Welcome to the second installment of the Hyperion EPM Month in Review. This month was pretty busy with 44 contributions by the community (45 if you include this post).
Gary has a quick update letting us know that the Smart View 11.1.2.5.620 has been released.
Cameron has a pair of posts this month. First he held Chris Rothermel hostage until he created a post that shows us how to delete multiple files with EPM Automate. Next up, he shows us around the new EPM Cloud Documentation Portal.
The DEV EPM crew starts off 2017 with a post covering 2016. They also tell us that they will be at Kscope17! They also have an OTN article on Building a 100% Cloud Solution with Oracle Data Integrator.
Eric gives us a look at the new Oracle Data Visualization Cloud Service. On the other end of the spectrum, he has a post about locking entities. This is a functional and technical question all rolled into one.
Sibin had another busy month of blogging. I wish I had the time or energy to blog as much as he does! He starts off the year talking about text members in Hyperion Planning. He then runs us through his experience using SQL Data Load Rules in Essbase and the error he encountered with Oracle DB. He also takes a look at the backend repository for Shared Services. Sibin also put together a cool Essbase log parsing shell. He then covers FDMEE logic accounts…twice. Finally, he has a post on installing the Hyperion EPM stack on Linux.
Glenn has an interesting post about FCCS and issues relating to data storage. This particular issue is not unique to just FCCS. I’ve had this exact issue occur one time before on a PBCS implementation as well.
I started the year off with a few posts. First I wished everyone a very belated Happy New Year. Then I started the new EPM Month in Review series with the December 2016 update. I will also be at Kscope17! I also started a new series talking about what’s up in my lab. And lastly, and most importantly, the next NTxHUG Meeting has been announced for February 16th.
Jason clearly has too much time on his hands like Sibin, giving us five blog posts this month! First, he shows off some Dodeca skills by having multiple Essbase sources in a view. Next up, he talks about renegade members in Essbase. He also has an update to his Hyperion Parent Inferrer app. Chris clearly made an impact with his post on Cameron’s blog, as Jason had to go and do his very own post on the topic from another angle: deleting multiple files from PBCS using EPM Automate PBJ. He finishes off the month with a post on Drillbridge and query translation.
John continues his awesome content to start off the year the way he ended it. He has part two of his series on FDMEE and the REST API. He also started a new series on the FDMEE Hybrid update.
Francisco gives us part two of his series on the 11.1.2.4.210 patch for FDMEE. He has a three-part series on the UDA for SAP HANA: part 1, part 2, and part 3. He also has a great extension to John Goodwin’s series on FDMEE and the REST API. He shows us how to execute custom scripts with the REST API in FDMEE.
Dayalan has a post showing the new functionality added to the PBCS Access logs. Looks like you can now download daily logs. Cool advances in the cloud. He also tells us a little about the 17.02 patch for PBCS that his this Friday (in test).
Celvin has a new multi-part series this month on Groovy in PBCS and On-Prem Planning. Here are part 1 and part 2.
Sarah takes a look at a cool new Oracle tool named Synopsis. She gives us part one her on-going series showing off this new mobile tool for analyzing CSV and Excel files on the go. She also takes a look at the new Quadrant Visualization plug-in for ODV.
Eric gives us the heads up on a variet of upcoming events and webinars.
Tim tells us that the Oracle Essbase Cloud Service (EssCS) webinar is now available. Apparently the soon part of coming soon is getting sooner…
What if the world is a prototype?
Christian has released a new version of his Tools-EPM utility for Linux and Unix! Previously this was only available for Windows.
Opal has a pair of posts this week. First she has a quick tip on Financial Reports that don’t appear after migration. She also has a big thank you to the 2016 ODTUG Marketing Committee. We all appreciate the efforts of all of the committees that make ODTUG a great community with many great events and contributions.
Brian Marshall
January 31, 2017
Welcome to the first installment of a new on-going series about what’s up in my Hyperion Home Lab. First, if you don’t already have your own home lab, why not? Get started by checking out my guide on building your own. And yes…I will get around to updating this series soon. In the meantime, let’s take a look at what’s changed in the lab.
UPS…not just for shipping
I’ve updated the power configuration of the lab to increase the UPS capacity. All servers are now connected to their own 1500VA UPS. This means a total of four (4) UPS’s with a total capacity of 6000VA. I can get roughly 20 minutes of time without power before things fall apart. The next step will be automating the shutdown procedure after a few minutes of power loss.
