It is rare that I have multiple blog posts in a single day, but I am so excited to see this come out. Smartview 11.1.2.102 is available as a patch set on Support.oracle.com. Big deal you say, its just another patch! Oh how wrong you are my friends. This is the patch of all patches. The patch we have been waiting our collective lives for.  Why, because it makes Smartview act and behave like the Essbase add-in and more.

The first thing that I consider a fix is you can no do a submit data without first refreshing the sheet if you make changes to it. Second, we have all checked the “Use Excel formatting” option only to find the formatting disappears if we zoom in or pivot. Well, now it really does work. and it works in two ways. If checked, it leaves the excel formatting completely alone. For example, if you highlight cell C3 as red, and you pivot a page member to a row, cell C3 will still be red.  But the Smartview team has figured how to set it so if you zoom in, the formatting gets carried along with the zoom in. Very nice!!

But that is just the beginning. Here are some of my favorite new things. (note, I’m writing this from my experience with the Beta, some features in the final version may not have been implemented exactly as I describe them. Since this patch came out, I’ve not had time to install and test it)

Items that are now in Parity with the Add-in

1. You can select multiple members to do Ad Hoc operations on at one time (zoom in, zoom out, Keep only, remove only). This is not limited to just row or column member, you can select both at the same time

2. Support for LROs and Linked Partitions.

3. Aliases. There are two items here. first, you can have both the member name and aliases on rows in the report and second and one of my favorites, if you use an alias from an alias table that is not active, Smartview now understands it and returns the member name or alias for the active alias table (depending on what you have your options set to)

4. SHEET LEVEL OPTIONS are back!!!!!!!!! All options are defined as sheet level options and are stored with the sheet. that means you no longer have to worry about what happens if you change options and then do a retrieve on a different sheet. Also, There is now a dropdown on the options dialog so when you change your options, you can set a default set. This default set is used when new sheets are created.

5. All of the zoom options that you know and love in the add-in are now available. They are also on the ribbon bar as a dropdown on zoom in so you can select the zoom level/type you want to do.

6. Formula preservation and Formula fill are working like they should and then some. In the add in, if you pivoted in the add in you would lose the formulas. In this release, in most cases, the formulas are preserved. They may no longer be accurate based on what you did, but they will be there.

7. While the new features document does not talk about it, I believe range retrievals are back. You can highlight an area of a report and as long as al of the dimensions are represented , you can retrieve just that part of the report

New and enhanced items.

While the above items allow for Parity, the Smartview team was not satisfied with just making things the same. In a number of areas, the went miles beyond what the Add in could do. Here are some of the things.

1. You can have multiple grids on a single sheet. Remember the old message “Multiple grids on a single sheet are not supported at this time” Well the time has come and that message can now be archived forever. You can set up multiple connections to the same or different databases and do a refresh and they all update. I had 4 different reports on a single sheet and they all pulled data properly.

2. Butterfly and reverse formatted reports are now available. A butterfly report is where member names are in the middle with number on each side (as shown below. Note, the numbers are not from sample basic. I made then up to show a report sample)

You can also do a reverse report where the member names follow the data values

3. While 11.1.2.1 allowed you to hide the POV, in this new version, you actually are not hiding it, but putting it onto the sheet. In this new version, the POV members are stored on the sheet in row 1 (or wherever you designate them to be. When you enable the POV, it hides the row on the sheet. Changing the member names on the sheet or in the POV bar affects both locations. Another nice feature with the POV is you can type in member names directly if you know them. (it was actually introduced in 11.1.2.1)

4. A Member information button has been added to the ribbon bar. From this you can get almost all of the information about a member such as generation and level, consolidation properties, aliases, attribute associations, formulas, comments and UDAs.

5. within the Smartview connection information dialog, new functionality has been included. for multiple grids on a single sheet, you can delete the connection info (currently the only way to reset multiple connections) and also copy off the connection into to a sheet to send to someone if you are having issues with your retrievals so they know what you are connected to.

6. A host of new VBA toolkit functions have been added. The development team asked what APIs people are using and turned most of them into toolkit macros. This is very handy so you don’t need to code to the API any more, you can do it all with macros.

as with any release, there are disclaimers and this is no exception. In the new features document is the following

Unless otherwise noted, the features described here are available only in Smart View 11.1.2.1.102 connected to Oracle Essbase 11.1.2.1.102 through Oracle Hyperion Provider Services 11.1.2.1.102. They are not available in other releases of Smart View, Essbase, or Provider Services. They are not available in data providers other than Essbase.

This means that you have to install the patches for Smartview, APS and Essbase to take advantage of the features. You can use this version of Smartview with older versions of APS but won’t have the new features available.

AS for upgrades, here is what the support matrix says

You can upgrade to Smart View Release 11.1.2.1.102 from the following releases:

I am truly excited about this release. It gives us things we have been asking for in the add in for a long time and now puts Smartview ahead of the add in in functionality.    

