Last week was clearly the calm before the Oracle OpenWorld storm! This week in Hyperion EPM has been really, really busy!
Hyperion EPM Patches and Updates:
Hyperion DRM 11.1.2.4.342 is now available. It appears to be a few bug fixes. Hopefully your bug was fixed!
Hyperion EPM Blog Posts:
Rodrigo continues his series on ODI 12c. This part of the series covers loading dimensions and cubes using natural keys with the promise of a future post on surrogate keys.
Sibin had four posts this week. First he covers how to delete a Planning application manually. Next he covers a very specific drill-through issue with FDMEE. Sticking with FDMEE, he moves on to updating the period tables. Finally he continues on with FDMEE and shows off the functionality of drill-through in Planning.
Celvin had two posts this week between a long flight and a meeting that doesn’t interest him. First he has an update to his NUMSysCmdLauncher utility that includes some new filter functionality along with a rewrite in Groovy. Next up he has an intro to JSON for the REST API in PBCS. Interesting read…as always.
Dayalan has part two of his series covering Essbase Web Services. Looks complicated!
Jason had three posts this week. First he covers simple drill-through in Dodeca. Next he tells us that he is speaking at OOW (good luck Jason!). Finally he has a new version of his Camshaft tool for executing MDX queries.
Eric shows off Oracle’s new online ordering for on-prem software. Right now you can only purchase Essbase and a few of the reporting pieces, so no real EPM software…yet.
I have a post this week showing off my skills (or lack thereof) at recovering Oracle DB’s after an unexpected failure.
Oracle OpenWorld Coverage
OpenWorld is this week, in case you missed the massive amount of coverage. I’ve recapped all of the blogging here by person. If I get time later, I’ll consolidate this all into one big OOW blog post after it ends!
Opal
Cameron
ODTUG GeekAThon
Another quick shout out for the ODTUG GeekAThon. Only four (4) days left to complete your entries!!!
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. 😉
One last thing…they have officially announced prizes. Now go finish building something awesome!
Brian Marshall
September 20, 2016
Welcome to another later edition of the Hyperion EPM Week In Review. I actually waited a little later this week as it was a really, really slow week. No PBCS updates, no FCCS updates, no on-prem updates.
Hyperion EPM Patches and Updates:
While this isn’t a patch or an update, the new Profitability and Cost Management Cloud Service has popped up on the Oracle Cloud website. There is a video, some screenshots, and no pricing information. This looks promising…
Hyperion EPM Blog Posts:
Celvin dug into the new 16.09 patch for PBCS and discovered a major change to the backup process. He also shows off some new Smart View functionality.
Glenn has a quick post highlighting the differences in security for PBCS (and Planning) and FCCS. Basically, all of the dimensions are secured by default.
Dayalan gives us a peek behind the Essbase covers while taking a look at the Essbase Web Services. Pretty geeky stuff…I love it!
Sibin had not one, not two, but three posts this week. First he takes a look at exporting data from PBCS using data management. Next up, he covers the PBCS REST API’s and understanding Oracle’s idea of an error. Finally, he shows us what happens in the Planning repository when we add a new data source for Planning.
Harry has an update to his cubeSavvy tool. This update brings relational database queries! Sounds like an exciting way to enable drilling from one source to another.
Like I said…a slow week.
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. 😉
One last thing…they have officially announced prizes. Now go build something awesome!
Brian Marshall
September 14, 2016
Welcome to a really late Hyperion week in review…but hey there was a holiday. This week we have a broken Essbase patch along with a lot of great blogging content.
Hyperion EPM Patches and Updates:
First off, Essbase 11.1.2.4.012 has been released. Sadly, if you use encrypted MaxL commands…they broke this. So stay away from this patch if you require that functionality!
Hyperion EPM Blog Posts:
Eric helps everyone get ready for Oracle Open World which is coming up in just over a week. He has a great summary of all of the Hyperion EPM and Oracle BI related sessions that you might find interesting.
Cameron has a great post from his guest blogger Igor Slutskiy. He covers using Cell Text data from Planning in OBIEE. This involves some relational wizardry including use of my favorite relational database: The Planning Repository. Cameron also has his own post about a Smart View survey. Do you use it?! He also has a post about his (and Tim’s) meetup at Oracle Open World. I’m a regular attendee at his (and Natalie’s) Kscope meetup, but I won’t be at OOW, so have some fun for me.
Sibin had a busy week with a pair of posts. First he talked about the need for Identity Domains. Next he has a cool new utility to parse Planning (and PBCS) meta-data. For those of us missing EAS in the new Cloud world, this could be useful.