More Drives
What about server stuff? I’ve expanded my FreeNAS server to include an entirely new chassis devoted to storing drives. This chassis is a Supermicro 45-bay with a pair of SAS2 expanders. These are connected externally to the FreeNAS server to an LSI 9200-8e controller. More on this later…
New Networking Goodies
In support of my FreeNAS fun and eventual VSAN implementation, I replaced my ailing Dell switch with a brand new X1052. This switch is complete with 24 ports of RJ45 gigabit connections along with 4 ports of SFP+ 10G connections. Each server is directly connected to the switch with SFP+ DAC’s. Each server is also connected directly to the FreeNAS server using another SFP+ DAC.
While I made everything faster on the wired side, the wireless was still a bit of a challenge. The majority of the house was just fine, but there were a few select locations that were very problematic. I decided to price out having a network drop or two added. While talking to a potential installer, he suggested I try out an extender. I had tried an extender years before, but it didn’t work well. Based on the installers feedback, I gave it another try. I purchased a Netgear Nighthawk X4.
The extender has been nothing short of awesome. My Nighthawk X6 has a pair of 5GHz radios and this extender allows me to isolate one of those and provide it with a dedicated radio signal. This is about as great as it can get without dropping an actual network connection. We’ve been using it for about a while now and I have nothing but great things to say.
Diagrams Are Cool Right?
Here’s what it all looks like in the form of a really bad Visio diagram:
What’s next?
As I continue my Essbase performance series and prepare for my Kscope17 presentation, I’m making some more modifications. I’ve also finally run out of space on my old file server and I think we have finally reached a point where I can trust my FreeNAS box as my primary file server. First, here’s a sneak peak at what’s coming in my benchmarking box:
That is an Oracle Flash Accelerator. This very drive is found in many Exalytics servers out there. It also happens to be a rebranded Intel P3605. This particular model is the 1.6TB variety with some insane performance. I’ll have a dedicated post for this SSD very soon.
In the meantime, I’ll be installing my capacity expansion to replace my existing file server next weekend when the drives arrive. I’ve ordered 13 3TB drives. I plan on using a pair of RAIDZ1 vdev’s in FreeNAS to give me 30TB of usable storage with a hot spare in the event of failure. I may also be transitioning to a new VM backup strategy at the same time, but more on that another time.
Enough Nerding Out
And that’s it for this update on my Hyperion Home Lab. I should have a few more posts coming in the near future with updates on much of what I’ve talked about broadly here.
Brian Marshall
January 31, 2017
The next North Texas Hyperion User Group (NTxHUG) meeting has been announced and it will be on Thursday, February 16th, 2017. The event will be hosted in Irving at the Oracle office. You can find more details here:
NTxHUG Website
We’ll be getting started at 3:00 PM then heading to a happy hour at The Ranch in Las Colinas nearby. I’ll be presenting along with someone from Oracle. This quarter we’ll be discuss on-prem Hyperion tools. This includes a road-map and then integration across the stack. The Oracle Office is located at this address:
6031 Connection Drive
Irving, Texas 75039
The following happy hour will be at The Ranch at Las Colinas at this address:
857 W John Carpenter Fwy
Irving, Texas 75039
At the end of the post you will find a handy map with a pair of pins: the Oracle office in question and The Ranch at Las Colinas. I hope to see all you local to DFW there!
[iframe src=”https://www.google.com/maps/d/embed?mid=17ymdBBU4dbXD1PKC8MOzPH8K6Oo” width=”640″ height=”480″]
Brian Marshall
January 29, 2017
I’m very pleased to announce that I will be speaking at Kscope17 in San Antonio. I will be giving a presentation on Essbase performance in virtualized environments. This will contain a lot of content that you will see here, or already have seen here. I’ve very excited that this presentation was accepted as I’ve been working for over a year to get everything ready to actually present. You can find more here. The official title of my presentation is:
IT Made Me Virtualize Essbase and Performance Sucks: Making Essbase Fast In Any Environment
I’ve had the pleasure of speaking at Kscope everything year since 2010. I believe that Kscope is far and away the best Hyperion-related conference in the world. I also enjoy getting together with a large number of like-minded Hyperion Nerds. This year should be an amazing experience just like every year before.
This year we are back at the JW Marriott outside of San Antonio. For those of you that haven’t been to this particular resort, it is pretty amazing. It has a great water park, so if you want to bring the family, or have the stay the weekend after, you will really enjoy it. If you happen to be into golf, they have a LOT of golf there.
In other news, if you plan on attending or even think that you might attend, I would highly recommend booking your room early. If you happen to book to late, you might be staying down the street. And when I say down the street, I mean down the super-long entry way, down another street, and around a corner near the freeway. In other words…you don’t want to stay offsite if you don’t have to!