I should also note, Cameron Lackpour has posted on his blog an Oracle presentation you can attend to see the new features demonstrated. Read about it here

I attended the Hyperion SIG meeting today (Sunday) at Oracle Open World and heard something that made my heart race. There on a slide on Major announcements for this year was the announcement of a new BI machine I believe the name was Exalytics. Larry is supposed to have details in his keynote, but this is exciting. From the short announcement, it sounded like a machine designed/optimized and integrated for optimal BI performance. There could be huge performance improvements from a standard install. It follows the Exadata and Exalogic machines from past years.

Two other announcements were:

Financial Management Analytics. This is OBIEE based real time analysis from HFM

sustainability Reporting Starter Kit. Again this goes against HFM. It is built on the GRI framework.

I don’t have much information on any of these, but I’ll blog the details when I know more.

With apologies to Katy Perry for the title. (My daughter would be amazed I actually know who Katy Perry is, but that’s a different story); I got my first look at the actual Exalytics machine. Well a sample box. and here is what it looks like. I would love to get my hands on one and try some client applications on it. I am going to two sessions today that give more details of the machine. Stay tuned!!!!

I’m sitting at the SFO airport waiting for an 11pm flight home after a looooong 9 days in San Francisco for the Oracle Ace Directors meeting and Oracle Open World. From my earlier blogs, you should surely have seen the announcement of the Exlytic machine so I won’t repeat it here. I sat through a lot of sessions, most on stragetic direction and/or roadmap. They seemed to blur together as the slides overlapped in many of them. There was talk of many enhancements and potential new products. I say potential because until I have my fat little hands on them, they are just a dream to me.

Interestingly, I think the best sessions of the conference were today (Thursday) when most people had packed up and gone home. I sat through a session on Fusion Apps and EPM and the voice in that session was how important Essbase and the Hyperion applications are to Fusion apps. As others have reported, Essbase is the engine beneath many of the apps and the apps have been designed to integrate seamlessly with Planning, HFM, Financial Close and other applications. Since Fusion apps have now been released, we should quickly see how they work. 

I next sat through a Smart View session and saw interesting things they are for HFM and  what they are working on for Essbase. For OFA customers who are switching to Essbase, there will be (insert standard disclaimer here) a new “Set” retrieval that looks like the OFA retrieves.

I ended the day going to the “It’s a wrap” party where I listened to Berlin for a while, then went and got one of my favorite dinners. There is a restaurant in SF called Cioppinos that of course serves the fish stew cioppino. It was a great way to end my time in SF.

I was at a client and needed to do some currency conversion for an application I was writing (BSO). In their case they had over 50 different currencies they would need to convert to USD (and only to USD). Their requirement was no maintenance to the calc scripts would be necessary if a new currency was added. The build of the currency dimension and loading of currency rates was automated in earlier versions of the project.  I got to thinking about the possibilities and the first thing that came to mind was to parse out a UDA and use it in my script. But alas, there is no function to do that. One idea down.

Next, I thought about an external table where I could pass a cost center number and pull in the currency rate for it. I would need a Custom Defined Function (CDF) to do this. This was a possible solution as my cube is built from Essbase Studio and I could write a SQL query to get the currency for any cost center and link that to the currency table to pull in the rate. Sadly, the client did not want to use CDFs in their environment. Plus, I don’t have one written to do that and am unsure of the speed as I have about 20k cost centers it would have to work against.

So finally, I thought of attribute dimensions. The client is on 11.1.2.1 and I remembered seeing some new attribute functions recently, I don’t remember what version but I think it was 11.1.1.1. So I looked through the tech reference and there was what I was looking for. @AttributeSVal. The function returns the string attribute value for the selected member. So I started experimenting.

First a little background. My cube has the following dimensions

Accounts – This is a standard account structure. It contains a balance sheet and multiple versions of a P&L. Each account is tagged with the type of rate it uses for conversion as a UDA (AVG or EOM).  It also has a section for statistical accounts. Included in this section buried are Average_rate, and EOM_Rate. (and a couple of others)

Periods – nothing special here, periods rolling to quarters

Years – just a list of years. Nothing special

Currency – This dimension has two parts. First are two members USD and Local. Data is loaded in as local and has to be converted to USD.  The second part of this dimension contains all of the currency codes used in the system

Scenario – again nothing  Actual and multiple forecast members.There are also some calculated members in this.

Organization. This is their entity structure. I won’t bore you with the structure, but the bottom level is cost center and this is where currency conversion needs to be done.

Products –again nothing special, This is a typical product hierarchy.

To this I added a new attribute dimension called Cost Center_Currency - It had the same members as are in the second part of the currency dimension (all the currency codes) but to make the member names unique, I prefixed them with the three letters “CUR” For example “USD” would be “CURUSD” and “EUR” would be “CUREUR”. I then associated this attribute dimension with the Organization dimension and wrote a quick load rule to populate the associations between cost center and the attribute dimension. I made sure if any cost center was missing an attribute member, I defaulted it to CURUSD. I figured is there was no currency conversion USD was always set to 1 anyway.No harm, no foul.

Now for the fun part, creating the calc script. I won’t bore you with the set statements or aggregations, etc, but just the currency conversion part. I’ll warn you at this point, I have changed the dimensions from the client to make it  generic and am not cutting and pasting code but typing it in by hand, so there could be minor typos in it. 

