The Hyperion EPM Week in Review has clearly become more than I can manage on a weekly basis. So, I’ve decided to do a monthly update for the time being. If things slow down, I’ll get back to a weekly update. So, welcome to 2017 and the review of Hyperion EPM in December of 2016!
As part of this change I’ll also be structuring the posts a little different. Because over the course of a month many of us post more than once, I’ll be adding sub-heading for each of the contributing blogs along with a link to their main site. I welcome any feedback everyone has.
Garry had three posts last month. First he announced that he was selected to present at KScope17. Congrats Gary! He also lets us know about the new 11.1.2.4.704 patch for Financial Reporting. This is a particularly important update given that Oracle will no longer support the desktop client soon. While he’s updating us on patches, he also has a post about the new 11.1.2.4.210 patch for FDMEE. This includes a whole host of new features including text-based data loads.
Cameron gives us the update on the most resent Boston meetup. It looks like a lot of fun was had!
The DEV EPM crew continues their series on Dimension and Cubes in ODI 12c. The topic of the day is loading data using surrogate keys.
Keith has a post on extracting UDA’s…using Python.
Eric, much like Gary, as a post on the 11.1.2.4.704 patch for Financial Reports. This seems to be a popular topic.
Sibin had another busy month of blogging. He starts off by taking a peak at the backend tables of Shared Services. He then moves on to showing us how to create a relational data source for an Essbase rules file…on Linux. Speaking of Linux, he also has a guide on installing HFM on Oracle Linux. I’m pretty sure this is only supported on Exalytics…but hey, cool guide.
Jason has a re-cap of his most popular blog posts of 2016 to finish out the year.
John continues his awesome content to finish off the year. He has a post on loading data to multiple years and periods with FDMEE. He also has part one of his series on FDMEE and the REST API.
Francisco has a post on the 11.1.2.4.210 patch for FDMEE at a glance. He the digs deeper into the patch.
Dayalan has a post on loading data into PBCS using the HsSetValue and HsGetValue functions.
Celvin, who I had the privaledge of hanging out with over the holidays, has a number of posts in December. He has an amazing family and it was great to spend some time away from Kscope with some fellow Oracle nerds.
First he has a tip on ADFS Federation and Signing Certificate issues. Next up he has a quick tip on deleting members and shared members more rapidly in PBCS. Finally, he has a post on adding a time value to a webform.
Sarah has a post on error 10058 in Data Visualization Desktop (DVD). While on the topic of DVD, she also covers plug-ins.
Eric has a great post showing off the new and hopefully eventually released Essbase Cloud Service.
Opal has a post on opening up more than one instance of the Oracle EPM Cloud.
Brian Marshall
January 17, 2017
Welcome to 2017! This post is way late as I continue to recover from a ridiculously busy Q4 and the Holidays that go along with that. 2016 was my second year of blogging, and I’d like to think that it was a successful year. In 2017, I published 83 blog posts. I’m not sure that I’ll get anywhere near that number this year, but I’m hoping to make every post count.
This year I hope to focus more on continuing to build out my home lab to support new and interesting things. I’d also like to spend more time with cloud technologies like FCCS and ARCS that I haven’t spent as much time blogging about so far. Here’s what I hope to post on in general:
- Essbase Performance (you should see a lot on this given my presentation looms)
- PBCS
- FCCS
- More fun with PowerShell
- More posts about the Lab
- Perhaps a guest-blog or two?
I’ll finish off this post by stealing an idea from Jason and posting my top 10 blog posts from 2016:
- The Planning Repository: HSP_OBJECT and HSP_OBJECT_TYPE
- Building a Hyperion Home Lab: Introduction and Choosing Your Hypervisor
- Getting Started With Hyperion Planning 11.1.2.4 and Rapid Deployment (Part 1 of 2)
- Building a Hyperion Home Lab: Choosing Your Motherboard
- Building a Hyperion Home Lab: Choosing Your Processor
- Getting Started With Hyperion Planning 11.1.2.4 and Rapid Deployment (Part 2 of 2)
- Drill-Through in PBCS and Hyperion Planning Without FDMEE
- Enabling Dynamic Members in Custom Plan Types in 11.1.2.4
- Currency Conversion in ASO
- Veeam Backup & Replication Free Edition Experience and Sample
Brian Marshall
January 16, 2017
It’s time for a meet-up! Tomorrow, December 1, 2016, join the ODTUG North Texas EPM/BI Meet-Up group as we co-host an event with the North Texas Hyperion User Group at Topgolf in The Colony. We’ll get started at 3 PM and the first two bays will be sponsored by ODTUG! You will have to buy your own drinks and food, but we’ll cover the bays until 6 PM. Come enjoy the company of your local EPM and BI professionals as we play Golf poorly!
