Random thoughts

It's been a while since I entered anything on my blog, so I thought I would share some random items.

First, I spend a week at Oracle at an event called Xmonth which is a partner seminar. The 15 or so people in the seminar were given an overview of things to come and had a chance to play with some of the features of products. While Non-disclosure does not allow me to talk about it a lot, I will say that most of the Hyperion products are stategic in Oracle's future.

Second, I finally got out of the 18th century and joined linked-in. I did it to join the ODTUG Kaleidoscope group at http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1796201 I'm not sold on it. Its a fad like PCs and fire, but I look forward to seeing what it does for me.

Third, as I've mentioned before, I'm presenting at the Kaleidoscope conference on a session called little used features of Essbase. If there are particular features that you would like more detail on or think others would get benefit from knowing about, let me know, I'm putting together the full content now. I've spent enough time talking about the merits of this conference so I won't bore you more with it. If you want more information, look at the agenda at http://www.odtugkaleidoscope.com/

Finally, a little technical content.
I had a client create a small cube for some really quick analytics. It was a small cube, under 100 meg. I got a call that when they tried to export data out if it, it gave them an error. In sending me the log, it was actually throwing an exception and crashing. I looked through the log and quickly found the problem. They had defined all of the dimensions as sparse. I replicated the problem on my system and sure enough, it crashed also. So it appears in order to export data, you have to have at least one dense dimension. We talk about tiny blocks if you make everything sparse, well, here is a real reason not to.

I've also ben playing with Smartview in EPM Fsuion Edtion 11.1.1 and while I have been an Essbase Add-in bigot, I have to say the enhancements they have made with the later versions makes me want to use it more. If they could get substitution variables, the ability to have both member names and alias and for it to allow the use of multiple alias tables at once, I would probably completely convert to smartview. Oh, I would like HFM to be part of the common provider. I believe that is coming. There are some really cool things like multiple retrievals on one sheet, the ability to create slices and even more use the slices to crate reports with grids, tables and graphs makes smartview my choice for a lot of quick reporting. I also like that you can pull in Planning forms and use them. The next version will have more functionality, but you will have to wait until Oracle tells you about it. But just wait it's cool