First a fix statement. I need to make sure I am at level zero Organization and other dimensions. I use substitution variables for the year and period I am going to calculate. I am going to replicate the script so I have different versions for Actual and forecast (I use different budget rates for forecasts).  Also note if the account does not have a UDA then I assume it is not convertible and make USD equal to Local. (This is because there are some non monetary items in the account structure).  Product has multiple rollups so I only grab the primary one and I only want the income statement and Balance sheet from Accounts.

Fix(&Year,&Per,Actual,@LEVMBRS(“Organization”,0),@relative(“All products”,0),@relative(“Income Statement”,0), @relative(“Balance Sheet”,0))

“USD(

IF (@ISUDA(“Accounts”,”AVG”)

“USD” = Local * @MEMBER(@SUBSTRING(@ATTRIBUTESVAL(“CostCenter_Currency”),3))->”No product”->”No Organization”->”Average_Rate”;

ElseIF (@ISUDA(“Accounts”,”EOM”)

“USD” = Local * @MEMBER(@SUBSTRING(@ATTRIBUTESVAL(“CostCenter_Currency”),3))->”No product”->”No Organization”->”EOM_Rate”;

ELSE

“USD” = “Local”;

END

)

EndFIX

So what does this do. First, I check to see what rate to use.(the IF statement). Next, I am getting the local value for each account. The

@MEMBER(@SUBSTRING(@ATTRIBUTESVAL(“CostCenter_Currency”),3))

is taking the value of the attribute dimension for the cost center we are working on and getting a substring of it starting in column 3. (remember when we created the dimension we added a prefix CUR to be beginning of the actual currencies).  Once we have the currency code back, it is returned as a string, so using @member we turn it back into a member name.  I then am using the cross dimension operators to define the intersections in the other dimensions where rates are stored.

The one issue I has was I forgot to tag my “No organization” member with an attribute value at first. When it got to that member, it crashed the calculation.

There you have it, a dynamic calc script to calculate currency conversion that does not need to be maintained. In my case, the dimensions were not huge so it ran pretty quick. I did find if I added dimensions to the cube, it slowed down considerably. I think the best use of this type of code would be in a business rule where you are fixing on one or a few cost centers but it could be used on bigger sets of data as well.

In September, Smart View patch 11.1.2.1.102 was released which gave us parity with the Excel Add-in. While it is great, I was informed by a colleague that there is a newer version of the patch available. I checked on Oracle support and sure enough, there is now 11.1.2.1.103 available. It is only for Smart View, there don’t appear to be equivalent patches for Essbase, APS or any other  products. Below are the fixes in this patch. If you go to the support site and look up the patch, there are also known issues that are worth looking at. 

• 6928106

General: Smart View cannot display member names and their aliases at the same time.

• 12828079

General: When Smart View is enabled in PowerPoint, images are displayed as blanks during Slide Shows.

• 12858015

General: When you perform web launch from Financial Reporting with a report that has multiple members in the POV, the POV selection is lost in Smart View.

• 12896500

General: If Smart View is located in a different directory from that specified in the server, Excel may terminate abruptly with this runtime error: "Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library…"

• 12957863

General: When you to open or save a Smart View Excel file, you may get this message: "Microsoft Office Excel experienced a serious problem with the 'oracle hyperion smart view for office, fusion edition' add-in. If you have seen this message multiple times, you should disable this add-in and check to see if an update is available. Do you want to disable this add-in?"

• 11779755

Essbase: When you change the POV, you may get this error: “Invalid start location.”

• 12918727

Essbase: If you are connected to a non-unique Essbase outline from a multiple-grid worksheet, you may get this error: "Invalid spread sheet data. An application protocol error might exist between server and client processes."

• 13242869

Essbase: When the Use Excel Formatting option is selected, cells that contain formulas may display the formulas rather than data after you refresh. In addition, cell formatting may change from general to text.

• 12854000

Planning: In the Smart View Panel, Planning folders and forms are not displayed the same order that they are in Planning. Instead, they are displayed in alphabetical order.

• 12902911

Planning: In ad hoc grids, cross-worksheet references in formulas do not work; the formula itself is displayed in the cell rather than the contents of the cell referenced.

• 12908185

Planning: When you search for members using the drop-down menus in the Page section of a Planning data form, Smart View may take an inordinate amount of time to return the members.

• 13001747

Planning: When you try to open Smart View from within Planning, you receive a Microsoft Excel error.

• 13253314

Planning: If the first worksheet of a composite form contains a formula, you cannot submit data from the other worksheets in the composite form.

• 13403509

Planning: After refreshing, column widths are reset even if Adjust Column Width is selected.

• 13419370

Planning: The"The form contains unsaved data." warning mesage is not displayed when you refresh a composite form.

• 13255112

Financial Management: Excel files in which Smart View is enabled may take a long time to open.

• 13401856

Financial Management: If "Member Name and Description" is selected as a member name display option, Smart View only displays only the description.

• 12559490

Reporting and Analysis: When you attempt to export a Financial Reporting query-ready report to Smart View, you get an error.

