Category Archives: kscope

Happy New Year & Best Posts of 2017

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!

Continue Reading…

Advanced integration with PBJ Java PBCS REST API library

This week’s blog posts are all about the upcoming Kscope16 conference and relate to the presentations I’m part of. This year I am co-presenting with Cameron Lackpour on on-premise Planning versus PBCS and talking about some different use cases. My particular focus for this presentation is how you might use the PBCS REST API with Java.

Over the last year I have put together a Java library that works with the PBCS REST API. It has the following characteristics:

  • Open Source (Apache Software License version 2.0)
  • Doesn’t depend on any Oracle libraries or code
  • High-quality, readable, fluent API

In my opinion, all of these goals have been met. Additionally, as of today, PBJ (PBCS Java Client) is available in Maven Central. What this means is that if you or your team programs in Java and use Maven for dependency management, you are just a few clicks away from being able to use this library.

For an overview of why you might want to use PBJ and how it compares to other scripting languages you might want to use instead (such as Groovy, Python, and more), come check out the presentation!

Today, however, I want to show how easy it is to incorporate PBJ into a Java program and do something quasi-practical. So the rest of this article will be oriented towards programmers, but for those of you that have employees or teammates that would be more likely to do the programming aspects of things, keep them in mind and send them a link.

First, let’s assume we’ve already created a new empty Maven project in Eclipse. Your experience will vary if you use IntelliJ IDEA or some other IDE. In this example I happen to be using Springsource Tool Suite (STS), which is pretty much the same as Eclipse.

pbj-up-and-running-01-empty-project

Next we need to open up our pom.xml (project definition file) to add a new dependency. You can do this manually by editing the XML file itself, but there’s a nice enough GUI in Eclipse that makes things even easier:

pbj-up-and-running-02-pom-editor

Next we need to go find the PBJ library. As I mentioned earlier, PBJ is available in the global Maven Central repository. If you have Maven set to update its index periodically or upon startup of your IDE, then you should be up to date and can find the PBJ library. As of right now the version of PBJ is just 1.0.1.

pbj-up-and-running-03-pbj-maven-dependency

Select the library, click OK, and then save the file. The PBJ library and its dependencies are added to your project.

pbj-up-and-running-04-pbj-added

Now we can create a new main class to test things out. At this point it’s just life as normal for the Java developer:

pbj-up-and-running-05-new-main-class

Just for good measure (and tradition!) let’s put in a simple code to print out “Hello world”, and run it. Note the output in the bottom middle pane:
pbj-up-and-running-06-hello-world

At this point we have project setup, we have all of the necessary PBJ files (and some additional transitive dependencies), and we are ready to write some Java code that uses methods in the PBJ library. The code to write is shown below:

pbj-up-and-running-07-refresh-cube

In the code you can see the following happen:

  1. A connection details object is created
  2. A connection to PBCS is made
  3. Ask for the list of available apps
  4. Print out the list of available apps
  5. Get a reference to a particular app (“Vision”)
  6. Call the refreshCube method on the app reference to refresh the cube
  7. Print message after cube refresh

It’s hard to imagine this code being much simpler. If might look like greek if you’re not familiar with programming or Java, but to a Java programmer, this will be readily comprehensible and its intent obvious. PBJ supports most of the REST API – importing data, metadata, business rules, and more.

To see a specific use-case and hear wry commentary from myself and Cameron, please swing by our presentation. We’ll cover an example of PBJ (don’t worry, it’s higher level than this!) but more generally some facets of administration of on-prem versus PBCS will be discussed as well. I think the presentation will really appeal to many different user groups.

Kscope16 is almost here!

Here we are again, just less than a week before Kscope16. I say this every year but this year’s Kscope promises to be the best yet, and I’m starting to get really pumped. There are a lot of exciting things going on in the greater Essbase world right now, and even my own little corner of this world is quite exciting (to me at least), including such fun things:

All of these items will be present at the conference, in one form or another. Dodeca will be featured in several presentations this year as customers talk about their implementation successes. Drillbridge has its own presentation again this year, given by yours truly, the outline extractor has a session put on by Tim, and the PBJ library will make up about half of a presentation with Cameron talking about on-prem versus PBCS.

That all said, this week I’m going to blog daily about some of the cool things in the world of Dodeca, Drillbridge, the Outline Extractor, and more. Stay tuned for a busy week!