Luckily, we have a long time between now and June, as I have a lot of work to do to make sure that this presentation and possible white-paper are…awesome.
Brian Marshall
January 19, 2017
The Hyperion EPM Week in Review has clearly become more than I can manage on a weekly basis. So, I’ve decided to do a monthly update for the time being. If things slow down, I’ll get back to a weekly update. So, welcome to 2017 and the review of Hyperion EPM in December of 2016!
As part of this change I’ll also be structuring the posts a little different. Because over the course of a month many of us post more than once, I’ll be adding sub-heading for each of the contributing blogs along with a link to their main site. I welcome any feedback everyone has.
Garry had three posts last month. First he announced that he was selected to present at KScope17. Congrats Gary! He also lets us know about the new 11.1.2.4.704 patch for Financial Reporting. This is a particularly important update given that Oracle will no longer support the desktop client soon. While he’s updating us on patches, he also has a post about the new 11.1.2.4.210 patch for FDMEE. This includes a whole host of new features including text-based data loads.
Cameron gives us the update on the most resent Boston meetup. It looks like a lot of fun was had!
The DEV EPM crew continues their series on Dimension and Cubes in ODI 12c. The topic of the day is loading data using surrogate keys.
Keith has a post on extracting UDA’s…using Python.
Eric, much like Gary, as a post on the 11.1.2.4.704 patch for Financial Reports. This seems to be a popular topic.
Sibin had another busy month of blogging. He starts off by taking a peak at the backend tables of Shared Services. He then moves on to showing us how to create a relational data source for an Essbase rules file…on Linux. Speaking of Linux, he also has a guide on installing HFM on Oracle Linux. I’m pretty sure this is only supported on Exalytics…but hey, cool guide.
Jason has a re-cap of his most popular blog posts of 2016 to finish out the year.
John continues his awesome content to finish off the year. He has a post on loading data to multiple years and periods with FDMEE. He also has part one of his series on FDMEE and the REST API.
Francisco has a post on the 11.1.2.4.210 patch for FDMEE at a glance. He the digs deeper into the patch.
Dayalan has a post on loading data into PBCS using the HsSetValue and HsGetValue functions.
Celvin, who I had the privaledge of hanging out with over the holidays, has a number of posts in December. He has an amazing family and it was great to spend some time away from Kscope with some fellow Oracle nerds.
First he has a tip on ADFS Federation and Signing Certificate issues. Next up he has a quick tip on deleting members and shared members more rapidly in PBCS. Finally, he has a post on adding a time value to a webform.
Sarah has a post on error 10058 in Data Visualization Desktop (DVD). While on the topic of DVD, she also covers plug-ins.
Eric has a great post showing off the new and hopefully eventually released Essbase Cloud Service.
Opal has a post on opening up more than one instance of the Oracle EPM Cloud.
Brian Marshall
January 17, 2017
Welcome to 2017! This post is way late as I continue to recover from a ridiculously busy Q4 and the Holidays that go along with that. 2016 was my second year of blogging, and I’d like to think that it was a successful year. In 2017, I published 83 blog posts. I’m not sure that I’ll get anywhere near that number this year, but I’m hoping to make every post count.
This year I hope to focus more on continuing to build out my home lab to support new and interesting things. I’d also like to spend more time with cloud technologies like FCCS and ARCS that I haven’t spent as much time blogging about so far. Here’s what I hope to post on in general:
- Essbase Performance (you should see a lot on this given my presentation looms)
- PBCS
- FCCS
- More fun with PowerShell
- More posts about the Lab
- Perhaps a guest-blog or two?
I’ll finish off this post by stealing an idea from Jason and posting my top 10 blog posts from 2016:
- The Planning Repository: HSP_OBJECT and HSP_OBJECT_TYPE
- Building a Hyperion Home Lab: Introduction and Choosing Your Hypervisor
- Getting Started With Hyperion Planning 11.1.2.4 and Rapid Deployment (Part 1 of 2)
- Building a Hyperion Home Lab: Choosing Your Motherboard
- Building a Hyperion Home Lab: Choosing Your Processor
- Getting Started With Hyperion Planning 11.1.2.4 and Rapid Deployment (Part 2 of 2)
- Drill-Through in PBCS and Hyperion Planning Without FDMEE
- Enabling Dynamic Members in Custom Plan Types in 11.1.2.4
- Currency Conversion in ASO
- Veeam Backup & Replication Free Edition Experience and Sample
Brian Marshall
January 16, 2017