Open World 2009 Day 2

Oracle Open World Day 2.
This has been a hectic morning with my needing to deal with some issues at clients so I missed this mornings Keynote. As I looked at the schedule as I did not preregister for any sessions (which is a mistake), I noticed that all of the Hyperion related sessions are in the Intercontinental Hotel on the 5th floor. Interestingly all of the Hyperion Vendor Kiosks were outside the rooms. What a great idea. Not huge booths, but a place to talk to vendors associated with the products you are looking at. Aside from the interRel Kiosk, there was one for Applied OLAP (and their Dodeca product) and Star analytics who has a couple of great products as well. The other booths were competitors, so I guess I won’t mention them. In total I think there were about 8 Kiosks.
I wanted to go to the session on EPM Roadmap, but when I looked on the board, I saw it was overbooked, so I figured I would have no chance to get in. There were people standing off to the side who had been shuffled there by the door wardens ( A thankless job). I figured what the hell, so I got into line expecting to be pushed aside. I got to the door warden, he scanned my card and let me in. I figured out afterwards, that my Blogger pass is worth something. Thank you Oracle.
The session was led by Bill Guilmart and Al Marciante. Like ALL of the sessions here, the first slide was a disclaimer saying nothing they say (or for that fact, my reporting of it) is reality and may never be delivered. So take what I say with a grain of salt or a pound and rub it into your open wounds.
The session first talked about the existing releases since Open World last year and since that is all old news, I won’t repeat any of it here. As they got to talking about new features, there was a these I have seen yesterday OK. I get it, the theme for the conference seems to be “Complete Open Integrated” and the real theme for the session was Unify intelligence from Transactional , BI and Management systems.. Toward that end, the topics would be
· Complete Integrated Close
· Extending the Planning Platform
· Expanded ERP integration
· Ease of use enhancements
· Integration
· Portfolio wide improvements
What does all this mean? I’ll go through what I was able to jot down while actually trying to listen at the same time (because of this my notes are not complete)
Financial Close Management is a four piece enhance,ment
1. A financial Calendar to let everyone know the schedule and task deadlines
2. Process monitoring – A dashboard to show how the close is going
3. Task Management. Lots of improvement including integration with Oulook task lists and calendar
4. Account Reconciliation This includes
a. Internal/ External reporting
b. Disclosure management (10Q, XBRL, SEC filings)
It will work with MS office and other products to provide consistent reporting and accountability

Planning
· It too has enhanced process management including reassigning of tasks(delegation)
· A New Form designer
· Composite forms
· Web form enhancements including
o Conditional formatting
o Ad Hoc Data entry forms
o Formatting options (freeze frame, sorting, filtering,, etc)
o Better member selection
o And Built in validation rules
Public sector Planning. This section went too fast for me to get the info, but it looked good

Smart View
· Enhanced Excel experience
· Task lists
· Composite forms from Planning
· Context sensitive ribbon bars
· Enhanced 2007 look and feel
· Better Log in
· For HFM
o Smart slices
o Report designer
o Cascading reports
· For Essbase
o Drill through to ERPI
Shared Service.
Alas, I was not able to get everything down they talked about, but good stuff is coming including
· New security deployment configuration
· 2 way SSL
· SSL offloading
· (I missed the rest of the points sorry)
EPMA
It looks like they are doing a lot of work on EPMA to make it really usable, this is a good thing.
· Enhanced Essbase support
o ASO and BSO
· HCPM Validations
· Smart mapping of Planning lists to ASO cubes. OK, This means Planning will create ASO reporting cubes. It sounds like it turns smart lists into dimensions (attribute???) as Al talked about 25 dimension cubes for reporting
· Batch updates
· The ability to purge transaction log files
· HFM copy application ability
Calculation Manager
While 11.1.1.3 enabled calculation manage to work oncubes outside of EPMA, it is getting better
· Procedural calculations on ASO cubes (Allocation and others)
· Template ability. Create one and use anywhere
· Parameter passing
Data Relationship manager
· Browser based
· Unicode support (Multilanguage)
· Role based
· Multiple applications per server
· Validations in real time and in batch
· Improved Nnavigation
ERP Integrator (Part of FDQM)
In general improvements in functionality
HFM
· Starter Kits – IFRS, Japan, ….
· Enterprise extracts in HFM format
· Integration with Government/Risk
o Segmentation of duty
o GRC manager
· Integration with OBIEE Answers
FR
· Related content enhancement
· Grid level and POV passing enabled for snapshots and books
· MS word integration as Word tables
· LCM support to migrate
· Diagnostics and logging
IOP
This is a fairly new product and was not integrated into the suite. The major work being done will make it similar to the other products including SSL, Diagnostics and logging