Towards Spreadsheet Management

I follow quite a few Hyperion related blogs. Years ago there weren’t too many of them but now I’m quite pleased to be able to follow dozens of them with my RSS reader of choice. The other day I read an article posted by Edward Roske titled “7 Signs Your EPM Is Lagging Behind Your Competition”. Edward has been working with Hyperion for a long time and runs one of the more well known consulting firms, so he has seen quite a bit. And his thoughts are insightful. While I was reading through the article I couldn’t help but read it with a “Dodeca colored lens”, if you will.

For example, one of the signs is that strategy is planned verbally or in spreadsheets. The interesting thing here is that the spreadsheet modeling paradigm itself is a robust and essential. Where things go sideways is with how the files themselves are managed (and mismanaged).

For example, consider a typical analyst or a power user analyst that creates a spreadsheet: some pulls from Essbase, perhaps some relational data pasted in, some formulas, multiple tabs, formatting, and all that fun stuff. So far so good (well, not really, but let’s say it is). Now they email it out. Some feedback comes in from the CFO. Now the sheet Profitability Q3 2016 becomes something like Profitability Q3 2016 – Revised. More feedback comes in. More meetings. Now it’s Profitability Q3 2016 (2). Teresa down the hall needs a copy, so the analyst copes it to the LAN. Teresa makes some changes but the analyst has a lock on the file, so she saves Profitability Q3 2016 (2) – Teresa. I’ve seen some pretty heinous file management in my time.

This is an all too common scenario in the world of spreadsheets. Things get ugly quickly. And this is to say nothing of links across tabs and sheets and a host of other bad practices that make the situation even more error prone and hard to manage.

Another sign from Edward’s blog is that Excel is the key enabling technology in your FP&A department. I agree completely with the sentiment here. Note that Excel is specifically mentioned – not the spreadsheet paradigm itself. Excel as the enabler of FP&A is yesterday; the flexibility of spreadsheets combined with the power of Essbase is tomorrow.

Some of Edward’s other points such as there is only one version of the budget and budgets favor precision over timeliness are also spot on in terms of their accuracy.

Enter Dodeca

To reiterate from the beginning of this post, I couldn’t help but read this blog article while thinking about Dodeca. It’s because Dodeca takes all of the best things about spreadsheets: their power, their expressiveness, their familiarity to so many finance users, leverages the power of Essbase, leverages data from relational databases, and marries it all up in one cohesive interface. It’s saving numerous people and companies a lot of time: time that is not spent laboriously refreshing report decks, time that is not spent copying files around, time that is not spent emailing files, time that is not spent posting things to SharePoint or the LAN, and even a fair bit of time on end-user training.

I’m really looking forward to this year’s Kscope in Chicago. There are multiple presentations by Applied OLAP customers on how they built solutions with Dodeca while increasing productivity and reducing risk. And of course, we at Applied OLAP will have a booth. Please swing by and say hello!

 

 

Kscope16 sessions I’m looking forward to

I was looking through the list of sessions coming up for Kscope16 to get an initial idea of what I want to attend. And, wow. There are so many incredible sounding presentations this year. I seem to say this every year, but the content this year seems just especially strong.

That said, a few sessions jumped right out at me as things I absolutely want to attend:

How ADT Gained User Acceptance in Its Delivery of Essbase and Oracle General Ledger Data to Business Users
Should be a very solid real-world example of using the Dodeca Spreadsheet Management System (disclosure: I am an Applied OLAP employee… but I’d be attending this anyway!).

Torn Between Two Worlds: Is Essbase a Business or an IT Tool
Joe always does a nice job on presentations, and I’m looking forward to one that might be more philosophical than technical, especially as the nuance of where Essbase resides (and is therefore managed, used, and more) is a very important issue that a lot of companies struggle with. As a developer, the most successful Essbase environment I have participated one is where Essbase was ‘owned’ by Finance or a line of business. On the other hand, I have done work for organizations where Essbase was managed (and sometimes mismanaged) by IT. But the reverse has also been true…

Essbase Does It, but Dodeca Makes It Easy
Dodeca’s success in the enterprise has resulted in an unprecedented number of Kscope sessions this year as more customers adopt this powerful technology. This presentation is by a customer – St. Jude Medical – and I am very curious to hear about their successes, particularly with respect to being long-time Essbase users.