Date: Thursday, December 1, 2016
Time: 3:00-6:00pm (drop in anytime and look for our bays)
Location: Topgolf
3760 Blair Oaks Drive
The Colony, TX 75056
Here’s the meet-up info:
https://www.meetup.com/ODTUG-DFW-EPM-BI/events/235679958/
Brian Marshall
November 30, 2016
Welcome to the Hyperion EPM Week in Review! And look at that…it has only been a week!
Hyperion EPM Patches and Updates:
Essbase 11.1.2.4.014 has been released. This is a nearly complete patch for the suite with everything getting a patch but EAS.
The December 2016 cloud updates are about to drop:
ARCS looks to have a few new features, including Transaction Matching.
EPRCS also gets an update in December.
FCCS will be getting another update as well. This update includes new alternate hierarchy functionality in the Entity dimension among other things.
PBCS gets an update as well with a lot of new features around sandboxing and a new web-based version of predictive planning. Also of note…workspace has an official date of death…December 2017.
PCMCS gets a few minor updates as well.
Hyperion EPM Blog Posts:
Opal has another post in his ODTUG Member Series. This time she focuses on the former ODTUG Marketing guru, Lori Lorusso.
Sibin has a five-part series on using ODI to load data from a flat file into an Oracle table. Check out part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5. He follows that series up with another ODI post on handling NULL values in ODI.
Peter has an extremely detailed post on conditional FIX statements in Essbase. Love the details and explanation.
Jason hosted a webinar this week on the Dodeca Excel Add-In. This is a pretty cool tool for all of you out there that either refuse to make the move to Smart View or have VBA code preventing the move. Jason also has an update on his Thriller MDX over JDBC driver.
Cameron has a great post on migrating an Essbase database to the cloud using PBCS.
Keith has an update to the FDMEE framework that he has been working on. He has updated the logging functionality to be in line with PEP 8.
Tim tells us Happy Thanksgiving along with some kind words from a Dodeca Excel Add-In user.
Glenn gives us a few highlights from the Essbase 11.1.2.4.014 patch that was just released. Sounds like we should all get patched up…
Rodrigo has an ODI post as well this week. He continues his series on Dimensions and Cubes in ODI 12c with part 3 on Settings for Surrogate Keys.
Brian Marshall
November 26, 2016
Welcome to the Hyperion EPM Week Month in Review! I can’t believe it has been almost a month since my last post. With the holidays upon us, I can’t say for sure that I’ll keep up with the weekly posts going forward, but I’m certainly going to give it a shot. Here we go!
Hyperion EPM Patches and Updates:
Hyperion Financial Clost Management 11.1.2.4.200 has been released. They removed reduced the reliance on SOA in this release. I guess its a step in the right direction, but a long way from where we all hoped it would be.
Hyperion Disclosure Management 11.1.2.4.253 has been released. That’s about all I know about that…
The November 2016 Update for ARCS has been released. More here.
The November 2016 Update for FCCS has been released. More here.
The November 2016 Update for EPRCS has been release. More here.
The November 2016 Update for PBCS has been released. More here. The dropping of support for the desktop FR studio is of particular interest. Really? Ugh…
The November 2016 Update has been released for PCMCS. More here.
Hyperion EPM Blog Posts:
Cameron shows us how to work around a bug that’s been around for a long time. FIX statements and shared members.
Tim shows us that query logging can really cause performance problems. Beware!
Keith has a few posts. He covers JConsole with ODI and some OutOfMemoryError’s. He also announced JunkieFramework. A framework for FDMEE development…interesting stuff. He then asked for everyone to help collaborate with the framework. All of these tools are only better with the community being more involved…so get involved!
Pete has a post on subvars and using them to hack data forms. I hadn’t noticed some of the improvements to the PBCS side of things as it relates to subvars. Good read.
