available. This crosses three version: 11.1.1.9.161018, 12.2.1.0.161018, and 12.2.1.1.161018. These of course continue the long-running pattern of the longest patch names imaginable.
Hyperion EPM Blog Posts:
Sibin is still staying busy with two posts since our last update. First he takes a look at Essbase password encryption. In his next post he sticks with that same theme, this time he looks into how secure the encryption really is.
Cameron also has a pair of posts. He starts off covering the new Activity Reports feature in PBCS. That’s the happy topic…then the sad topic: License Compliance.
Everyone has two posts, including Gary! He first tells us that the new Smart View has been released. He then goes on to release his own updated SV++ Utility! This includes a variety of new features, the most exciting of which are Shortcuts!
Keeping with our theme of two posts, the DEVEPM crew has a pair (of posts). First they tell us about OTN Appreciation Day…which I totally missed. They also have a webinar coming up in December.
Opal has a pair of posts as well. She also has an OTN Appreciation Day post. Hers features EPRCS. She goes on to talk about your default interface in PBCS in her second post.
Eric is our first blogger with only one post. He has an OTN Appreciation Day post about the Log Analysis Tool.
Luckily, Jason had three posts to even it out. He shows off a new feature in the Next Generation Outline Extractor. Jason also has a post caused by me pestering him for help related to getting data out of Essbase. He then took that post and extended it into Drillbridge. Cool stuff.
Dmitry has some really cool stuff on using Essbase with Oracle Data Miner and Oracle R. First he gets things set up with ODM and ORE. Next he runs clustering models in ODM. Finally, he uses those clustering models as data sources for regressions. This is really cool stuff too.
John Goodwin has parts three and four of his EPM and ORDS series.
Vijay has a post on a simple DRM error. He runs through how to unlock properties to prevent error messages around security.
Patrick has a post on using the backslash escape character in Essbase dim builds to retain quotes.
Brian Marshall
October 25, 2016
This week we review our EPM week of only seven days, unlike the ten days of last week. We had some great content, but no patches or updates. Let’s get to it!
ODTUG Board of Directors
It’s that time of year. Election season. No, not THAT election. The ODTUG Board of Directors election! You can see the very long list of 16 nominees along with their campaign statements and bios here. I urge you to pay special attention to Jake Turrell. Jake has been contributing to the ODTUG community for as long as I can remember. He has multiple best speaker awards and a great deal of passion for what we do. He also has a fantastic blog that I reference multiple times a month. I can’t imagine a better candidate for the ODTUG Board of Directors. If Jake were more self-promoting, he would have let me put up an amazing campaign site. But that’s not really his style, so I’ll leave it at this for now…VOTE FOR JAKE!!!
Hyperion EPM Patches and Updates:
No updates this week!
Hyperion EPM Blog Posts:
Sibin had yet another busy week with four new posts. He first brings us a blog about the back-end tables that store source system information in FDMEE. I’m a sucker for looking under the covers of EPM products… He then shows us how to export data to a relational table from Essbase directly with a calculation script. This is a great tutorial, but I will note that I have seen very slow performance going direct to a relational destination versus just straight to a flat file. Now that’s I’ve said that, I feel the need to benchmark it. In the meantime, he has a follow-up on adding a timestamp to the export. He finishes his week off with another post on calculation scripts in Essbase, specifically allocations.
Ricardo reminds us that the deadline for Kscope 17 abstracts is rapidly approaching.
I have a the fifth part of my Essbase performance series. We’re getting dangerously close to real Essbase benchmarks. Excited? I am…
Jason has a pair of posts on Dodeca this week. First he covers dynamic rolling quarters. He then has an extremely detailed post on adding a username to a row during relational input.
Keith has a pair of posts this week as well. Both of his involve Jython. First he shows us how to install it and then he shows us how to debug it in ODI.
Eric has a pair of posts this week as well. First he advertises tells us about Managed Oracle EPM Hosted Solutions. Next he tells us that he is running for ODTUG Board of Directors. I will say that his campaign site made me laugh.