• 12982945

Reporting and Analysis: When you import a functional grid from Financial Reporting into Smart View, the formatting may be lost.

• 13093388

Reporting and Analysis: After you upgrade to Smart View 11.1.2.1.102, Excel may not launch.

• 13365904

Reporting and Analysis: After you upgrade to Smart View 11.1.2.1.102, Excel may terminate abruptly.

There are a lot of things going on and I thought I would let you know about them. First, I’ll be speaking at a Hyperion Solutions Roadshow  with the ever amusing Edward Roske on Jan 24th in Denver. I’m also excited that Toufic Wakim will be giving the keynote. Aside from being a heck of a nice guy and a great speaker, he actually knows what he is talking about and can give great insight into the Hyperion products.  It is at the Hyatt Regency downtown. To see the sessions click here To register for it click here (note: you must register with a company email address)

Second, In on February 14th at 12 noon (Easter time), I will be in a loving mood and will be presenting a webcast for both interRel and ODTUG.It is titled is MDX Practical Examples.  Note, it will be repeated as an interRel webcast on Thursday Feb 16th. The abstract for it is:  

MDX is the direction of the future, but how do you actually code in it? Join Oracle Ace Director Glenn Schwartzberg as he walks through some of the basics of using  MDX in Essbase. This session is peppered with real world examples of how you do multiple cross joins (and why), the syntax for getting descendants, the first child and what you can do in MDX that you can’t do  in Calc scripts. The list goes on and on. This session is a must attend for those who are getting started with ASO cubes and MDX and provides tips and tricks for those who have already been using MDX. To register for the webcast, go here.

Next, If you are in the Dallas Area, or plan to be there on Thursday February 23rd, the ODTUG Hyperion SIG is putting on a half day mini-conference at the ballpark in Arlington. While the agenda is not set yet, you can reserve a spot by going here. There is supposed to be a sister event in Atlanta. I believe the date will be Friday, February 17th, but I don’t have information on it to share with you yet. When I do, I‘ll post another blog entry.

I’m not sure where I’ll be or what I’ll be presenting in March, but in April, I am doing a couple of sessions at the Collaborate conference. in Las Vegas and of course, in June, I’ll be presenting at the Kscope 12 conference. I’ll put more information out on those later.

Of course, while I’m not doing most of them, the interRel webcast series is in full swing with a series on HFM, FDM and the related components. To get a list of them, contact Danielle White at dwhite@interrel.com

I don’t want you to miss out as there is still time to register for the ODTUG Hyperion SIG mini-conference in Arlington, Tx  on Thursday, February 23th. It will be at Ranger stadium and promises to be a great event.  The agenda and registration is available at HERE,  The keynote  is being given by Floyd Conrad  from Oracle and is entitled The Future of Oracle EPM and Beyond. There are at least 4 Oracle Ace directors that will be there giving sessions. Where else can you get a keynote and sessions like that for FREE!

I’ve heard serious rumor that there will be a similar event in Atlanta on March 20th, but it is not confirmed yet. I’ll get you details once I know more.

I just got back from the first ODTUG Hyperion SIG User Group Conference and am happy to report it was a roaring success.  There was great attendance and aside from mine fantastic sessions. Floyd Conrad  from Oracle gave a great keynote, I won’t repeat what he said here for two reasons. First there was a safe harbor statement in it and second, I actually missed it. I was doing a webcast at the time.

The conference got great support from Applied OLAP, US Analytics, Linium, and interRel. 4 different Oracle Ace directors, Tim Tow, Eric Helmer, Edward Roske were there presenting as well as others. On top of that the refreshments were really yummy  and give-a-ways were good. Unfortunately, I didn’t win the free pass to KScope12.

Below is Alice Lawrence Hyperion SIG president and conference chair beaming about the successful birth of this baby. She should be very proud of this first SIG sponsored event.

I wish I took more pictures, but completely forgot until it was too late.

I look forward to the next event. Unfortunately, the March meeting in Atlanta had to be postponed till a later time. I’ll keep you posted when I know more about when it will be. 

While I am not the first to notice this, the 11.1.2.2 documentation is now on the web. For how long I don’t know as it was pulled once before. You can get to it from http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26232_01/index.htm

With the documentation out, the release can’t be far behind. I’ll be looking through it and highlighting some of the cool new items soon.

Update, I found out yesterday the software for Essbase is available as a patch. Go to Support.Oracle.com, log in and go to patches and updates.

Search on the product family Hyperion Essbase and version 11.1.2.1 and you will see

I almost have the changes for the Essbase Studio book done, so it will be available for 11.1.2.2 soon as well.

I find it interesting that they just released the Essbase/Essbase Studio and supporting items (shared Services, EAS) but not Planning, FHM or other products all together. I think that This was holding up the release of Exalytics so they released this now. OBI was released last week so everything is in place for Exalogic.

Stay tuned

You are probably getting tired of me writing about KScope, and in some ways I don’t blame you. But there are a few things I wanted to let you know about.

First, I wrote a blog entry for ODTUG about the Essbase Beginner’s track and I wanted to remind you all about it. Rather than repeat it here, you can view the entry  Here.