Gary walks us through his complex Studio Drill-Through implementation. Very interesting. I still prefer DrillBridge, but that’s just me. 😉 He also has a PSA regarding new Smart View installations. I’ve not seen this problem happen yet, but definitely worth a read so that if/when it happens to you, you know how to fix it.
Glenn takes us through FCCS from an Essbase perspective. I found this interesting and as an Essbase and Planning guy, I find FCCS interesting given its foundation.
Celvin also has a pair of posts this week. He starts with the mother of all CDF’s. I haven’t tried this yet, but I’m excited to! Next up he takes a look at finding all of your formulas buried in your financial reports.
Opal has a pair of quick tipes for the cloud. First she shows us how to fix the fun an exciting connection error problem when you are going from one cloud pod to another. Next she walks us through connected to FR in the Cloud using the installed FR Studio.
Kyle shares some extremely useful PowerShell scripts for splitting data files. I’m a huge PowerShell fan, so I really enjoy content like this.
Harry has a follow-up to his prior post on pulling Essbase data in Power Query. This reminds me of my Analysis Services days writing applications to pull multi-dimensional data with XML/A. It sucks for MSAS too Harry, it’s not just an Essbase problem!
Wayne takes us on a tour of BICS Deliveries. For the EPM people out there…think of it like FR Batches, but for BI!
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. 😉
One last thing…they have officially announced prizes. Now go build something awesome!
Brian Marshall
September 8, 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
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
Welcome to another Monday edition of the Hyperion EPM Week In Review. Let’s just jump right in…
Hyperion EPM Patches and Updates:
Disclosure Management 11.1.2.3.820 has been released. This one is way out of my wheel-house, so…
OBIEE 11.1.1.9.160719 has also been released. This is an extrememly long patch number and includes a extremely long list of bug fixes across the BI stack.
Not to be outdone…OBIEE 11.1.1.7.160719 has been released with its 11.1.1.9 sibling.
And just to round out the entire OBIEE family, 12.2.1.0.160719 was released as well.
Hyperion EPM Blog Posts:
Opal has several posts this week. First, a review of Tony’s book, The Definitive Guide to FDMEE. Next up is an ODTUG post about Jorge Rimblas. Jorge is an Oracle ACE with a heavy interest in photography. Heading back to the cloud she has a pair of posts on finding your version number and enabling data management in FCCS.
Celvin shows us the details of a pretty big bug in the date difference functions built into Calc Manager. The good news is that there is a patch.
Sarah has a guest blog post by Teal Sexton about OBIEE and APEX integration. Perhaps I need a guest blogged? Anyone interested? 😉
Tim has an excellent write-up on adding a dimension to an ASO cube. Pretty cool idea. I’m sure I’ll make use of this before too long.
Jason has part 4 and part 5 of his on-going data intput with Dodeca series. He covers focus calculations and relational database input.
Kyle continues his bromance with Jake over a in2hyperion. Kidding…kidding.
Vijay has some great automation samples doing exports with variables. This should come in handy for some automated backups. It also sounds like he has more coming soon.
Robert combines some FDMEE, MaxL, and Jython for those needing to do data clearing in ASO models.
ODTUG GeekAThon
ODTUG announced a competition this week. For those of us real geeks out there, they have a competition work of the maker community. You can find the announcement here. You can find the competition website here. And finally, you can register for a lunch and learn this Friday, July 29th at noon CST here. And a quick re-cap:
GeekAThon Announcement
GeekAThon Competition Website
GeekAThon Lunch and Learn Webinar Registration
Now go build something awesome!
Finals Words
That’s it for this week! We’ll keep going with Monday posts as they seem to be working out pretty well.
Brian Marshall
July 25, 2016
This week, Oracle was kind enough to give us a few patches while the EPM community in general is still recovering from Kscope16. We still have some great content this week, so let’s check it out.
Patches and Updates:
HFM 11.1.2.4.202 was released. This appears to be general bug fixes.
Speaking of bug fixes, Essbase 11.1.2.4.011 was released. No new functionality, but hopefully your bug was included.
For the shrinking population of 11.1.2.3 customers, the Tax Provision 11.1.2.3.702 patch was released.
Gary has another new release of his SV++ tool. Check it out here.
New Blog Posts:
I posted a tip on reloading the Planning cache without requiring a restart. Pretty cool tip…wish I had figured it out. Special thanks again to Tjien Lie for providing the code!
Sibin tells us all about handling NULL values in FDMEE. While on the subject of FDMEE, he also provides us a magic decoder ring for multi-period log files.
Jason has a pair of posts as he continues his on-going series on Dodeca. He has part 3 of this series, and a related post about relational data.
Pete has a wrap-up of Kscope16, but more importantly, he shows off an awesome new feature in PBCS: automatically updated smart lists based on dimensions. I can’t wait to see this one on-prem. Luckily I have more and more cloud clients so I get to play with this stuff.
