The EPM Week In Review: Week Ending April 9, 2016
This was a big week for patch releases and as always, a lot of a great blogging. Patches and Updates: The Essbase 11.1.2.4.008 patch finally hit the Proactive Support blog along. Last week we were missing EAS, Studio, and APS. This week we have them! Sadly, this patch does not fix my client’s issue. Oracle just updated my ticket says, and I quote…”sorry”. More importantly, Oracle’s cloud and on-premises worlds have finally collided! The FDMEE 11.1.2.4.200 patch has finally arrived. This added cloud integration along with a ton of other important bug fixes (including a lot of unmentioned one’s). New Blog Posts: This week I blogged about loading SQL data into ASO in parallel. Harry is working on a pretty awesome web-based Excel-like interface for Essbase. I’ll be installing this when he makes it available. Christian shows us how to change the supervisor password in ODI. Good article, though I fear that I will have to ask clients for their supervisor password in the future instead of just knowing what it is. Ricardo and Rodrigo
Parallel SQL Server Data Loads with ASO Essbase
If you have a ASO cube where timing is everything or a cube with multiple large data sets, waiting for data loads to process in series can waste valuable time. Luckily, Essbase supports parallel data loads! Sadly…while the documentation for this isn’t bad, it is inaccurate. I’m sure it was accurate a few (or many) versions ago, but the drive names have changed as have the DLL’s. So first, let’s set up our MaxL rule to execute multiple parallel loads from a single SQL data source. Here’s the code: import database RetASO.RetASO data connect as hypservice identified by ‘Hyp3r10n!’ using multiple rules_file ‘dRev’, ‘dExp’ to load_buffer_block starting with buffer_id 100 on error write to “e:\\data\\RetASO\\dRev.txt”; So this MaxL code assumes that you have at least two load rule developed. I’ve built a load rule for revenue and a load rule for expense. Each of these rules load roughly 2 million rows of data into my ASO cube. So let’s execute this and see what happens: If we read the error, it tells us exactly what the
The EPM Week In Review: Week Ending April 2, 2016
The EPM community never seems to slow down with providing great content. Patches and Updates: Essbase 11.1.2.4.008 has been released. It has not yet hit the Proactive Support Blog. So here it is: Essbase Server 11.1.2.4.008 PSU 22674292 Essbase RTC 11.1.2.4.008 PSU 22674308 Essbase Client 11.1.2.4.008 PSU 22674304 Essbase Client MSI 11.1.2.4.008 PSU 22814465 It says this: “Essbase Administration Services 11.1.2.4.008, Provider Services 11.1.2.4.008, and Essbase Studio 11.1.2.4.008 are supported for use with Essbase 11.1.2.4.008.” But…I can’t actually find those. So if you happen to be able to find those, drop me a line. Perhaps this is why it isn’t on the Proactive Support Blog yet? New Blog Posts: This week I covered upper-level drill-through using Drillbridge. I really like this product more the more I use it. I’m currently working on several more posts around advanced functionality and comparing the free version to the enterprise version. Francisco tells us that hard-coding passwords is bad and shows us how to take care of the problem. Summer tells us about a random date issue in Planning. Henri shows
Drillbridge: Enabling Upper Level Drill-through
In our last post about Drillbridge, we did the basic introduction and then ran through the steps to get it up and running. But, in the interest of simplicity, we kept it simple. Now we are ready to get a little more complex. For today, a little more complex will be upper level drill-through. This is one of those things that can make Essbase admin’s and DBA’s run from a building like it’s on fire. Why? Because upper level drill-through relies upon the end-users ability to not do something stupid. As we all know…it’s a virtual certainty that they will. This is where Drillbridge really shines. We have several mechanisms to control the level of stupidity that we allow our users to engage in before we shut them down. So let’s get started. Log into your Drillbridge server and start by changing up the Deployment Spec. If you remember from our first post, we started with this: @RELATIVE(“Year”, 0),@RELATIVE(“Measures”, 0),@RELATIVE(“Product”, 0),@RELATIVE(“Market”, 0),”Actual”,”Budget” We also checked the box indicating that this was Level-0 only. Now let’s
PBCS April 2016 Update: FDMEE On-Premise Is Here, Kinda…
Another month…another update to PBCS. This month we have a few very interesting items. First, we have a new version of the EPM Automate Utility with a few new commands: copysnapshotfrominstance – This command can essentially replicate one instance to another. This could make migrations a bit faster and more streamlined and possible less error prone. provisionreport – This provides a report of which roles are assigned to which users. The cool part here is that it also shows the “sequence of inheritance”. userauditreport – In case you wonder who is actually using PBCS, this report should tell you who logs in and when. setsubstvars – Similar to the MaxL command that performs the same function, we can now use the EPM Automate tool to create and set substitution variables. Now let’s talk about what really makes this release interesting. PBCS now supports integration with on-premise FDMEE! This is great news that we have all been waiting for. But wait…it requires FDMEE 11.1.2.4.200. This confirms the rumors we’ve been hearing. So what’s the problem? 11.1.2.4.200
The EPM Week In Review: Week Ending March 26, 2016
Because this is a 3-day weekend for many, I’m posting this a day early. Also, today is the last day for early bird registration for KScope16. So what’s new this week? Patches and Updates: DRM 11.1.2.4.330 has been released. This includes a ton of new features and patches. This patch as previously been released, but has been pulled and moved around and required a password at one point. FCM 11.1.2.4.102 has been released. There are quite a few bug fixes, especially for ARM. New Blog Posts: This week I continued my series on PowerShell and Hyperion. I focused on executing the outline load utility from a remote server. Amit shows us how to encrypt our password using the EPM Automate tool. Celvin has cracked the Hyperion Planning API…cool stuff. He has also made some updates to his Essbase Member Operations utility. Busy week for Celvin! Eric gives us a lot of great information about Exalytics. Kate walks us through the new features found in the recently released 11.1.2.4.200 patch for HFM. Sarah (now over at