Second, I warned you. The J.W. Marriott is full, not to worry, KScope has set up an alternate hotel (another Marriott) at the riverwalk. There will be shuttles to and from the conference, so not to worry.

Third (and fourth), for the more experienced KScope attendees, there are two programs I want to let you know about: the mentor program and ambassadors. Mentors are seasoned Kscope attendees who volunteer to get paired up with first time attendees to help them get into the flow of thing, choose sessions, offer support, etc. While it does not take a lot of time, it really helps the new attendees. To sign up to be a mentor, just go the the KScope registration page , sign in and update your profile saying you want to be a mentor. Conversely, if you are new, and want to be mentored, you can sign up for that as well there.

Next is the ambassador program something to help out at the conference. Again, it does not take a lot of time or energy. An Ambassador helps the speaker with things like passing out evaluations (Yes we are going back to paper evaluations this year), counts number of attendees, keeps the speaker on time (A hard task for my ambassadors) and collects the evals. Since you will be attending the sessions anyway, it's a no brainer to be the ambassador for a few of them. In years past, you got nifty pins and fun stuff for being an ambassador as well as a special reception. Sign ups to be an ambassador will begin next month, so keep an eye out for the announcement. You can actually go onto your schedule and sign up there.

I am anxiously awaiting another new book to review. This time for experienced Hyperion users. As soon as I have had a chance to get my dirty little mitts on it, I’ll let you know what I think. It you want to know more about it, you can see it at Cameron Lackpour's blog

There are a few things I want to tell you about today associated with both the KScope12 conference and the Hyperion SIG.

First, If you have not registered for the most awesome conference ever, time is running out. The discounts are expiring on June 9th. so sign up now. To save a little extra put in the code irc (interRel Consulting) and save an addition $100. but this is only good till the 9th, so don’t delay.

Next for you who have already signed up for the conference. Log onto the schedule builder and you will see you have the opportunity to become an ambassador for sessions. This is an easy task, you take attendance in the room, pass out and collect session reviews and in return for doing this, you get a special reception and a little tokens of appreciation. You are going to be in the sessions anyway, so why not reap the benefits.

Finally something not directly related to the conference. The ODTUG Hyperion SIG nominations are now open. If you want to help shape the direction for Hyperion content in ODTUG, here is your opportunity. Things the SIG has done in the past are:

• Help with content for the Conference
• Create a quarterly newsletter with great information for the Hyperion community
• Put on a fantastic regional user meeting in Dallas this last year.

The SIG needs motivated people to help out. Run to be on the board. For complete info go HERE.

Get involved,

For those who read my blog, here is the directors cut of a review I wrote for the ODTUG Journal coming out soon. You get the first look at it and the extended features(Just a little extra text)

When I started out in the Essbase world; aside from the database administrators guide (DBAG) there were virtually no other books on Essbase. Since then, there have been a number of books produced on the topic. I have had the pleasure and agony of reviewing some of these Hyperion books. The latest book to be released is Developing Essbase Applications: Advanced Techniques for Finance and IT Professionals edited by Cameron Lackpour and written by Cameron and twelve other authors many of whom are well known in the Essbase community.

In every review I have written, I have given a disclaimer: this review will be no exception. I work for a company (interRel Consulting) that has written eight books on Hyperion products. I have edited a few of them and I’m the author of one on Essbase Studio. I am an advocate for the professionals in the Hyperion field and if you have read any of my prior reviews realize I don’t hold back or sugar coat what I think. I am friends with many of the authors of this book and acquaintances of others. When I agreed to do the review of the book, it was with the understanding that I would to be blunt and honest. With all this, I was still asked to do it.

With so many books in what many consider a niche software space, is this book necessary? I think so. I love the Look Smarter books and recommend them to people who are starting out in Essbase. Once you have mastered building a cube, you need more in depth information. This book supplies that extra information but, in most cases, not going into step-by-step detail of how to accomplish it.

I won’t keep the authors in suspense; overall, I really liked this book and it more than fulfills its purpose. The topics are intermediate to advanced and widely varied. While I didn’t always agree with what the chapter author was saying, I understood their rationale behind it enough to accept what they wrote. Almost every chapter had information that would be of interest to an intermediate to advanced developer.

This book is written by 13 different authors, and it is like reading 13 different stories which is good and bad. The writing styles of the authors differ greatly and in some cases it was enjoyable and others it was not. I don’t recommend trying to read this book cover to cover. Find the section(s) you are interested in and read them, then read the other chapters at your leisure to see what tidbits you may have missed over the years.

First, if for nothing else, buy this book for the chapter “How ASO Works and How to Design for Performance.” The content is amazing. I’ll admit, I’ve read the chapter twice now and still don’t understand everything I’m being told. For some this will be overkill, but you can read the highlights and bypass details when your eyes glaze over. This is truly an advanced chapter and opens up the internals of ASO like nowhere else I’ve seen. I’ve already used some of what I’ve read to tune some ASO databases I created.

Ok, no book (especially mine) is perfect and this book is no exception: the chapter on Advanced Smart View wasn’t as advanced as the title might lead you to believe. I felt it was more basic than advanced and did not incorporate the Smart View toolkit as it should have. This chapter could have been the definitive advanced Smart View guide; alas it was far from it.