A Stomp Through the Tulips of Essbase Cloud Service
Steve Liebermensch of Oracle always puts on good, information-packed presentations and I am confident this will be another one that I won’t want to miss.

Case Study: Reduce the Kroger Essbase Footprint without Sacrificing ANYTHING! And Have Room for Growth…
Kroger is near and dear to my heart. It’s where I started (literally) – in a small division, bagging groceries – and eventually worked up to finance where I helped deploy Essbase across the entire enterprise. This presentation immediately caught my eye, owing to its co-presenter. The main presenter is Kadee Rodriguez, who I never had the pleasure of working with directly). The co-presenter is Christine Blea. During my time at Kroger, Christine administered Essbase for another division, and it wasn’t uncommon for us to call or email and share some knowledge, calc script, formulas, or whatnot. If I’m not mistaken, this is Christina’s first time presenting (or at least co-presenting!) at Kscope. In any case, I just gotta go see what my favorite grocer is up to and cheer on the team.

 

And I’ll definitely be attending my own sessions:

Drillbridge: The Easy Way to Implement Hyperion Drill-through
Drilbridge is back for its second Kscope presentation. Last year I did a “soup to nuts” live demo of Drillbridge – starting at literally downloading the ZIP file from the web, unzipping it, installing Drillbridge, making a custom report, deploying it to Essbase, and using drill-through from Smart View – in exactly 14 minutes. Let’s just say that Drillbridge has learned a few new tricks since then.

Hey Mom! Look What I Built with the Essbase Java API!
This session is ostensibly presented by Tim Tow and Harry Gates as co-presenter. Which I guess makes me the co-co-presenter. In any case, this is a bit of a hybrid format presentation were we can talk about the Essbase Java API and some of the interesting things we’re doing with it.

On-Premises Planning vs. PBCS: Common Administrative Tasks Compared, Contrasted, and Recommended
Cameron and I will take a look at on-prem versus PBCS. My angle on this will be more on the REST API for PBCS and how its usage compares to traditional ways of implementing things.

Kscope15 Presentation Preview: ODI Workhorses

The other day I mentioned my goals for attendees for my upcoming ODTUG presentation on Drillbridge. Today I’m going to talk about my goals for my presentation on Oracle Data Integrator (ODI).

Over the last few years I have presented on ODI a handful of times. My main presentation on it has been highlighting a success story with it, where ODI was used to clean up and facilitate a lot of automation and ETL jobs for a health services company that [as you can imagine] has tons of data flying around everywhere. This previous presentation was more of a high-level affair, where I talked very generically about what the benefits of ODI were over the previous solution. Wanting to add a little more technical meat to the presentation, I appended what started off as a small section at the end where I take a look at just how ODI works under the covers.

While the “business” or high-level part of the presentation was all well and good, I found myself getting really excited to explain just how awesome the workings of the details of ODI ETL jobs were, and what started out as a 10-minute flight of fancy into the lower depths of something technical has now been promoted, as it were, to full on presentation.

In other words, I am going to spend an entire presentation literally tearing apart a single ODI interface, explaining why the steps are sequences the way they are, how to build idiomatic ODI interfaces, the affect of various options (journalization, query hints, delete all vs. truncate, etc.), update strategies, and more. I’m also going to marry up what is ostensibly an IT tool with various concepts from computer science, including the notion of idempotence (and why it’s a good thing).

With any luck, the attendee coming to this presentation will have a new or expanded understanding of how interfaces/mappings work, feel comfortable with modifying knowledge modules, and learn a trick or two when it comes to debugging ODI jobs. This will be a nuts and bolts, technical deep dive. While it’s ostensibly an advanced content presentation, I believe that people with even only a cursory familiarity should benefit from it as well. If you haven’t worked with ODI at all but are curious (and intrepid!) about what it can do, I think you’ll also benefit. So to all of my pure-Hyperion colleagues that haven’t dipped their toes in the ODI pool just yet, this is a great chance to hop on a different track and expand your horizons – I hope to see you there!

Kscope15 Presentation Preview: Drillbridge

I am very pleased to be able to say that I have two presentations at Kscope15. One of my presentations is on Drillbridge, the other presentation is a deep dive on how interfaces work in ODI. I’m going to really have a chance to geek out on both of these, especially the ODI presentation.