HPCM (HCPM) I’ve heard it both ways.
· Expanded Driver functions
· Standard Cost drivers
· Sequence dependent drivers
· Expense assignment functionality
· Exp Model navigation
· POV management
· Improved performance
o 10-20 times better for direct drivers
o 3 times for genealogy
o 140 times from Allocations
And last but not least Essbase
· Improved EPMA deployment
· Improvements in LCM
o Outline compare
o Project naming
· Access ability(they put the number 508 in parens after it, I don’t know what that means)
· Functional enhancements
o Username/character length allowability
o ASO Formula editor
· Web services
· Studio Usability
· Diagnostics and logging
They covered a lot in 1 hour and could not go into a lot of depth, but as you can see, the products look like they are going in the right direction. It’s nice to know that Oracle thinks they are worth all the work.

OpenWorld 2009 Sunday

After an on and off and on again scenario, I actually made it to Open World. I got asked to sit on the Customer Advisory board for Essbase (CAB). So if there is anything on your wish list for Essbase or one of its related products (studio, PBIEE integration, etc) let me know and I’ll see if I can get your voice heard.
After a long day in CAB listening to things I’m not allowed to talk about, I’m sitting here with thousands of my closest friends waiting for the opening keynote address. One nice thing, they have set up an area for press and bloggers with tables so I don’t have to try to type in my lap. I hope there is some amazing tidbit about the Hyperion products I can tell you, but I’m not hopeful.
The session is starting with Scott McNeally from Sun Microsystems. His theme is innovation. He started of with a top 10 list of Engineers gone wild. His list is cute, but not worth repeating. (although I did like his sushi USB drives and Nobel prize for Gas Mask Bra ,no more funny than other Nobel prizes. ) He then went into the top 10 innovations from Sun (not a funny list, but interesting). The list includes the following,
Sparc, Solaris, Opensource, Java, Open Storage, Blackbox Datacenters( in containers for 3rd world countries), different chips, multithreading, etc.
I won’t go into them, but Scott talked about them all. And more.
Scott Fowler talked about Sun Systems, integrated systems, Java. Security.. He announces that Sun SPARC/Solaris is the number 1 in all the commercial Benchmarks including Hyperion.. He talked about the Sun Oracle Database machine (Didn’t I see a similar presentation from Oracle and HP last year?). $00 gig of flash on a card that won’t wear out like old flash and a nore Flash array. A single rack equates to 1000s of disk with 4X the throughout .
It was a real love fest from Sun about Oracle.
Larry Ellison then came out and the love fest continued with him talking about why He supports the Sun products and will not get rid of parts. He talked about his commitment to beat IBM. Expect to see ads why Oracle and Sun have a 25% better processing than IBM being 6 times more green.

After the keynote, I headed off to the Oracle Ace dinner. I met some old friends and met some new ones and had a nice mean (Thanks Oracle). While I was at the dinner, The rest of the crew from interRel was at the Partner awards presentation. interRel won the EPM Titan award for a second year in a row. Congratulations to Edward, Eduardo and everyone who was associated with the project

New Essbase book Review - Oracle Essbase 9 Implementation Guide

Recently, I was asked by Packit Publishing to review a new book on Essbase by Joe Gomez and Sarma Anantapantula titled Oracle Essbase 9 Implementation Guide. I jumped at the chance. There are so few resources available out there for someone new to Essbase, it’s a shame. I understand it’s a small audience, but since the Oracle acquisition it is growing. I would like to thank the authors for spending their time, energy, sweat and tears to create the book. I know it is a difficult task, for I have a hard enough time just updating my blog from time to time. So my hat is off to them for their undertaking.

Before my review, I feel it only proper that I give a couple of disclaimers before I review the book.
1. I am not the intended audience for it as they say it is for the IT professional who wants to start working with Essbase. I’ve been doing the way too long, about 14 years now (I think)
2. The company I work for puts out a competing book. Look smarter than you are with Essbase.(I am not the author nor an editor or reviewer of it).
3. I realize this is the first printing of the book and a tried to overlook errors like typos, obvious misstatements and wrong graphics for the text. I tried to concentrate on the subject matter.