Sibin kept busy while I was backlogged in my posting. Here’s a quick re-cap:
Dmitry continues his datamining series.
Jason has a few posts. He covers custom landing pages in Dodeca. He keeps with the Dodeca theme and covers multiple applications. Did I mention Dodeca? Jason did…this time covering Tenants.
John Goodwin shows us a way to run FDMEE data load rules from inside of a task list. Groovy!
Another Tim laments the fact that Essbase feature adds are few and far between right now.
Francisco has been busy too. He has a post about extracting YTD balances. Next up…a pair of code snippets: logging fdmContext values and script code based on EPM environment.
Dayalan starts off a series about the EPM Automate Utility.
Sarah has completed another Ironman.
Ludovic has a pair of EPBCS posts: Part 1 and Part 2.
Vijay shows us how to filter exports to remove duplicates in DRM.
Doug shows off the new functionality in FDMEE in FCCS for Multi-Column data files.
Opal has a few posts from the cloud. Or is it about the cloud? First she has a quick tip on EPBCS/EPC and how you should always log out. She also covers PBCS administrator settings. Last, but certainly not least, she covers the notable updates in the Oracle EPM cloud for November.
Other Stuff
In other news, thanks largly in part to my amazing blog post his qualifications, Jake Turrell has been elected to the ODTUG board of directors! Congrats Jake!
Brian Marshall
November 18, 2016
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
You know you are running late on your Hyperion EPM Week in Review when someone asks you about in on a phone call… It’s been about 10 days since my last week in review, so welcome to this weeks “Hyperion EPM 10 Days in Review.”
Hyperion EPM Patches and Updates:
Hyperion Financial Reports 11.1.2.4.703 has been released. Looks like mostly bug fixes.
The October updates for the cloud will start flowing out next Friday! We have PBCS updates-a-plenty. You can read more about those here. We also have some ARCS updates that you can read about here. Finally, we have FCCS updates that you can read about here.
Hyperion EPM Blog Posts:
We’ll start off with a post from Robert on the death of on-prem! Well, it may be more of a question, but he has a great headline.
Summer has a post about the cloud and how to support your applications. Managed services are becoming far more popular as it becomes more difficult and expensive to find an admin.
Dayalan has his third part of his Essbase Web Services series. He covers the admin services portion of the web service. He then follows that up with part four covering the Datasource Service.
Christian has a post regarding some settings in the BIOS to improve performance in Essbase. Definitely an interesting post. Obviously hyper-threading is bad and he also found that working with memory interleaving can help.
Glenn has a quick post on some Excel Add-In’s that cause odd behavior with Smart View. I’m excited to hear more. He also has a post on migrating from EIS to Studio. I would just convert things back to a normal build and use DrillBridge personally.
I covered the next part in my series on FreeNAS. I also spent some time with network storage getting ready for my Essbase benchmarks.
Sibin has several posts again this week. First he covers Category Mappings in FDMEE. Next he moves on to the Open Interface in FDMEE. After that he covers the DATAEXPORT command in Essbase. Finally he covers more information on the Open Interface Adapter.
Tim has some more information about Essbase Cloud Services. This should be an interesting read if you haven’t heard much yet.
John Goodwin has a part one of a series covering Oracle’s REST Data Services and how to integrate that with the EPM stack. Good read…very in-depth. Not to be outdone by himself, he gives us part two as well.
Jason has a funny post about TBC going bankrupt. Give it a minute and it will make sense.
Will has a post about some new features in DRG: Workflow Task Calculate Name and Calculate Parent.
Henri has a great post on the HFM Java API. More parts are coming and I can’t wait to read them.
Opal talks a lot about FCCS and where she thinks development is heading. This is a good read and FCCS is definitely going to open up a lot of new opportunities in our EPM market.
Gary has a collection of highlights from the Oracle docs to help everyone out with Smart View. As more of us are forced to give up the Excel add-in, this will become more and more important.
Cameron really wants to you join ODTUG. I’m a member…are you? ODTUG brings us Kscope and a whole host of other important activities, so go become a paying member!
Oracle OpenWorld Coverage
OpenWorld was last week I’ve recapped all of the blogging here by person including prior posts to have a complete list of coverage.
Opal
Cameron
Jason
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! Go submit some abstracts!
Brian Marshall
September 30, 2016