Why I created a blog

Its been many years since I first created this blog. It has remained true to Essbase and related information over those years. Hopefully it has answered questions and given you insight over those years. I will continue to provide my observations and comments on the ever changing world of EPM. Don't be surprised if the scope of the blog changes and brings in other Hyperion topics.


Wednesday, April 26, 2023

Apparently 80 characters is not enough

Even I learn new things that are interesting, at least to me and a subset of the nerds. This is a post on something I find amusing and  others might as well.

 I'm working on a project at a client converting Essbase from 11.1.2.4 to 21c (21.4.2) and ran into something interesting. We were comparing aliases we were building in the two systems. In 21c the alias  names were longer than in 11g.   I figured it could be that they increased it a little, but when I looked at the admin guide I was amazed. For BOTH member names and aliases the limit has increased to 1024 characters. I would never want a name or alias that long, but if it floats your boat go for it. I could see an interesting use for it. For example, if I have a customer dimension, I could have a second alias table with  company name, address, phone number, contact person name. or a product dimension with details about the product. It certainly opens up new possibilities. 

I'm guessing this came from the work on federated partitions  on OCI Marketplace installs where Essbase can use an Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW) to build a cube with no data. The data is retrieved via SQL queries from the ADW when it is asked for. The cube structure is hybrid cubes.  Since the member names are sourced from ADW columns  it makes sense they would have to accommodate longer names

 We did notice another difference that could impact retrievals if using UDAs. UDAs in 11g are not allowed on shared members. Apparently in 21c that restriction is gone. It might be because 21c has a new concept of member IDs and a shared member would have the same member ID .

one last thing I noticed is filter names go to 256 characters  I'm sure there are more changes, but these are the ones that I thought interesting. .

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