Kaleidoscope revisited

With Kaleidoscope less than a month away, I sent in my presentation on little used features of Essbase. I think there is some cool stuff in it. At least I was impressed with some of the things I found. As a preview, I talk a lot about load rules and things I never used in them, the expanded role of substitution variables in newer versions, Triggers, Query logging and much more. I'm excited to give the presentation as I think it has information anyone can use. I think, I may end up doing a second presentation for a presenter that can't attend, but that is still in flux right now, so I won't comment on it more. After Kaleidoscope, I'll post sections of my presentations here for those who could not attend. But it's not the same as hearing it in person. For one, you don't get my dry humor (ok, attempt at humor) or my enthusiasm

Speaking of attendance, if you are still on the fence about going, I would recommend it (as I have in the past). I've seen some of the presentations and they are awesome. They are technical with things that developers and advanced users need. For a couple of more days, you can use the code IRC (interRel consulting) to get the early discount. But I think it expires on June 2nd. Last year I paid for the conference myself and it was worth it. Take vacation if you have to in order to attend. It's better than any single training you can go to.

I hope to see you there. If you are introduce yourself or if I know you and you are not avoiding me, say hi.

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

Update on report script commands and more on ODTUG

I was looking through the tech reference the other day (9X) for something and noticed a couple of report writer commands that I had not seen before. They deal with using aliases or member names. AS you might remember we used to use {OUTMBRALT}, {OUTALTMBR}, {OUTALT}, {OUTALTNAMES}, OR {OUTMBRNAMES} sometimes with little success. You had to place one of these commands before the dimension you were defining in the report and change it before the next command if you wanted something different for the next dimension.

When they added duplicate member names, they created new commands
<REPMBR , <REPALIAS, <REPMBRALIAS, and <REPALIASMBR
They offer more flexabilitiy than the old commands. You can dfine multipe dimensions at once that share the same attribute.

For example if you want aliases for Product and Market you would specify
%lt;RepAlias "Product" "Market"

It should be noted you can't use these commands mixed with the old commands (exception bing to select the alias table <OutAltSelect) and you can't use them if you are using rename functions. There are additional commands to get fully qualified names, but by looking the above up in the tech reference you should be able to find them.

You may nave noticed I've been posting a lot about the ODTUG conference. I had a comment about me being crazy(well not as nicely put as that) to suggest that people pay for it themselves if their company won't. I really believe this conference adds so much value and knowledge that it is worth it. I paid my own way last year and would again if my boss were not so supportive. (an amazing compliment. Edward, don't get used to it)
If you need rational to present to your boss to compel him/her to let you go, I suggest looking at Gary Crisi's blog entry. http://garycris.blogspot.com/2009/02/some-tips-for-kaleidoscope-2009.html He has great tips on how to get this conference approved in these tight times.

Exciting news about the ODTUG Kaleidoscope Conference

I just got word that the ODTUG Kelidoscope has confirmed John Kopke for it's Keynote address and Robert Gersten for the Sunday Hyperion Symposium Keynote. In addition, there are hands on sessions planned for OBIEE, ODI, Essbase Studio and Creating your first Java Essbase application. (Standard disclaimer, this is all subject to change). I believe there will also be a "Midnight Madness" for old people (it starts at 8:00 pm.) where you can bring your tough questions to the Essbase Aces and get them answered.

While I realize budgets have been cut this year in many organizations, this is such a good conference with so much in-depth information, it is something you should not miss even if you pay for it yourself. All the cool nerds will be there including all of the Oracle Ace and Ace Directors in the BI space. Last year we were a minority of the coference with one track, this year there will be four tracks including the hands on. You could not pay and get this much training in one week.

While this might sound like an ad, and is some ways it is, if I did not believe this is the best technical Hyperion based conference to go to, I would not be talking about it.

Blog Rant

I apologize in advance if this entry into my blog offends anyone, but today I want to talk about a pet peeve of mine. As most of you know I am a frequent contributor to the Oracle and other forums. There have been multiple threads with a common theme.” I know nothing about Essbase, how do I get certified?” In addition, I’ve looked at web casts and other web sites that help you with the certification questions. One went so far to say “We know our questions and answers are good, we buy them from the internet”. They are willing to teach you, not how to use Hyperion products, but how to pass the test. I will admit they have a disclaimer that passing the test is no substitute for experience. If you don't know anything about the product you should not be certified.

Certification means nothing without experience, so what that I can memorize the formula for computing block size, unless I know how to apply it and the implications of the block size on performance, it means nothing for my clients. Diluting the pool of certified professionals just cheapens the value of certification. I have interviewed (and worked with) certified people who could not answer the most basic questions and have wasted so much client time and money. In some cases, people have gotten jobs (permanent or consulting) from being certified, Did they last long? In most cases NO. So they got paid for a short time, don’t have a reference and leave behind unhappy and upset clients. It makes it harder to get the next job.

