Time for a quick Quiz

I finished up presenting three sessions at the DOUG semminar in Dallas on Tuesday and my voice is shot.I talk way too much.  I was amazed at how many people were there. I'll guess over 100 just to hear me talk. Well actually to hear Edward Roske, Tracy McMullen and me talk. The biggest draw was Tracy's track on OBIEE. It seems to be the hot ticket right now. In all I think it was a very good day and people got a lot out of it. I only stayed for a little of the Rangers/Yankee game that followed the session as I had a long drive back to Austin. Thank you interRel for hosting the event. (Is this a shameless plug for the company or me just being nice?)

It has ben a while since I have done one of my quizes so I thought I would give you an easy one.
Bob is a real zero in life, but he does not like missing anything.. He loves the little round orbs that are nothing. But when he tries in smartview 11 to have his missing values display as zeros he has problems. Can you tell Bob  two ways (without doing find and replace) that he can have true numeric zeros in a smartview retrieve. As added bonuses
How he can take non-numeric data in Excel and show it in formulas as a zero without using an "IF" statement
Second Bonus, How can you have the classic Add-in return numeric zeros.
Third bonus, Why can this be a bad thing?

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.

Kaleidoscope changes

For those of you are my groupies (I guess the whole post is for Cameron) and signed up for all my presentations at Kaleidoscope, I have a change for you. Edward Roske and I switched a session. I will now be presenting "Essbase Studio Tips and tricks" on Wed at 9:45 and Edward will be presenting "Configure it out" on Thursday at 9:45. All of you Roske groupies can change your schedule to listen to his dry sense of humor. The switch made sense to us, I'm almost done putting together the presentation and I think it has some good content. A word of warning, if you read the abstract on the the Kaleidoscope website you will get a little confused. They did a good job of updating who the presenters are, but in the abstract is still says Edward is presenting.

Wow, after my initial posting, I found that I've been added to another session. This time with Edward Roske and Tracy McMullen. It is on Tuesday at 9:45 and is called "Ask interRel's gurus, More fun that a barrel of monkeys".So for this session you don't have to choose between Edward and me. Actually if it works like normal, Tracy will answer the questions and Edward and I will make snide or off topic comments. What I want to know is how fun is a barrel of monkeys? One would think they would get rather annoyed being packed together. I do think it will be interesting, we never know what will happen. I typically end up learning new things at these sessions from the audience.

Cameron on his blog has posted the sunday symposium and it looks like the topics are interesting and meaningful. I am anxiously waiting to see what is new, exciting and on the roadmap.  You can find the agenda here at http://camerons-blog-for-essbase-hackers.blogspot.com/2010/05/kalidoscope-2010-symposium-agenda-is_18.html

If you are not signed up to go, what are you waiting for? If you miss this conference, you miss so many technical presentations that you will fall behind. I would say this is where all the cool kids will be, but to be more accurate, this is where all the geeks  and nerds will be. (I'm proud to be a geek or is it a nerd?). All of the Oracle Aces in BI except for John Goodwin will be there presenting. I'm still hoping John comes out. If he does, he will get very drunk as a lot of us owe him drinks for help in one thing or another.

I'm not sure anyone ever notices it, but I think the coolest thing on my blog is the useless knowledge box that appears on the lower right hand side, you might need to scroll down to see it. I come to my blog just to see the trivia. Of course some people say my whole blog is useless knowledge, but that is a different story