Monthly Archives: September 2013

Two of my favorite things together at last: Essbase and reddit

Just quick post today to turn your attention to the new Essbase reddit. For those of you unfamiliar, reddit is a community site for posting and discussing cool, interesting, or whatever links. I’ve had this up for a little while now and have been slowly putting in some links as time allows. A couple of you have stumbled on to it already.

I thought this might be a cool way for us Hyperion bloggers/followers/enthusiasts out new content, discuss Essbase/EPM news, and post relevant links. This is my first time moderating/managing a reddit community. If you want to help out and/or be a moderator, please message me and we can figure it out.

The idea here is not to try and suck away traffic from the technical discussion forums such as OTN and Network 54, but rather to to complement them and our blogs by having a general area for discussion along the lines of “hey, check this out!” and “I wonder what other people have posted?”

For the least part, I’ll try and post something interesting on a regular (if not incredibly frequent basis by reddit standards) to keep things fresh and exciting!

Please enjoy and if you have a cool link to share, send it to /r/essbase!

Friday fun day, fish names, and 100th post!

Happy Friday! Most of you Hyperion folks out there have probably called it a week already, so you can just catch the fun from your RSS readers or when you come up for air next week. It has been a busy week on my end, what with doing a fairly deep cubeSavvy review, building elegant/robust/awesome solutions for clients, polishing up open source Essbase power tools, and more (even a few things I can’t mention… yet).

A while back I mused on some Essbase or Hyperion related names for my new betta fish. I never circled back to this but I have to go with a late submission from “Keith” – so without further ado, Mr. Fish will be henceforth known as DBAG. *hehe*

Last, but not least, this is my one-hundredth blog post here. Wow! I’d probably write anyway even if no one read this blog because I find it oddly therapeutic (not to mention serving as a repository for the obscure bugs I track down and fix), but to those of you that regularly comment, email me, offer to help out on testing some tool, and say Hello at conferences, thank you very much for your time and thoughtfulness.

Have a great weekend.

cubeSavvy Review

One of my personal blogging goals this year is to take a tour of apps, code, libraries, and other third-party tools in the Hyperion ecosystem. I have some cool stuff on deck to be reviewed, starting with today.

Today I’d like to take a look at Harry Gates‘ cubeSavvy. cubeSavvy ostensibly purports to be “Planning without Planning”. Or, put another way, it’s a web-based interface for Essbase cubes, without all of the additional infrastructure and setup that Planning entails. This is an interesting approach. Let’s think about it for a moment.

As many of you know, by design, Hyperion Planning sits on top of Essbase and is synchronized down to Essbase. This design has some drawbacks and some advantages that are possibly worth musing on in a future post. Planning also brings a lot of extra functionality to the table that manifests itself in the user interface and/or is pushed down in some way to the underlying cube. cubeSavvy comes to the table and more or less says, “Hey, let’s do away with all of that and get a little more purist about this: let’s have grids (similar in concept to forms in Planning) defined that work with our vanilla Essbase functionality – and let’s just manage the cube instead of pushing and synchronizing things down to Essbase.”

So in theory, if you have an Essbase server up and running and then stick a cubeSavvy server in front of it, define some grids and provision some users, you’ve got a web-based budgeting and planning system on top of your cubes. Interesting.

In a first for me and this blog, this article will be split up in to several pages, covering Installation & Setup, Configuring Grids, User Experience, and Closing Thoughts. Please enjoy this whirlwind tour of cubeSavvy!

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essbasepy Python MaxL module for Hyperion moved!

As some of you may know, I am now the active maintainer for the essbasepy Python module for MaxL. This project is an analog to the MaxL Perl module that was originally created by David Welden. I have put a fair bit of time into getting up and running with it, updating it, and testing it against EPM 11.1.2.3. I have now moved the code from its previous home on Google Code to an open repo on my GitHub account.

Other than moving to GitHub, I have included a few updates for the newest version of Hyperion, updated the documentation, and consolidated the distribution down to one master set of files. The future plans for this project are to keep validating it against Hyperion updates, polish it a bit, and enhance the documentation even more. At this point I don’t have any plans to significantly change the functionality.

I know there’s a handful of you out there that are hardcore users of this so if you have any issues or questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.