My goodness – has another year gone by already? 2017 was busy, to say the least: trips/presentations/booths at Kscope17, Collaborate, and Oracle Openworld, new releases of Dodeca, the Dodeca Essbase Add-in for Excel, Drillbridge, the Outline Extractor, an upgrade to Oracle ACE status, lots of internal development going on, and more.
Speaking of Kscope, did you submit an abstract for Kscope18 yet? The submission deadline is very quickly approaching.
In any case, I covered a lot of ground on the blog this year, and as with last year, I thought it would be fun to take a look at the best and most popular posts of 2017!
Most Popular Posts
JDBC and JNDI Connections Compared
Oddly enough, the most popular post of 2017 was an article I wrote comparing, contrasting, and explaining the differences between JDBC and JNDI connections, with an emphasis on how it pertains to configuring Dodeca’s middle-tier components. I have to imagine that this actually garnered some non-Essbase/Hyperion attention since JNDI configuration can be a bit of a dark art and tough to figure out, especially for people that are only used to JDBC.
I’m either sad or happy that this ultra-technical post was the number one post of the year. I’m not sure yet.
Hacking the Essbase Java API to Run Application Calcs
In second place is another ultra-technical and almost entirely useless post in the literal sense of the word about how you can run old-school application-level calcs on an Essbase cube, even though EAS and the Java API conspire to make it seem like it was never actually a thing.
Essbase Renegade Members Revisited
Whatever happened to renegade members and the dream of being able to shovel almost imaginable garbage into a cube that will still tie out at the top of the house? I dig into the diminutive renegade member feature and give it some love.
Improvements to the Next Generation Outline Extractor
Hey, finally something useful. The next most popular post was about a raft of improvements and fixes to everyone’s favorite free tool, the outline extractor. The outline extractor continues to be a very popular download and possibly the most downloaded tool of its kind in the Essbase ecosystem. Some fun things are in store for this tool in 2018.
Essterm: the terminal based ad hoc client for Essbase
Rounding out the list of popular posts was my post detailing my latest flight of fancy and dubiously useful tool: Essterm a terminal based client for Essbase. Look, no one said that Essbase was sexy. So why not go full 80’s-neon-lime-green text-in the terminal with it? My favorite quote of all was from Peter Nitschke: “I thought it was fake until l realized that it would have been more work for you to fake it than to actually make it.”
Than you, Pete, I’ll take that as a compliment.
Honorable Mention
In the top trafficked pages for the entire website, a couple of other URLs jumped out in addition to the posts above. Both the category and tag URLs for MaxL were on the top 10 list. In other words, people are still really needing and hungry for MaxL content, need help with it, and doing things with it. This makes sense, of course. But it’s still interesting…
Honorable Mention – Older Posts
Also in the top 10 list of popular URLs were various old and older posts that are getting a lot of attention, interestingly enough. In order: a Do This/Not That post on Scenario dynamic calcs with regard to the previous year, a very old post on post on how to copy an Essbase application from one server to another (this is pre-LCM, maybe I should write an update…), some deeply researched analysis on a “nefarious” ODI issue that burns sequence values when using the MERGE update strategy (ah, memories), and a super throwback Essbase optimization story where I did a soup-to-nuts refactoring of a critical automation system for a Fortune 50 company to cut processing time down from 6 hours to 37 seconds (pre SSD, thankyouverymuch).
Here’s to 2018
May the year 2018 be even better than 2017 – I look forward again to seeing and talking with all of my esteemed Essbase colleagues in the upcoming year as we talk about all things Essbase, cloud, drill-through, spreadsheets, and more.