Now that I have discussed the extremes, the rest of the book is pretty solid. I don’t have the space to discuss everything, so I’ve selected a few tidbits. Most chapters had niggling annoyances that prevented them from being great. For example; I liked the chapter on preventing bad data. It gives a good perspective on how to prevent it, but the chapter is a bit verbose and rambling.

The chapter on the JAPI was good; It was aimed more at beginners using it. I think this is a good idea since intermediate Essbase developers may not have any experience with Java development. A description of development environments and how to include the Essbase classes would have completed it for me. I found the chapter on infrastructure hard to read, maybe because I’m not an infrastructure guy; it was more tables and lists than a description of what you need to do to install or pitfalls you might encounter.

Note, these comments will not come as surprises to the authors: I have discussed it with them.

I enjoyed (well enjoyed is the wrong word), I appreciated, ah better, the chapter on managing a project. There is a good discussion on things a project manager running their first project should be mindful of. The chapter on Groovy was interesting, but I’m still not convinced that Groovy is the way to go.(sorry Joe). Perhaps I’m too square to be groovy.

In summary, I believe once you have gotten past the basics of trying to figure out how to build your first cubes, you should purchase this book, read it, put it on your shelf or Kindle as a reference and thank the authors for their hard work. The book is truly worth the time to read it!

Talking about Cameron Lackpour, the author of Editor if the book, I would be remiss if I did not congratulate him on becoming an Oracle Ace Director in the EPM space.  He is truly a proponent for the Hyperion community and I’m sure he will continue to support it well. It is a well deserved recognition. Another recent recipient is an Oracle Ace honor is John Booth. He is one of the few infrastructure guys out there that is willing to share his knowledge and expertise.  He has worked hard at getting cloud instances for the masses and is active answering questions and speaking. Like Cameron he is well deserving. They should be applauded for their efforts.  Remember an Oracle Ace or Ace Director recipient does not lobby for the award, but is recognized by his peers for the work he/she does in the community.

Finally, A changing of the guard is occurring. I have been on the ODTUG Hyperion SIG for a while now and it was time for me to roll off. The SIG bylaws require that board members serve no longer than a three year term and have to wait a year prior to being reelected. Each year three board members are elected with the restriction that the number of client/customers exceed the vendor/partners. Elections were recently held and three deserving individuals were elected to a three year term.

Eric Helmer
Vice President of Infrastructure IT Services, Linium
Michael LaBarge
IT lead for Hyperion, Cessna
Deanna Sunde
Senior Director, EPM Planning and Essbase Practice, Hackett Group

I’m sure they will do great expanding on what the SIG started. Give them your support and ideas on how to make the SIG better.

I’ve used Essbase Studio a little as many of you might know and I like the tool, but once in a while I get perplexed on how to do something I think should be simple. The other day I had a rush requirement to build an attribute dimension based on a table the used a recursive hierarchy in an ASO cube I was developing for a client. Pretty simple I thought, I’ll just add it in like I normally do and it will just work. I should know better. I spent a day and a half trying to figure out what was going on. To start out I had defined my Hierarchy as:

and in 11.1.2.2 it gave me the very nice warning that it could affect existing Essbase Models. I bravely went on and after doing a resync of the hierarchy (god I love that the Studio team added that) , I went into my Essbase Model and added the Attribute dimension. I then tried to deploy the cube. What I got back was the error:

Failed to deploy Essbase cube.

Caused by: Cannot end incremental build. Essbase Error(1060053): Outline has errors

\\Outline verification errors:

\\Attribute Dimension ISISP is not associated to the base dimension

\\Record #2 - Member name (BalanceSheet) already used

BalanceSheet Assets

\\Record #4 - Member name (CurAsset) already used

CurAsset CashMktSec

\\Record #6 - Member name (TotCash) already used

TotCash CashPetty

\\Record #7 - Member name (TotCash) already used

TotCash CashatBank

In variations of testing, I also got:

Failed to deploy Essbase cube.

Caused by: Failed to build Essbase cube dimension: (Scenario) .

Caused by: Cannot end stream build. Essbase Error(1007083): Dimension build failed. Error code [1060246]. Check the server log file and the dimension build error file for possible additional info.

\\Error Updating Dimension Acct_W_ICP

\\Error Initializing Rule File Information

At this point I was befuddled, I spent a few more hours making sure the view I was using only had the Attribute value on the level zero child members and tried variations creating the hierarchy different ways. I tried filters to limit the members, an outer join to another view that just had the level zero members, Adding user created members as the parent values all with no luck. If I took out the attribute Hierarchy, the build worked fine.

With deadlines looming and no hope in sight, I opened an SR with Oracle to see if I could get some help. I was able to get in touch with Lyudmila the QA manager for the Essbase Studio team. Her help was invaluable and I owe her a debt of gratitude. She was able to replicate my issue based on info I sent her. The first issue she was able to determine was not with my problem dimension but with my Scenario dimension. Remember the error:

Caused by: Failed to build Essbase cube dimension: (Scenario) .

