Whether you are a user or implementer of Smart View there comes a time when an upgrade is necessary. Since each user installs the smart view binaries on their workstation/laptop, the question of how to push a system-wide upgrade may arise. Fortunately this functionality is built into Essbase Administration Services.
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Sometimes I feel like I am the only evangelist out there for Essbase Studio and I wonder why that is since Essbase Studio is such a great tool.  This is especially true when you look at its ability to connect to a myriad of data source such as OBIEE, Teradata, MySQL, EPMA Dimension Server, netezza, etc.  Below is the top 10 list of why an organization should migrate their existing Essbase Integration Services models to Essbase Studio.  If your team is not an early adopter, run it in parallel.  If your team is scared of change, have them read “Who Moved My Cheese?“.  Otherwise, let’s make it happen.  Get with the program and enjoy the fruits of this fantastic toolset made for those who believe analytics are always evolving for the better.

Top 10 List

10. It has a familiar feel to EIS but its actually intuitive and user friendly.

9. It integrates with the new features of Essbase Server 11x.  Has EIS been touched since System 9x?

8. Introspection

7. There is a step-by-step tutorial on Essbase Studio Server made just for you (here).

6. Security provisioning and roles can be assigned in Shared Services.  Deliniate data modelers from administrators.

5. Essbase Integration Services is about to get sunset and Oracle Support will go bye-bye.

4. It connects to EPMA Dimension Server out-of-the-box. Ever heard of Master Data Management?

3. Essbase Studio Models are deployable with native MaXL Scripting.  Have you tried to automate a EIS deployment?

2. Essbase Studio comes with an Integration Services Catalog Migration Wizard. (hint, hint)

1. Larry Ellison wants you to.  Seriously, Oracle’s BI roadmap is taking Studio to the next frontier, not EIS.  Its a good train…get on it.

ASO does not provide an out-of-the-box version of dynamic-time-series (DTS) like its partner in crime, BSO. However, one straightforward approach to achieving this functionality is to implement a time aggregation dimension and leverage MDX functionality.  In this example we will house the Time Periods/Months (i.e.:  Mar, Apr, May, etc.) and the Years dimensions into two separate dimensions.  We then add an additional dimension called “Time Series” to the outline to support our ASO version of DTS.

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As promised, based on my previous post regarding setting up Essbase Studio Server and OC4J to run as a Windows Service, I have provided a video to visually assist you with your integration.

Essbase Studio Server & OC4J As a Windows Service from ArtOf BI on Vimeo.

If you have any questions or comments please post them so that everyone can benefit from them.

As you know, the Hyperion 11.1.1.3 release of Essbase Studio Server was not release as a windows service. After my last Essbase Studio implementation project, and being repeatedly asked, “How do we run Essbase Studio as a Windows Service?”, I decided to dig deep into the details and deliver a concrete answer to those that care to read on.  Of course, I was successful in my endeavor, hence this post. Now, I ask, Do you want to see Essbase Studio Server launchable in your services panel like this…?

I keep getting asked “Was the Essbase Studio installation ever provided as a windows service?”. My reply to that now is “Who cares?”. If the Oracle think-tank decided not to make life easier for us with a Windows Service for Essbase Studio upon install then so be it. At least now, I’ve got a great rebuttal and a top-notch solution. Now, no longer must this one piece of the Hyperion BI suite be the outcast with only the startServer.bat file to launch the server.
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In previous, blog posts I’ve talked about the power of Smartview, how it came from Hyperion, and all of that jazz, but today we want to learn how to immediately integrate Smartview and OBIEE.  The burning question is, How can the end-users download smartview to their workstations? We’ll if you’d like to see the option to download Smartview in the “More Products…” menu along with the Oracle BI for Office add-in download, then continue on, you’ll be delighted you did.

Here is what we want the users to see.

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By now every knows that the release of Hyperion 11x has provided us with the latest and greatest Essbase modeling application, Essbase Studio.  A lot of us are familiar with Essbase Integration Services and have been looking at Essbase Studio like a two-headed dog.  They either are scared and don’t want to go near it or they are so used to their purse-dog, i.e: EIS, that they stick with what they know best and haven’t unwrapped Essbase Studio yet.

