Exalytics X5-4 Fast and Furious

I love going to KScope because I learn about new features and products. This event was no different. In the Sunday symposiums with Oracle there was a discussion on the new Exalytics X5-4. It was only Sept last year at Open World when the X4-4  was announced . Edward Roske talks about it in his Blog. It was a big deal then. With the introduction of the X5-4 only 9 months later it becomes even bigger, better and “Badder”. With the X5-4 we go to a max of 72 cores, up from 60 and more memory. In addition to more cores, the X5-4 supports a new NvMe High bandwidth flash technology that improves throughput by 2.5 times. I won’t bore you with the details if you want to read about them , here are the specs

To me the most remarkable thing about this is you get more and the price has not increased. All of the way back to the X3-4 the price has remained the same. With a list price of $175K it is what I consider cheap.

As John Booth mentions in his Blog, you can get this as an X5-2 configuration as well offering additional flexibility. Note I had a correction from John. The X5-2 was more a wish from him than a reality. While you could create a X5-2 using sub-capacity licensing, you are still paying for the physical cores (Thanks Steve Libermensch for that clarification)

For us in EPM it keeps getting better and better.

Essbase Studio 11.1.2.4.002 patch

Well, I survived KScope. It was a very good event with participants getting over 175 sessions related to EPM/BI.  I sat in a number of sessions and was impressed with the quality of the speakers and presentations.  I also had the opportunity to speak in 4 sessions and I think they went pretty well, at least from the questions people asked.

Patch 11.1.2.4.002 came out the other day and I read through the readme file. There were only two changes and one document change. 

The first bug fix relates to a problem with stored dimensions (I assume ASO) where it would not let you use external consolidation operators. 

The documentation change fixes the statement that you can drill through on any level of a hierarchy including the top level. That is incorrect, you can’t drill through from the top member of the hierarchy (The dimension name).

The most intersting bug fix is the second one and I’m surprised they are calling it a bug as it used to be described as a limitation. When doing a drill through report on a recursive hierarchy, the drill through would fail with an error message if there were more than 1000 level 0 members returned in the query.  For recursive queries, Essbase Studio created an IN clause with the list of level zero members under the selected member. The 1000 member list was a limitation for Oracle as that is the maximum number of members allowed in an In clause. I’ve not been able to test this yet and wonder how development got around that limitation.

I guess the moral of the story is , even if something is listed as a product limitation, still submit bug and enhancement requests and it is very possible what you need will be changed.