Caused by: Cannot end stream build. Essbase Error(1007083): Dimension build failed. Error code [1060246]. Check the server log file and the dimension build error file for possible additional info.

\\Error Updating Dimension Acct_W_ICP

My Scenario dimension was made up of a single user defined member “Actual”. This is a place holder for later. It turns out with this combination the scenario dimension followed by a dimension building attributes, you get errors. She was nice enough to open a bug report on this.

But I was still having problems and she was not. Hmm, I started to look at the screen shots she was sending me of the cube she built and realized that she built a BSO cube and I was working on an ASO cube. I was trying to build the attribute on the Accounts dimension. Essbase Studio was nice enough to let me know you are not allowed to have attributes on the compression dimension, so I had turned that off. The error I was getting looked like:

Failed to deploy Essbase cube.

Caused by: Cannot end incremental build. Essbase Error(1060053): Outline has errors

\\Outline verification errors:

\\Attribute Dimension ISICP is not associated to the base dimension

\\Error Associating Dimension "ISICP" to "Acct_W_ICP"

\\Error Initializing Rule File Information

\\Record #8476 - Error in association transaction [410100.10.COGSDir] to [N] (3362)

410100.10.COGSDir N

\\Record #8477 - Error in association transaction [410100.30.COGSDir] to [N] (3362)

410100.30.COGSDir N

\\Record #8478 - Error in association transaction [410100.50.COGSDir] to [N] (3362)

I started looking through the documentation and found a single line in the comparison of ASO to BSO that said you are not allowed to have attributes on the dimension tagged as accounts. Bummer. Not a Studio, but is is making me revisit how I build the cube.

I’m in the process of converting the Accounts dim to not be tagged as accounts, take my Time balance tags and change them into UDAs and use the code from Gary Crisci’s blog entry to add the required formulas in my view dimension to add time balance functionality.

In the near future I’ll also have a blog entry on some interesting things I’ve seen on drill through with recursive hierarchies.

It seems to be my time to find bugs. First a little background for you. I’m working on Essbase and Studio 11.1.2.2 .  I’m on a project using Essbase Studio to talk to EBS to pull GL data and drill through data. We have a view that uses a function that was written that passes the date off of a table to do a currency conversion. The query we are running pulls from a view that used the function. When we ran the Query in toad, the data we expected was returned. When it was run from an Essbase Studio Data Load SQL the wrong numbers were being returned for currency converted values but not the local (Functional) currency values.

There were a number of things tried to narrow down the problem. First, we cast the output as a Varchar2 to make sure there was no issue with numbers(This is a common problem and I actually had to do that on a drill through report to get the numbers right). I tried pulling the unconverted amount and it was correct. I tried to pull the currency rate and it was coming back wrong. Hmmm, a starting point to the problem.  Looking at the Function, it converted the amount based on the transaction date that was being passed to the function. If the date was invalid or missing, it went into an exception routine that picked up the prior month rate. This was the rate we were getting back, so it was evident that we were going into the exception routine.

To test further, I narrowed down the SQL with a where clause to process a single row of data and ran it in both Toad and from a load rule. Again differences. We added the date field to both queries and noticed the format of the date was returned differently from Toad and Essbase. Upon further investigation, it seemed the date format of the date field being passed to the function changed format if it was being called from Essbase even though the specific query itself did not reference the column at all, it was just used in the view itself. The data processing within Oracle was getting the wrong date format.

We worked around it by modifying the date passed to the query to be in a specific date format, but followed up with Oracle support with an SR.   Oracle was able to replicate the issue and has created as bug for this. (or course the answer was it will be fixed in a future version).   I’ve not tried this on any other version, so I don’t know how long the bug has been around. Oracle certainly didn’t know about it. I’m posting this in hope it might save one or more of you the time I spent trying to debug this issue.

As a side note, I got an email today from ODTUG reminding everyone that session submissions for KScope13 in New Orleans are due by 10/15/12. It seems like the conference just ended and already I have to think of new content for next year. If you have interesting information to share, submit an abstract yourself. If selected you get a free pass to the conference. If you don’t want to submit one yourself but have an interesting idea for a session or a specific topic you want discussed, let me know and I’ll consider submitting it myself(of get someone who know about the topic to).  Why do I bring this up in this post, because I’m thinking about doing a tips and tricks for Essbase Studio presentation and want to get your feedback if you would like a session like that.  If you want tips for getting an abstract accepted, have a look at the ODTUG Content page

I think my next post will be on recursive Drill through tables and interesting things I’ve discovered working with them. Stay tuned.

Today on OTN was a tread asking about wildcards in MaxL import statements. OTN Thread . I didn’t realize it was possible and up until 11.1.2.2 it was not. John Goodwin researched the new features guide and found

11.1.2.2 essbase new features readme
"Block Storage Parallel Data Load
Parallel data load refers to the concurrent loading of multiple data files into an Essbase database. When working with large data sets (for example, a set of ten 2 GB files), loading the data sources concurrently enables you to fully utilize the CPU resources and I/O channels of modern servers with multiple processors and high-performance storage subsystems.
Parallel data load uses multiple parallel pipelines on the server side, and multiple threads on the client-side, to load multiple data files concurrently, thus enabling data loads to be truly optimized to the capabilities of modern servers."

