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Few days back, I had an opportunity to discuss on capability of Calc Manager to trigger .bat files. A fellow colleague of mine happen to have this requirement and had written a CDF to call a batch script. I was not convinced to write a CDF to perform such activity and believed to have some option using which we can avoid writing CDFs. Most of us have used Maxl and must be aware of the command ‘Shell’. This command triggers underlying operating system commands from within Maxl shell session. This is our easy way to do what we want. With the introduction of Calc Manager CDFs @CalcMgrExecuteEncryptMaxLFile and @CalcMgrExecuteMaxLEnScript , we now have ability to trigger Maxls from within Calc Manager. All we need to make sure is all such requests are sent to Essbase Server and bin folder under Essbase path is our starting point. Lets use Oracle sample application Vision and Calc Manager to test out. Create a batch file Test.bat . This file accepts a run time parameter and simply w...

While exploring different features under EPM 11.1.2.4 release, I happen to stumble upon an interesting setback in Calc Manager which I believe is a potential bug.  The issue occurs when we try to write business rules for Essbase applications and deploy them. It all started with me trying to explore how business rules with RTPs can be executed from Essbase. Interestingly, it the script editor which is buggy while the designer mode works perfectly.  I used Sample.Basic, which comes with installation to test out my findings. Created a runtime variable PeriodApp of type member which belong to dimension Year from Sample.Basic Created a new business rule 'LNCHTST'. Select the 'Script' mode and type in a simple command to copy data from one period to another. And target is a runtime prompt. When I try to validate this rule, I get a popup asking for RTP value. Bang !!! Script validation throws an error. I could not determine as to what is the issue. I doubl...

Oracle released EPM 11.1.2.4 with various new features added to the list. Having initial look at the list, it seems quite exciting to work with new release. Apart from minor enhancements and features for different products, migration of HFM application from Windows dependent platform to platform independent nature seems to be the major offering in this release. HFM's dependence on Windows had been the reason behind unavailability of HFM over Exalytics. Thus Oracle catered to this requirements to introduce ability to install HFM on Linux but it is supported only for Exalytics as of now. Let's quickly walk through the new EPM 11.1.2.4 and have a chance to look and feel the new interface. I will limit myself to basic visual changes to the interface and won't delve into technicalities. Installation Installation steps have not undergone any change except for HFM where it no longer asks for DCOM and IIS details. Similar to 11.1.2.3 we can install and configure all comp...

I believe it is no new situation for any ODI developer, where he/she had to go through a long list of ODI objects to identify their usage in interfaces or packages, LKMs /IKMs used within interfaces, variables and their usage, getting rid of unwanted objects, etc I had been in such a situation and wanted to keep a track of any such objects. I was able to beg, borrow, steal or develop SQL queries to query ODI work repository and following list of SQL queries can be used to put down a list of objects and their association Query 1: Variables Used in mappings Query 2: Table Names used as Source schema & Datastore Tabs Query 3: Interface Information Query 4: Interfaces not used in Packages --- Updated May 12th, 2014 --- Query 5: Procedures used in Packages Query 6: Procedures not used in Packages Query 7: Scheduling Information This scheduling information query fetches all scheduling information except repetition information ...

Recently, I was asked a question by my colleague, Linga  (he always comes up with something or the other) - Can we pull file names from a directory and process the latest one out of them, while keeping the history of processed files ? I could recall that one other colleague Parasuram PJP did something similar. When I tried out his code, that did not work for me due to some reason. Anyways, he was kind enough to share some pearls of wisdom and I sat down searching details about Jython to fetch file names and additional information. To find out the latest file out of all, we need to capture the timestamp of its last modification. Since we need to keep a log of all files which gets processed, we will be maintaining a RDBMS table (SQL Server in my case) -  FILENAMES with following structure Along with this comes a twist where initial part file names will be same having different suffix. Just to simulate the scenario, I could think of some files which were ...

The most commonly used reporting tool with Hyperion setup is the Financial Reporting aka HFR. HFR brings with it, the ability to design reports using various datasources - Essbase, Planning, SAPBW, MSOLAP, HFM. It has been quite popular to burst static PDF reports using inbuilt scheduler or using the command line utility for Essbase, Planning and HFM. Along with HFR, SmartView is another tool used for reporting. SmartView provide options to download HFR reports in spreadsheets and carryout analysis as most analyst love to do. One common requirement which HFR do not offer as an out-of-box solution, is the ability to burst reports in spreadsheets. This post delves into an alternate approach to cater such requirements. The Smart View has been enhanced lately to include lot of new capabilities - Retaining Excel based formatting, butterfly reports, multi-grid reports, etc. - which combined with its macros functions help analysts design, automate and burst spreadsheet based reports ...

Disclaimer: The steps mentioned in this post are a workaround and in no scenario intend to replace standard steps of migration published in Oracle documentation. Please take necessary backup before following these steps. These steps may help  to import artifacts when we do not have configured environment from 11.1.1 release to follow upgrade path. I wanted to setup a Hyperion Planning 11.1.2.3 environment to try out new features under this release and thought of creating an application from the extract files of one of my app which I had used long back for training and proof of concept. I created a new Planning app shell similar to the app I was about to import. Since 11.1.2.3 LCM offers ability to upload the LCM extract from shared services console in to File System directory ( import_export by default) , I followed these steps to upload the LCM extract. On trying to open the app under the File System, it did not display any of the artifacts in the detail pane. I...