Did I mention recently that Drillbridge can now be installed on Linux in addition to Windows (in fact, Drillbridge is so flexible, it now runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and AIX all out of the box!). WELL IT DOES!
So regardless if your Hyperion environment is running on Windows, Linux, or AIX, it’s now easier than ever to add Drillbridge to one of your servers and unlock the power of your detailed data for your users.
Just wanted to mentioned that I’ll be at Kscope15 (you have registered, haven’t you?) with two brand new presentations. I will be presenting on Drillbridge, the innovative, awesome, easy to implement, super cool, fun, free, and fast drill-through solution, as well as a really interesting twist on an ODI feature.
For the ODI presentation I will be doing a super detailed, incredibly deep dive on one of the main features of ODI – mappings and interfaces – and how they work under the hood, how to make/customize Knowledge Modules, and more. I’m really excited for this presentation because it’s a total nerd look at how and why things are setup the way they are, filtered through the lens of a computer scientist (with a nice helping of cube geekery). I don’t seem to get to write about ODI as much as I write about Hyperion-related things, but truth be told if I had to rate my Oracle-specific skills in order of strength, it would go Java, ODI, and then Hyperion. Go figure.
Anyway, get to registering for Kscope as soon as you can; I have a feeling this year’s is going to be the most awesome yet, and when you do, be sure to swing by my presentations and geek out with me and introduce yourself.
It took a little longer than anticipated (I took some genuine time off over the holiday break), but I am very happy to make Drillbridge version 1.5.0 available to download.
A lot of work has gone into this release. For example:
I have done my absolute best to test this version and make sure it doesn’t have any showstopper bugs but there are bound to be issues. There are a few things I know need to be worked on for the inevitable 1.5.1 release. So if you upgrade, please be sure to make backups so you can flip back to 1.3.3 or 1.3.4 or whatever your current version is, in case there’s something broken that you need.
If you have any questions about the new features and how to use them, don’t hesitate to hit up the forums or email. In the coming days I will be adding on to the Drillbridge Wiki with some info about how to set things up in terms of new features. There was recently a lot of spam activity on the wiki that I’m trying to sort out but for now it looks okay.
That all being said, this is the best release of Drillbridge ever and it now contains every feature I originally set out to put in, and then some. There will undoubtedly be some quirks but I look forward to a few point releases to stamp them out. Many or most of the features are from direct user requests, feedback, and ideas, so thanks to everyone.
Happy Drilling.
I had a use-case today where I needed to parse an XML file created by the relatively new MaxL command “export outline”. This command generates an XML file for a given cube for either all dimensions or just all dimensions you specify. I just needed to scrape the file for the hierarchy of a given dimension, and that’s exactly what this tool does: pass in an XML file that was generated by export outline, then pass in the name of a dimension, and the output to the console will be a space-indented list of members in the dimension. More information on usage at the Essbase Outline Export Parser GitHub page including sample input, sample output, and command-line usage.
Also note that the venerable Harry Gates has also created something similar that includes a GUI in addition to working on the command line. While both written in Java, we’re using different methods to parse the XML. Since I’m more familiar/comfortable with JAXB for reading XML I went with that, which in my experience gives a nice clean and extensible way to model the XML file and read it without too much trouble. The code for this project could be easily extended to provide other output formats.
Quick bug fix release (thanks to Peter N. for the heads up!). There was a problem with the way the runnable JAR was packaged. A new version can be downloaded from the Camshaft downloads page.
Camshaft is a Java command-line utility that executes MDX queries against a given cube and returns the results in a sensible format for loading or processing with your own tools (as opposed to you having to use voodoo or something to try and parse it into something usable). So stop parsing header bullshit off of MDX queries and start parsing complements from your users saying how awesome you are.