Monthly Archives: December 2016

Top Posts of the Year 2016

Well, 2016 is almost behind us. I haven’t done this before but given that I’ve been doing a fair bit of blogging this year, I wanted to point out the “top posts of the year” on ye olde Jason’s Hyperion Blog. The subjects are diverse (as far as a Hyperion blog goes I suppose) and I think are an interesting reflection of what things people are interested in. Starting with the most popular:

Running MDX queries through a JDBC driver (for fun?): I got a lot of feedback on the MDX over JDBC franken-driver in JDBC. In retrospect, I think this goes to show how rich, diverse, and challenging the world of data integration around Essbase can be. People – developers, consultants, users, whoever – are constantly spending time, energy, and money getting data in and out of their EPM systems. The Thriller MDX-over-JDBC driver hit a real chord with some people that see it as a way to bridge the gap between EPM and other systems.

Drillbridge acquired by Applied OLAP: Probably the biggest news for me this year. Applied OLAP acquired all of Drillbridge (as well as myself) and added it to their portfolio of products, including the Dodeca Spreadsheet Management System, Dodeca Excel Add-In for Essbase, and the Next Generation Outline Extractor. Recently I announced that the enterprise/supported version of Drillbridge was officially named Drillbridge Plus and offers many compelling features, such as upper-level drill support from PBCS.

Kscope16 sessions I’m looking forward to: Interestingly, people were very curious as to what sessions I planned on attending at Kscope16. I’ll be sure to post thoughts on Kscope17 sessions when the time is right. I’ll have a single presentation at Kscope17, which will focus on “demystifying the PBCS REST API”. I hope it’s a crowd-pleaser that people will find useful.

Dependent Selectors in Dodeca: I blogged extensively about Dodeca this year, and apparently this was one the most popular article. Dependent selectors are a great feature in Dodeca that allow for narrowing down or otherwise dynamically generating the selection values for a user. For example, choosing a state could cause another selector to narrow its list of cities to just those in the given state. I’m both surprised and not surprised that this is the most popular Dodeca article. I think it’s cool because this is the type of feature that really enhances the user experience by respecting their time and making a system easier to use.

Data Input with Dodeca, part 1: Dodeca is great for providing a structured way to input data into a cube that is incredibly more robust than “we do lock and sends”. This was the first part in my data input series (six articles!) that covered inputting to Essbase, relational datasources, both at the same time, commentary, and more.

Camshaft MDX tool updated and available: Again with the MDX/data integration theme, people were very curious to find out more about a command-line tool that helps convert MDX queries to useable data files.

Essbasepy updated for Python 3: Surprisingly (to me), people the article on the Essbasepy library caught a lot of people’s attention. A lot of people are using Python to do integration/automation, and Essbase is definitely a part of the picture.

TBC Files for Bankruptcy: My tongue-in-cheek look at the woeful situation at everyone’s favorite beverage company!

Drillable Columns in Drillbridge: Lastly (but not least), one of my favorite features in Drillbridge and I think one of the standout features that you get when it comes to drilling into a web browser instead of a tab in your workbook: the ability to drill from a drill. With drillable columns, you can specify a subsequent view to drill to and the POV of the row (the global POV plus the key/values from that row) will be used to execute it. Many organizations are using this to drill into further/related journal detail, PDF files of invoices, and more. It’s a great feature!

Well, that’s the highlights from 2016. I’ll be looking forward to another productive blogging year with all sorts of exciting things regarding Dodeca, Drillbridge, the Next Generation Outline Extractor, Kscope17, and even a few secret projects I have been working on. Happy new year!

 

Guest Posts Welcome

I’ve talked with a fair number of you lately about various Oracle/Essbase/Hyperion topics and there are a lot of you out there with great ideas, news, or things to talk about but you don’t have your own blog. I just wanted to reiterate that if you want to write about something and get it out to folks, I’m happy to post it here. Just reach out to me and we’ll figure it out!

Drillbridge Update: Officially Announcing Drillbridge Plus

It has been awhile since an official post on Drillbridge, so today I am happy to say that there has been a lot going on with Drillbridge behind the scenes!

For those of you not familiar, Drillbridge is an innovative software application that runs as a service and makes it very easy to implement drill-through on Essbase cubes from Smart View, Hyperion Planning (including PBCS, including drilling from upper level members!), and Hyperion Financial Reporting. It accomplishes this by offering a robust and flexible way to translate a given cell’s point of view into a SQL query that it then executes and presents to the user. I have blogged about it extensively and presented on it at multiple conferences. In fact, during both of my Kscope presentations on Drillbridge I did a live demo starting with literally nothing but an Essbase server and relational table and then proceeded to download the zip file containing Drillbridge, install it, configure it, and use it to perform an actual drill-through request from Smart View in less than 15 minutes.