I realize that some people get certified because their company wants them to. I’ll admit, that is why I got my latest certification, but I have the experience and knowledge to back it up. Can you say the same thing?

Don’t get certified for the wrong reasons, get it because you know and understand the product(s) and can truly be a help to the client(s) you serve.

Please, I’m interested in your comments, Tell me why I’m wrong!

Varied topics

It’s been a little while since I’ve written anything; I’ve just gotten bogged down in actually doing work. That is what happens when you start a new job and go to a new client. There are a few things I'd like to discuss.

First, I would like to congratulate Tracy McMullen from interRel on becoming an Oracle Ace Director. It requires a lot of work and she deserves it. For those of you who don’t know, There are two types of Oracle Aces. The standard Ace and Ace Directors. Oracle Aces are nominated for their work helping others and willingness to share their knowledge. Oracle Ace Directors are those people who go beyond what an Ace does and truly evangelize Oracle products. Being an Ace director also requires additional work doing presentations, attending events and many more things. While you don’t have to do much as an ACE, you have to commit time (actually sign an agreement) to what you will do as a Director. Tracy jumped over the Oracle Ace level and was honored as an Ace Director for all of her past and future work. I’m sure Tracy is up to the challenge, so I am glad she was bestowed this honor.

Second, I’ve been on the committee putting together the ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference this year. It will be bigger and better than last year. In addition to Essbase topics, we will have sessions on other Hyperion applications, reporting tool and even hands on labs for things like Essbase Studio, OBIEE+ and Java. While there might be changes(standard disclaimer) you can see the schedule on Tim Tow’s Essbase Blog http://timtows-hyperion-blog.blogspot.com/2008/12/tentative-odtug-hyperion-schedule.html If you attend no other conference this year, be sure to attend this one. It is completely technical in nature and you are constantly learning. I learned a lot last year and expect to get a lot out of this year’s conference as well. It's much cheaper than training classes and you learn so much more than the basics you get from a class.

Third, when I started my blog this last spring, there were not a lot of other blogs out there dealing with Essbase topics, but I’ve been looking around the web community and am amazed at the number of new Essbase related blogs that have popped up. There are a lot of people putting out quality information. I’ve read about ODI, OBIEE, EPM Fusion Edition 11.1.1 (.1), tuning tips, MDX formulas and so much more. There are a few links to other blogs here on my site, and each of these blogs has links to other great blogs. Spend a few minutes and you’ll be amazed at how much you can find.

Now onto some more technical stuff. I recently have been working with a couple of other skilled consultants and we were running into a problem with a dimension build (Parent/Child) coming out very funky. At first we were doing it from SQL and it seemed to work fine, but when we BCP’ed the dimension data to a flat file and tried to run it, we got the outline not building the dimension properly. It took a while to figure it out. Turns out the alias column for one member had nothing but a space in it. This caused problems. In our case it was easy to change the view we were pulling from to substitute the member name where the alias was a space, but it was odd that from SQL it was ok and from a flat file it wasn’t. As another workaround, I guess in the rules file we could have replaced space with a character selecting all occurrences, then replace the character with nothing matching whole word only and finally replacing the character with a space for all occurrences. It sounds like a lot of work sometimes is necessary. A similar thing can be done to replace a null column with a default value.

A new beginning

Although most of my entries have been technical in nature, I depart a bit in this one to give some personal news. I have accepted a new position as a consultant with interRel consulting and start Friday Oct 24th (2008 for those of you like to look through really old blogs). While I enjoyed working with those that became really good friends at Narratus Solutions; after all I only worked with them for 17 years, it was time for a change. I am excited about my new position and a bit apprehensive as interRel has some of the brightest and most knowledgeable Oracle BI (Hyperion BI) consultants around. This is really good for all of you because I can share new things I learn. The one thing I have learned over the years working with Essbase is no matter how much you know, there are always things you don’t know. As I go forward in my career, I find that the more I learn, the less I know. It really is amazing how much they have packed into the applications now.

While I don’t answer technical questions sent to my email as I prefer you post your questions to the Oracle Forum http://forums.oracle.com/forums/category.jspa?categoryID=145, if you need to contact me about business or personal matters, I can now be emailed at Gschwartzberg@interrel.com

I’ve been told, I should to blog( I was encouraged to increase my blogging) and am even allowed to flame Edward Roske once in a while (Relax Edward, I won’t do it more than once an entry). Some of the interRel people have even offered me bonuses if I do. I think I’m going to like it here.

Let the journey begin