With that said, I came into the assignment with an unbiased and open mind. I attempted to read the book from a new IT professional’s point of view while using my knowledge to insure the material was accurate.

I was excited when I got the book last week and using time I don’t have, began to go through it. I have to say, I really wanted to like the book as another source of information would be invaluable to the Essbase community. I am sorry to say I feel this book falls very short of being a good guide or reference. There were some good points, but the problems out weighted those few glimmers of insight. There are a numbers of troubles I had with the book.

First the good. As bright notes, the book talks about Cube Preview in EAS. It is a useful tool for administrators that no one ever talks about. In addition, they spend time talking about report scripts and even go through some of the syntax. Everyone seems to ignore this topic thinking report scripts are dead. I thank the authors for reminding us that they can still be useful. Even though the classic add-in is dying, they spend a bit of time on Query designer. This feature can be very useful and they mention some of the high points of it. I also enjoyed the introduction to data warehousing. It was interesting, although there was not really applicable to the subject of the book.

What did I not like about the book, I’m afraid more than I liked. I won’t go through everything, but give you a number or items I had difficulty with.

First, the book was hard to follow. While in the middle of a subject, the authors would veer off to talk about something related, but minor. In other cases it appeared pages might be missing or thought processes were incomplete. I would get into a subject and it would just end.. As an example of being hard to follow, when talking about dimension building, they went into a detailed discussion of MaxL. With Data loads, they did it again and then for Calc scripts veered off to Esscmd, this while having a whole chapter on automation and not really adding value to the topic. Another item that made it hard to follow was extreme detail would be presented on what buttons and options meant of various screens, but important functionality would be glossed over. For example, they described the load screen extremely well, but gloss over, the two different types of joins, selection and rejection criteria, adding text, etc, giving no examples at all. Finally, the examples were not cohesive. I never really got the overall understanding of what the database they were building looked like. It would morph into different dimensionality without explanation.

Second, there was not a cohesive flow to the examples. It would have been nice to have examples that built on each other. There was talk about the dimensions of the outline, and one example of how to build it, but I would have liked to build on prior steps. Perhaps first create the dimensions manually and build the dimension members manually, then exercises to add the members of other dimensions through load rules. Once flaw here (and with the Look Smarter book line) is there should be a source for sample files used to do dimension builds, data loads, and results from calc scripts that would allow the reader to easily follow the examples.

Third, unknown or inaccurate terminology was used. For instance, I’ve never heard of a parent dimension. Does this imply that there are child dimensions? Throughout the book the terminology was inconsistent. Dimensions were called all sorts of things. I know this next one is trifling, but in the Calculations section, they call the set commands functions. They are not functions but commands. There is a difference and if you are writing you need to be accurate with your information.

Fourth, this is a book that is supposed to be based on System 9. In the install section you get the most basic of installs, Essbase, EAS and the Excel Add-in. No mention of Provider servers, external authentication, FR etc. They talk about Esscmd (a lot). As a dying interface, why spend the time on it. I have to admit the authors do warn you in the automation chapter that Esscmd is being phased out. Get new users using MaxL, since it is the direction of the future. Yes you can mention that Esscmd exists, but don’t waste the readers time teaching it. I have the same comment about the classic Excel Add-in. While I love the add-in, new readers should be learning Smartview. I guess that would have required the author to discuss how to install and configure APS which would have made that section longer and more difficult.

Finally, I could live with all of the above and still be relatively happy, but there are too many inaccuracies in the book that would either confuse or mislead readers. In some cases the book would give completely wrong information. Here are a very few of the many examples I found.

Did you know that Smartview costs extra? I didn’t but according to the authors it does.

When talking about attribute dimensions, they use color as an example and put it on their product dimension. Their product dimension level zero members are Car models (like Sedan). This makes the reader believe you could have different colors (attribute dimension members) for the same model. No where do they tell you that a base member can only have one Attribute from an attribute dimension associated with it. Attributes on dense dimensions? I don’t know they never tell you if you can, but allude that it’s possible.