This blog post should put and end to any reluctancy.  I introduce to you the first Essbase Studio tutorial on the web. 

You can download the PDF here. (I’ll eventually move this to a CDN if the downloads get to big, so please link to this post and not the document itself.)

Hyperion Essbase Studio Tutorial by Example (PDF)

I am also breaking the tutorial into a series with this being part 1.  There are a lot of cool new functions with Essbase Studio and you will immediately see the benefits it has over EIS. Soon, you’ll see other blog post here on Essbase Studio tutorials part 2, 3, etc. so be sure to check back often or subscribe to the RSS.

If this series is good, bad, or indifferent please let me know.  I would like to keep these up and with your feedback I can revise and make the documents that much more informative everyone.

Cheers.

Update 8/30/2009

- This should have been posted to the live site last week. I am in the middle of switching hosting providers for my blog and uploaded this post to my test site instead of this one. Sorry for the delay.

I covered in a previous blog post the new addition of Annotations in HFR/FR in the System 11x EPM release.  When you create or reply to an annotation one has the option to taxonomize the annotation using the category dropdown.  This blog quickly steps you through how to add/remove a category so that the default categories can be augmented or offset.  Please note that you may cause referential damange to your HFR/FR system if you modify a category that is already being used in an existing annotation entry. Be careful or you may cause errors in FR and the annotation report viewer resulting from your modification.

When a user creates or replies to an HFR annotation, out-of-the-box the default category list appears in the drop-down with the options seen below:

In order to modify this list (add/change/remove) on must access the “annotations.properties” configuration file located in [%Hyperion_Home%]\products\Foundation\workspace\lib\. This file also stores logging information related to the annotations but we are concerned only with the categories at this point.

Open the file and location the section for “Categories”. It should be above the logging configuration section. There is a comma separated list of values which are set by default. At this point you can add, delete, or modify this list. For testing purposes and the sake of this tutorial I simply appended a new value called “Testing” to the end of the list. Pay attention to follow the structure currently in place before making your change. Notice that there are no spaces between values and that the last value does not contain a trailing comma.

Save the annotations.properties file and close it. At this point your modifications have taken place but they will not be available in FR or anywhere else in the system for use until you restart the Hyperion Annotation Server windows service. Restart the windows service and re-open your HFR/FR report. You will now see that your change has been picked up properly.

Conclusion

In this tutorial we quickly located our annotations config file, made a modification, restarted services, and saw the change reflected as we desired. Just as a reminder this operation should only be done by a high-level administrator. Extra care should be taken to run the annotation report from Workspace first to ensure that no existing annotations are using categories that you seek to modify. Doing so may have undesired results and cause headaches. Enjoy.

I wanted to revisit a Hyperion Essbase adage that every Hyperion Essbase Administrator should know by heart - FIX on Sparse, IF on Dense.

If you don’t know this mantra then burn it into your memory and read on to get the content behind it.

When working with calculation (Calc) script in the BSO world, ideally if you are working with allocations or other logical calculations where you need to isolate a smaller set of blocks you will want to FIX on the dimnesions that are sparse. The long and the short of this is that this is really just a best practice. You could of course FIX on a dense dimension as the Essbase parsing engine will allow it. However, doing so will cause you a very inefficient performance hit because multiple passes through the same blocks will take place. On a small cube you probably wouldn’t notice it but a large cube you will take a hit.

Now putting the IF on dense dimensions is again part of the best practice. Doing this will allow the IF logic to be performed while the block is in memory which means it will end up being a single pass operation.

I have to thank Greg V. for bringing this topic up in a recent conversation which led me to this quick post.

BSO still rocks and is alive and kicking in many organizations. And, I’m not just talking about Hyperion Essbase versions < 7 or Hyperion Planning cubes. Even though ASO reared its head in version 7+ an its agg time gets crazy performance gains over BSO we cannot simply move to the new Aggregate Storage option and forget the finer points of BSO and how it all started off in the first place. Keep living BSO, you rock.

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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