Over the past few years, Drillbridge has been a really great solution for many companies because it’s non-invasive (keep your existing cube and automation), flexible (drill to bottom, drill between columns, automatic hyperlinks, formatting, and more), offers an “insanely fast development time”, and works with most relational database technologies. The number of companies that have installed and deployed Drillbridge is absolutely staggering to me. I get emails almost every week from people about how easy it is to use. Many of the emails mention that they downloaded Drillbridge earlier in the day and go it working in a very short period of time. I never get tired of hearing that.

Versions:  Drillbridge Community Edition & Drillbridge Plus

Drillbridge started off life as a totally free piece of software, and to this day there it is still available in a free form. This edition is now called Drillbridge Community Edition and it can be downloaded from the Applied OLAP website. Later on, a licensed version of Drillbridge was offered for companies that wanted additional features, and usually more importantly, came with official software support/maintenance. This version was called Drillbridge Enterprise; this version has been renamed to Drillbridge Plus. Besides being officially supported by Applied OLAP, Drillbridge Plus has numerous features that the free version doesn’t have. This includes advanced paging/caching options, automation integration, PBCS support, custom plugins, and more. It’s a really great piece of software with some really powerful capabilities.

Future of Drillbridge

Drillbridge has an exciting roadmap (that I’m looking forward to blogging about more in the future) along with its sibling software applications at Applied OLAP, including the Dodeca Spreadsheet Management System, Dodeca Excel Add-In for Essbase, and the venerable, completely free Essbase Outline Extractor. We are dedicated to making Essbase (and the lives of people in the greater Essbase community) better. Please do not hesitate to contact us for additional information.

Vess + ODI to extract Essbase metadata

Well, apparently it’s Friday Fun Day over here in Seattle. I was going to head up to the mountains for the weekend but plans changed. So how about a little frankendriver Vess update with some ODI goodness thrown in?

Vess has some really interesting data integration possibilities that I’ve mentioned before, one of which is being able to drop it into Oracle Data Integrator and use it as you would any other JDBC driver. I hadn’t really tested this out though, until yesterday. It turns out that it works surprisingly well.

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Dynamic Calendar with Comments in Dodeca

I keep telling myself that I’m going to do more blog posts that are short and sweet, instead of these epic 6,000 word monsters, but I’m just having too much fun. Today’s article is going to be a little bit of thinking outside the box. Outside the box – but inside the grid. This is actually inspired by a use-case I saw a Dodeca customer present on at Kscope this year.

The basic original idea was “Why not make a calendar view in Dodeca?” Those of us that are heavy in the Essbase/Excel world are used to modeling financial data, but spreadsheets are used for countless different activities. Create a workout plan. Create a list of your favorite movies – and even make a calendar.

In the context of Dodeca, a calendar, whether it be static or dynamic, is a really cool use of the tool, if a bit unorthodox. A lot of financial departments and companies have very complex but methodical financial processes, particularly around the “close period”, and keeping everyone on track and coordinated is important. And companies that have Dodeca already have a very quick and very easy way to make dynamic spreadsheets centrally available to their users without having to email around a bunch of Excel files.

For today’s post I am going to start off with a basic calendar, then absolutely turbocharge it. The user is going to be able to select a month and year from Dodeca selectors and the calendar will dynamically update. We’re going to make it so we can add comments to each cell of the calendar. The comments will be associated with arbitrary intersections of our choosing (a great feature of Dodeca comments that I’ll go into extensively in this post). We’re going to accomplish this using the built-in Dodeca comments functionality. Along the way, I’m going to show off some of the power and versatility of Dodeca comments and use practically every option available.

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Dodeca Technique: Essbase View with Cascaded Transaction Details Tabs

A support request came in the other week regarding some help on how to setup a particular report. The user wanted to create a view where the first tab would be a normal “bread and butter” Dodeca view that is based on Essbase retrieval ranges (and where the data shown is based on the values of different selectors. Additionally, when the report is built, for every item on the view (in this case, different products), create a separate tab within the workbook that has transactional details for that product.

So, just to visualize this a bit more concretely, check this out:

The built view!

The built view!

The first tab in this workbook is just a normal everyday Dodeca view with Essbase data. Note the series of additional tabs after the first tab, though: One for each product at the bottom of the Sample/Basic database. These tabs are all generated dynamically when the report is run.

Our Chief Software Architect (hi Amy!) wound up putting together an example that showed this technique off. After I took a look at it, I knew that I wanted to show this technique off (with a couple of twists), because it shows an absolutely amazing cross-section of functionality that highlight the power and flexibility of Dodeca. Even better, this report can be accomplished without any custom programming at all. This is all out of the box functionality that neatly ties together the ability to retrieve Essbase data, relational data, cascaded tabs, hidden selectors, Excel formatting, and more.

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