Monthly Archives: March 2017

Dodeca Workbook Script documentation available online

I kind of posted this on the down-low earlier this week but got outed by my auto-tweet feature, where it got picked up by Oracle EPM Blogs and a few others, so I thought I should just write about this for real.

Earlier this week, the new documentation for the Dodeca Workbook Script functionality went online. In case you’re not familiar, Workbook Scripts are part of Dodeca Spreadsheet Management System’s event-driven extensibility model. You can kind of think of it as an elegant blend of the best aspects of Microsoft Access macros and Visual Basic, but designed from day 1 to make it easy to facilitate really sophisticated functionality in views that contain Essbase, SQL, or MDX data (or all three on the same sheet!)

The documentation contains a full index, all methods/overloads, events, and functions. It represents one of the first major steps towards my goal of making incredibly high quality documentation and online resources available for people that are developing with Dodeca. In the future I am hoping to get even more documentation online with samples and other resources that make developing even better.

I’ll be at Collaborate 2017 in Las Vegas, say hello!

Lots of exciting things going on right now – I’ll be in Las Vegas next week for the Collaborate 2017 conference. Originally I was just giving one presentation, but now I have three (yay!). I am going to be presenting on the PBCS REST API and in particular how to use it via the high-quality, open source PBCS REST API Java client, PBJ. I am also going too be presenting on “Essbase Tools & Toys” – a whirlwind overview of some of the free tools that make Essbase better that I have created over the years (including Drillbridge, Cubedata, Vess, Camshaft, Thriller, and more), and on the Dodeca Spreadsheet Management System.

Additionally, Applied OLAP will have a booth in the Hyperion section of the exhibit hall, which is where I’ll ostensibly be when I’m not doing presentations. Please swing by and say hello!

Handy Essbase Data Audit Log Query for Dodeca Repository

I’m putting together a simple Dodeca view that shows information from Dodeca’s data audit log tables. One of Dodeca’s really nice Essbase-specific functionalities is that it logs all user inputted changes to Essbase data. This comes in handy for many organizations so they are able to tell when something changed, what changed, who changed it, and what the old value is. Because the same tables are used for every single cube in the system and every cube can have different dimensionality, Dodeca uses a flexible table structure to record all of the dimension names and members that changed. A naive query against these tables will give you multiple rows for the same data point (one for each member in the POV), but I wanted something quick and easy to consolidate to a single row per data item changed.

Most of my own Dodeca servers use MySQL for the repository database (although it’s common to use SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, and others). I discovered a really great MySQL-specific function called GROUP_CONCAT that is able to join fields from multiple rows, and it works great. Here’s my Data Audit Log query:

SELECT 
    AUDITLOG.SERVER,
    AUDITLOG.APPLICATION,
    AUDITLOG.CUBE,
    AUDITLOG.USER_ID,
    AUDITLOG.CREATED_DATE,
    GROUP_CONCAT(DP.MEMBER SEPARATOR ', ') AS MEMBER_NAMES,
    GROUP_CONCAT(DP.ALIAS SEPARATOR ', ') AS ALIASES,
    IFNULL(ITEMS.OLD_VALUE, '#Missing') AS OLD_VALUE,
    ITEMS.NEW_VALUE
FROM 
    DATA_AUDIT_LOG_DATAPOINTS DP, 
    DATA_AUDIT_LOG_ITEMS ITEMS, 
    DATA_AUDIT_LOG AUDITLOG
WHERE 
    DP.AUDIT_LOG_ITEM_NUMBER = ITEMS.AUDIT_LOG_ITEM_NUMBER AND
    ITEMS.AUDIT_LOG_RECORD_NUMBER = AUDITLOG.AUDIT_LOG_RECORD_NUMBER
GROUP BY
    ITEMS.AUDIT_LOG_ITEM_NUMBER
ORDER BY
    CREATED_DATE DESC

And here’s a view from a SQL tool:

A query for viewing Dodeca’s data audit log tables for Essbase data

I went ahead and used the concatenation function twice – once for the regular member names, and again for the aliases. Not every member of every intersection has an alias, but fortunately the function handles it just fine. So now I have everything on one line exactly like I wanted.