Christian has released Tools-EPM. This sounds like a cool command-line utility to make our lives easier. I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, but I hope to eventually.
Opal went to the fair. Not exactly EPM, but hey, it is an EPM blog normally.
Eric (Erikson, not Helmer) has a great post showing off the new charts in HFM data grids functionality. Pretty pictures. 🙂
Kscope 17 Abstracts
Friendly reminder to those of you interested in presenting at Kscope17 next year…the deadline is rapidly approaching with just two weeks left. That’s right, the deadline is October 14! That is just one week from today! Go submit some abstracts!
Brian Marshall
October 7, 2016
Introduction
Welcome to part five the Essbase Performance series that will have a lot of parts. Today we’ll pick up where we left off on network storage baselines. Before we get there, here’s a re-cap of the series so far:
Essbase Performance
In case you’ve forgotten, here’s the list of configurations that will be tested:
- Eight (8) Hitachi 7K3000 2TB Hard Drives, four (4) sets of two (2) mirrors
- Eight (8) Hitachi 7K3000 2TB Hard Drives, four (4) sets of two (2) mirrors with an Intel S3700 200GB SLOG
- Eight (8) Hitachi 7K3000 2TB Hard Drives, four (4) sets of two (2) mirrors with sync=disabled (NFS) or sync=always (iSCSI)
- One (1) Intel P3605 1.6TB NVMe SSD
- One (1) Intel P3605 1.6TB NVMe SSD with sync=disabled (NFS) or sync=always (iSCSI)
And the four (4) datasets:
- One (1) dataset to test NFS on the Hard Drive configurations
- One (1) dataset to test iSCSI on the Hard Drive configurations
- One (1) dataset to test NFS on the NVMe configurations
- One (1) dataset to test iSCSI on the NVMe configurations
So what benchmarks were used?
- CrystalDiskMark 5.0.2
- Anvil’s Storage Utilities 1.1.0.337
Benchmarks
And the good stuff that you skipped to anyway…benchmarks!
As with the rest of the series, we’ll continue our flow. We started with CrystalDiskMark and now we’ll move on to Anvil. While Anvil will also provide MB/s metrics, we will focus on just the IO/s. Let’s get started.
Anvil Sequential Read
In our read tests everything is pretty well flat. The NFS Hard Drive configuration seems to be lower than everything else, but at a low queue depth, we’ll consider that an outlier for now.
Anvil 4K Random Read
The random performance at a low queue depth is also pretty flat. The iSCSI NVMe device does seem to separate itself here. We’ll see how it does at higher queue depths.
Anvil 4K Random QD4 Read
At a queue depth of four, things are basically flat across the board.
Anvil 4K Random QD16 Read
It seems that at higher queue depths, things still seem to stay relatively flat on the read side. Let’s see what happens with writes.
Anvil Sequential Write
As with our CDM results, write performance is a totally different story. Here again we see the three factors that drive performance: synchronous writes, SLOG, and media type. NFS and iSCSI are inverse of each other by default. NFS forces synchronous writes while iSCSI forces asynchronous writes.
Clearly asynchronous writes win out every time given the fire-and-forget nature. The SLOG does help in a big way. As in our CDM results, the S3700 SLOG still seems to perform better on iSCSI than even the NVMe SSD. Once we get to actual Essbase performance, we’ll see how this holds up.
Anvil 4K Random Write
Random performance follows the same trend as sequential performance in our write tests. At a low queue depth, SSD’s get us half-way to asynchronous performance, which is exciting.
Anvil 4K Random QD4 Write
As queue depth increases, the performance differential seem to stay pretty consistent. Asynchronous performance is pulling away just a tad from the rest of the options.
Anvil 4K Random QD16 Write
In our final test, we see that at much higher queue depths, asynchronous really pulls away from everything. iSCSI seems to fair much better with the SLOG than the NVMe drive again.
So…can we get some Essbase benchmarks yet? That will be our next post!
Brian Marshall
October 3, 2016