In the tech reference (for BSO cubes only) is the ability to use wild cards.

For the import statement

Specify whether the data import file(s) are local or on the server, and specify the type of import file(s).

To import from multiple files in parallel, use the wildcard characters * and/or ? in the IMP-FILE name so that all intended import files are matched.

• * substitutes any number of characters, and can be used anywhere in the pattern. For example, day*.txt matches an entire set of import files ranging from day1.txt - day9.txt.

• ?* substitutes one occurrence of any character, and can be used anywhere in the pattern. For example, 0?-*-2011.txt matches data source files named by date, for the single-digit months (Jan to Sept).

Example:

import database Sample.Basic
data from local data_file '/nfshome/data/foo*.txt'
using local rules_file '/nfshome/data/foo.rul'
on error abort;

and for

using max_threads INTEGER

Optionally specify a maximum number of threads to use, if this is a parallel data load.

Example:

import database Sample.Basic using max_threads 12
data from data_file '/nfshome/data/foo*.txt'
using rules_file '/nfshome/data/foo.rul'
on error write to 'nfshome/error/foo.err';

If this clause is omitted for a parallel data load, Essbase uses a number of pipelines equal to the lesser of number of files, or half the number of CPU cores.

While I have not had a chance to try this, it would have been very useful to me in the past. I’m guessing it was added for Exalytics efficiency, but we certainly reap the benefits of it.

Another tidbit

While not really a MaxL but more of a windows tip that has been around, but most don’t know. In a path statement in a windows batch file we know if we want to have a path statement in a script (like the import) most people use something like c:\\datafile\\Sample\\mydata.txt. We have to use the \\ because MaxL uses the backslash as an escape character. Did you know you can use forward slashes instead, just like on Unix.

c:/datafiles/Sample/mydat.txt. It can make your life easier

I’m back from Oracle Open World and while I typically blog a lot during the conference, this year I sat back and listened more. It was a long week and I’m glad it is over. The biggest announcement for EPM was Planning on the public cloud. In Q1 2013 Oracle will be previewing (can you say Beta) their offering. There are still a lot of things being worked out, but it is an interesting proposition.  I think this will also allow Oracle to fill a need that they have overlooked. Smaller companies can take advantage of a cloud implementation as It will allow companies to implement planning with less hardware and IT resources. It should also allow for more power in the planning process. It should be noted this will be Planning without EPMA as EPMA requires a Windows server and the cloud will be Linux based.  There were some other changes in the works but I’m under an NDA and am not allowed to talk about them. Suffice it to say, I look forward to seeing them.

As part of my continuing series on Studio tips and tricks, I thought I would throw a few drill through tidbits your way.

First, let’s talk about how Studio (11.1.2.2 at least) handles recursive hierarchies and returning data. The easy part is if you are at level zero. Studio returns the member name. If, however, you are at an upper level and have turned allowed drill trough from that level, you get a list of the level zero members under the member you selected. What is that in English?  Think of the periods dimension. If I select Q1, Studio returns to the query Jan, Feb and Mar. This is why you would need an in clause to process them.

Where Periods in ($$Periods-Value$$)

If you look at the documentation it says you need to use the format ($$Periods-Column$$) in ($$Periods-Value$$),

but I’ve found I can just use the values if I’m not joining to the dimension table. Something associated that I found is the variable names are case sensitive It took me a long time to debug an error of “Invalid character in SQL”  when I typed PEriod instead of Period.

Also associated with how the list is generated and exposed by Tim Tow, is the in clause is limited to 1000 members. If your level is going to return more than 1000 members , you get an error. Something about line 1792 which is the generic of “oh crap, I have no clue what is happening”. 

Next, As I’ve created custom SQL, I was VERY careful that the list of items to be returned matched the report contents list

As it turns out, I was overly cautious. It turns out whatever is in your custom SQL ignores this list completely and returns whatever is in the SQL itself.

Finally, I ran into a little oddity with copying drill through reports.I have two reports one named “JE_Detail” and another named “JE (GL Entity, GL Account)”. I can copy and paste the first one with no issues into the same folder, but the second one fails with the error

To work around this, I used the export function in 11.1.2.2. After exporting the report, I edited it in Notepad and change all occurrences of the name to “JE Glenn” and reimported it.  That worked just peachy. I’ve used the export/import functionality on a number of instances now and it works really nice. In this case, it knew this was a drill through report and it allowed me to turn off associating the report to cube schemas and models as I exported it. Very nice as I wanted to modify it before activating it for users. The other times I’ve used the export and import, it worked flawlessly for individual objects or for a full export.

In the next few weeks I’ll be talking at interRel EPM roadshows in Calgary, Phoenix and L.A.  This event is open to Oracle customers (sorry consultants and competitors that read my blog). These are great events and if you are interested in getting more info contact Danielle White at dwhite@interrel.com.

I’ll also be speaking at Connection Point in November and the Michigan User group meeting.  It will be a busy couple of months for me.