One of the smartest tools Oracle/Hyperion ever integrated into its product suite was the migration utility. Overtime this has evolved to the LifeCycle Managment utility or LCM for short. Actually Oracle/Hyperion has taken it even one step further by calling its fully integrated migration tool the BI+ Artifact LifeCycle Management utility even though they have retained the same acronym, LCM. I saw a job board posting for a BI+ administrator recently that touted knowledge of LCM as a “must have”. So, between that and a recent client project request, I thought I would shine some light and/or seek to demystify this tool, LCM.

LCM, has actually been incorporated into the Hyperion suite since Hyperion System 9x. I believe starting with 9.3 which is when I started using it. At that point it was really just a command-line tool. It was very much a kluge and in my opinion it still is especially after you do the first migration from dev to prod (or whatever you envrionment structure look like). I’ll go into that later.

Why do we need LCM?
Technically you don’t. You can get along without it like we did in the previous versions of Hyperion by copying objects and migrating them individually. One could still use the Essbase “Copy…” command in EAS to get a database from dev to prod and vice-versa with no problem. The same goes with getting security from one environment to another although that’s usually a bit more work that simply moving Essbase objects around.
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