Kaleidoscope

I’m sorry. I said I would be blogging about the conference each day to keep those of you how could not make it informed about what was going on. Frankly I’ve been so busy that I have not had the time to do it. Monday started with a genera session. During the session a couple of things were revealed. First, The location for the next Kaleidoscope. It will start June 26th in Long Beach Ca. Second, A new conference chair was announced. It is Edward Roske.  The Keynote speaker was Lee Rainie from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life project. I won’t go into the presentation itself, you can look at their web site to see statistics, but it was interesting as he showed a lot of technical trending.

I had the opening technical session of the conference with a session on MDX practical examples. While I think (hope) the presentation went well, I had so many good questions, I got off track at times and had to rush through the last part.

I ended up taking over one of Edward Roske’s presentations on ASO optimization so I spent an hour or so going over it the had lunch. The food was good,but crowded and a bit unorganized. First impression, not quite as good as last year. 

Since I’m on so little sleep, I’ll apologize for not saying more, I’ll TRY to do a recap of what I saw after the conference is over. 

Kaleidoscope Day 1

Welcome to Kaleidoscope 2010. I’ll try to blog about what is going on here for those of you who could not attend. It may be limited as I’ll be pretty busy. I’ve picked up a few more presentations and I have a lot of commitments during the week. This is Sunday, Day 1. I arrived yesterday with little problem. Taking the Metro to the hotel was easy if not crowded. I got my room at the Marriott. It is bigger than a small country(I think thanks to the number of nights I spend with them).

I’m sitting in the Sunday symposium hosted by oracle. There are about 150 people in the room. I have to say, I will not be saying much if anything about it. We have been cautioned we are not allowed to say anything about what is talked about today (aside from saying Edward’s shirt says he is a tasty villager). The whole day is on Oracle products and future and will be an interesting day.

Tomorrow (Monday) I have two presentations. MDX practical examples and ASO optimization (which I picked up at the last minutes). It will be a long night

ASO Outline Compaction

The other day Tim Tow on his blog talked about opening outlines and commented about how slow ASO outlines created in EIS or Essbase Studio were to open. 
http://timtows-hyperion-blog.blogspot.com/2010/06/essbase-outline-performance-testing.html

I've seen that and have a number of large outlines that don't seem to compact. I have one very similar to the zzzz application Tim talks about. sitting at about 122 meg. I tried to compact it and brought it down to 120 Meg. Still big and still slow to open. This is where OTN came to my rescue. There is a extension to Esscmd (yes Esscmd not MaxL) that calls the outline API. This is used by Oracle internal Quality Engeneering to test the API. On the page they have a PDF that explains how to compact an ASO outline. I tried it and my outline went down to 8K and opened in a few seconds. Simply amazing results.

I've sent this post to Tim and hopefully he will test his instance and will report on the results.

I guess I should tell you where to get this godsend. You can download it from  http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bi-foundation/esscmdq-sampleapps-093105.html?ssSourceSiteId=otnjp

 While not a supported application ,it does have versions for all of the platforms and for versions from 6 to 11.

Never listen to what people tell you (me included)

Ok, so do you believe me or not based on the title? Today I had another Homer Simson moment , you know D'oh. For years we have been talking about the config commands SSAUDIT and SSAUDITR and how they only work with the Classic Add-in. I'm sure I read it somewhere. Someone (Brian Suter) casually mentioned to me that they are using it with Smartview. That goes against what I had been told so I had to try it. Sure enough, SSAUDIT creates the files and writes to them if you do a submit from Smartview. I still don't know about from a planning form and I think I would use the transaction logging in 11X as it is most likely more robust. But it is nice to know that this actually works.

Moral - Never trust what people tell you or even what you read. Test it for yourself. I know of at least three incidents where the DBAG is just plain wrong of what it says and other places where information is omitted.

Data Export, why I never thought of it

All of the posts on OTN lately about the Export command got me thinking about something I found by accident (and should have realized all along). We all know if is possible to do a parallel export using the MaxL Export statement just by supplying multiple export file names separated by comas. I always write a script to do exports because it is quicker than exporting in a single file format from EAS.

 I thought it odd that EAS did not give you the option to do a parallel export. Stupid, stupid me. It does, it just does not slap you in the face being obvious to tell you. I expected a check box and a place to list each file name in it's own box. You know bells and whistles sort of stuff. No that would be too easy and intuitive. To do a parallel export from EAS you just list the export file names separated by comas (just like MaxL D'oh).


I selected export from Sample.Basic and entered sample.txt,sample1.txt and ran it. I then went to the file system and in \hyperion\products\essbase\essbaseserver\app (sheesh could they make the path longer please), I found Sample.txt with a size of 214 K and Sample1.txt with a size of 212 K. It couldn't have been easier. 

The moral of the story is, if you can do it in MaxL you can most likely do it elsewhere. Get creative and try.