Sarah as a great introduction to BICS. This starts from the very beginning…the login screen! She continues on to the home dashboard.
Speaking of Sarah, she gets a shout-out from the DEVEPM crew. They have a post dedicated to the ODTUG Leadership Program.
More cloud functionality that doesn’t work on-prem yet is brought to you by John Goodwin. He has a post on loading non-numerical data using FDMEE. I know I say this every time…but great stuff!
Doug has a recap of CloudScope…I mean Kscope16. He also discusses the roadmap to FDMEE. <<SAFE HARBOR>>
Gary has a pair of posts this week. He started with some Smart View performance tips that may help those of you using Office 2013 and 2016. He also has a post on the previously mentioned new version of SV++.
Brian Marshall
July 18, 2016
Welcome to the week after Kscope. This week brings us a lot of posts about Kscope16 (including mine!). There were even a few posts not about Kscope. This is also my first Week in Review that will be posted on Monday rather than over the weekend. It has been suggested that posting on Monday will increase the overall visibility of the content for everyone, so we’ll see how it goes!
Patches and Updates:
DRM 11.1.2.4.341 and DRM Analytics 11.1.2.4.341 have been released. This seems to be primarily bug fixes.
Gary also updated his SV ++ enhanced ribbon interface for Smart View. Definitely worth a look.
New Blog Posts:
This week I have a post about Kscope16 (like everyone else) and also I’m showing off my new Oracle rack. I’m pretty excited about this rack (I hear you snickering over that statement…get your mind out of the gutter!).
The DEVEPM crew has some nice words about Kscope16.
John Goodwin has posted the fourth and final part to his FDMEE and DRM integration series. The whole series is definitely worth a read.
Christian has an awesome tutorial on deploying the Planning utilities on a system other than your Planning server. I’ve often thought that there must be a way to do this as well…glad Christian figured it out. This opens up a whole host of automation consolidation for Planning customers.
Cameron has part 1 and part 2 of his Kscope16 review in the form of photos. He has made it through Monday night so far.
Sibin has a good tip on why your Workspace is missing all of your installed applications. Don’t forget to deploy then to the workspace server!
Opal has two updates this week. First, she has her all-inclusive single post on Kscope16. Then she has a post on backups and software updates in the Oracle EPM Cloud.
Celvin has a first look at using attributes in PBCS. As of the July update, everyone should have these and he shows us how to use them with suppress missing to gain some additional form-building power. He also has a great post on how to push options to all of your Smart View users during the install. Have I mentioned lately how awesome Celvin is? If not…Celvin is…awesome.
Jason joins a group of us last week with more than one blog post. He has a two-part series on data input with Dodeca: part 1, part 2. Did everyone get their Dodeca water bottle this year at Kscope? I have it on a shelf next to my Dodeca water bottle from last year. 😉
Vijay has some excellent content about using Groovy and the REST API’s with HPCM. I always love a good code snippet.
That’s it for this week! We’ll see how the Monday thing works out. Hopefully it leads to more consumption of the great content our community continues to produce!
Brian Marshall
July 11, 2016
Welcome to the most delayed Week In Review ever! Between recovering from Kscope16 and the holiday, I totally missed it this week. This week was a lot slower than last week, for obvious reasons. So let’s get to it:
Patches and Updates:
Nothing new this week.
New Blog Posts:
Cameron started off the week strong at Kscope16 with posts about day 1 and day 2. He disappeared into Kscope16 after that. 😉
The DEVEPM crew started KScope off with a post as well.
Eric talks about OECD country by country reporting in HFM and HTP.
Keith has an extensive post on memory settings for the web apps that run the Oracle EPM stack. He also has a less EPM-centric post about reinstalling Windows on a Yoga tablet.
Dayalan continues his series on DRM Integration with FDMEE. This dives a bit deeper into the configuration of DRM and the Web API’s.
Sibin continues his series on installation Oracle EPM. This time he talks about the repositories that need to be created and all of the tables that they eventually contain.
Summer has some musings about the Oracle Cloud now and the Oracle Cloud to come.
Other News:
In other news….Kscope16 was last week. It was great…or so I heard anyway. I was in Chicago for all of 18 hours. Most of that time was spent meeting with Oracle or presenting. I still had a great time seeing everyone. The big news for me at this event was the announcement of Kscope17. We’re headed back to San Antonio. The JW Marriot is a truly awesome venue and it should be another great conference. See you all in Texas next year!
Finally…for those of you who attended my sessions and those that weren’t able, I’ll have the presentations posted here soon. Stay tuned…
Brian Marshall
July 5, 2016
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