A second example is their discussion of Two Pass. It is stated that Two pass is only allowed on the Accounts dimension and only on Dynamic calc or Dynamic calc and store members. While only on the accounts dimension was applicable on version 3 of the software, it has not been the case ever since Dynamic calc came into effect. “Only on Dynamic calc (and store)”, If this were the case, what is there a command called Calc TwoPass. Further in the section on Two Pass, they give an example and lead the reader to believe that if you perform aggregations on the database in different orders of dimensions, your results will be different. The example shows data that is added up to parents. The last time I checked addition and subtraction were commutative. I surely hope that adding up my database in different orders will not affect the results. Had they used the typical example of a ratio supplying different results if you add the sums or sum the adds, I could understand, but this example makes me scratch my head.

A third example of misinformation is in the section on Calc scripts. They give you the following calc script in an example
Fix(@IDescendants(“Calendar Periods”))
“Gross Sales” = “Sales” – “Discounts”;
Endifix
While this calculation is not incorrect, It is no different than just running the calculation on the entire database. In the discussion on Fix, it is stated that items left out of a fix statement exclude them, in truth, dimensions left out of a fix statement are all included at all levels. Like the above, a lot of examples are not well thought out. For Sumrange, the use @Descendants(Products) Based on the outline example they give, you would be summing together multiple levels, parents and children. I doubt that would give the answer one would want. I thought it interesting that they showed examples of calculations, but never showed the starting point or the result. The book claims that after reading the chapter on calculations, you would not need to take a calculation course. I believe the opposite is the truth. After reading their explanations I would need a course more than ever. If I knew nothing about calc scripts, I would have come out of that chapter more confused than when I went in it.

I don’t remember a section on security and I was not impressed with the section on optimization. As you can tell by now, I was rather disappointed with the book. As I said earlier, I applaud the authors’ intentions but I think this book falls much too short to be useful.

Upcoming Webinar

On Tuesday August 18th (2009) I'll be giving the weekly interRel webinar. It will be on little known features of Essbase. IT is basically the same presentation as one I gave at Kaleidoscope in June. If you missed it then, try to attend this week. You can register for it at www.interrel.com
I was scheduled to repeat the webcast on Thurs Aug 20th, but I'll be unavailable, so my co-worker and friend Cameron Lackpour will be giving it then. Heck sign up for both and see who does it better. At any rate, I think it a worthwhile topic and everyone I know that has seen it has picked up a few tidbits (or more)

4th addendum to Data Export

Well, I guess the team at Oracle was listening to someone. I just looked at the release notes for EPM Fusion Edition 11.1.1.3 and there plain as day is the bug fix

Data Extraction. While exporting data to a relational database, DATAEXPORT does not create thedelimiters if there are one or more missing values in the last column. [8507606]

Another problem I was getting at a client was when I would remote onto a server using the consloe option, when I logged of the Essbase application would hang. That apparently has been fixed as well

Agent. When Essbase is running as a Windows service and the domain user logs off the machine,
the Essbase applications hang, which in turn causes Essbase Server to hang. [8279377, 8464004]


While I worked around both of these problems, Its nice to know I won't have to in the future

3rd addendum to DataExport

My last blog post talks about dropping columns when exporting to relational using the dataexport command.
I found the answer looking through the knowledgebase. Turns out you have to set
DEXPSQLROWSIZE 1 to get it to work. I don't know if I like tihs answer as it requires you to basically turn off bulk insersion, but at least it works and I can continue with my development withput having to asdd jexport to the mix.

2nd Addendum to Data Export

OK, I'm starting to see why people don't like Data Export. I'm trying to export a particular set of data to a relational table and for some reason, one of the dimensions is not showing up in the table. If I change the export to write to a file, the column is there. It is interesting that the order of the row members is different in the flat file than in the relational export. What appears to be happening is it is taking one of my two dense dimensions which shows up as the last row member before my data vailes in my flat file and is moving(or perhaps overlaying) what is my second row member in the flat file. I know that is clear as mud so to show you an example a row my flat file export looks like:

Actual,r1,aaa1,bbb1,ccc1,ddd1,eee1,Tier1,123456.789

In the relational it looks like:
Actual,Tier1,aaa1,bbb1,ccc1,ddd1,eee1,blank,123456.789

so it is shifting or overwriting the R1 with Tier1 and where tier1 should be is blank.

If anyone has figured a workaround for this other than to export to a file and load it into relational, let me know. In the meantime I'm opening a SR with Oracle and se eif they have a fix