As for the Drillbridge presentation, I want to give a brief overview not just of what I am going to cover, but what I hope to accomplish for those in attendance.

This Drillbridge presentation will be an elaboration of my original webinar. I’m going to introduce the attendee to what Drillbridge is and how it works (of course). Then, as with the webinar, I will download and deploy Drillbridge in real-time, showing off just how easy it is to get drill-through up and running. The original webinar had a stated goal of deploying drill-through in 10 minutes or less. Not only was drill-through deployed to a cube in less time (five minutes!), I used the spare time to redeploy drill-through on the same cube but with drill-to-bottom enabled in the Time dimension (and still had some time left over). Yeah, it’s that good.

Since I’ll have more time than the webinar, I’ll also be able to show off the handful of awesome features that have been added in the last year: custom mappings, support for Linux, custom plugins, server-side result paging, smart formatting, drill-from-drill, custom stylesheets, and more.

After the presentation, attendees should have a firm grasp of how Drillbridge works, how it can be used, and how implement drill-through in simple situations. More importantly, they should be heading back to their respective companies excited about how they can now deliver a solid win to their users without breaking the bank or having to re-architect their systems.

There are a lot of great presentations this year, but I hope if you’re interested in drill-through or Drillbridge you will be able to attend!

Kscope15 – Two Presentations

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.

Upcoming Webinar: Practical Essbase Web Services

Upcoming webinar, as in happening tomorrow! This webinar will be tomorrow, August 6th, at 11AM PST.

I am conducting a webinar tomorrow called Practical Essbase Web Services. This is mostly a re-presentation of my webinar in New Orleans for Kscope a couple of months ago. As with before, I’ll be taking a tour of the different connectivity options for getting to Hyperion and Essbase data programmatically, then jumping in to the Essbase Web Services component that has started being available as of version 11.1.2.2.

This is a bit of short notice but I wanted to invite anyone that reads this blog to attend. As with my ODI webinar a while back, we’ll be recording it so that it can be watched at your own time, but definitely attend if you are interested in this topic or want to ask some questions at the end.

The link to register can be found here. Wish me luck and I will hope to see you there!

Kscope13 Session Thoughts: Joe Aultman sprinkles magic Groovy dust on the Essbase Java API

There were lots of great sessions this year, as always. I tried to get outside my comfort zone a little bit and take in some new content. I thought over the next few posts I’d shine a little bit of light on a few of the sessions that were notable to me.

Fixing What’s Broken in the Essbase JAPI and Reaching New Heights with Groovy

As a programmer, this was right up my alley, naturally. This session was presented by Joe Aultman. Joe is using Groovy to do some automation that would otherwise be done with the venerable Java API. Joe, if you’re reading this, super cool presentation. In my mind I saw this presentation as being about two things: issues with a particular API and issues with a language – namely a lot of “boilerplate” Java code.

As an aside, there is something of a renaissance happening in the Java world with respect to the JVM. As a computer science guy (go Dawgs!) and general purpose programming nerd I have been keeping abreast of this language and several others, particularly Clojure. In a nutshell, what’s going on is this: Sun (now Oracle, of course) created Java many years ago. Java runs inside the JVM, or Java Virtual Machine. Whereas with a language like C or C++ you might compile your C source code into an executable meant to run on a particular system, in Java you just always compile down to the same code that in turn runs on a JVM. In other words, in theory, as long as you have a JVM available for a platform (Windows, Linux, OS X, etc), then you should be able to run the same old byte code. Hence the original notion, “Write once, run everywhere.” In practice there were and are many quirks to this, but by and large the statement is true – which is why generally speaking you are able to download Java JAR and class files that work irrespective of the underlying operating system (rather than separate downloads for Linux, OS X, and so on).

As it turns out, the JVM is useful for more than just Java. New languages that are able to compile down to code than runs on the JVM are able to stand on the shoulders of giants and leverage an incredible amount of infrastructure that has already been written and battle tested. Some of the more notable languages running in the JVM are Groovy, Scala (kind of a streamlined Java), Clojure (a “Lisp” dialect), and Jython (Python running inside of a JVM).

Getting back to Joe’s presentation, I think it’s fair to say that Joe is enamored with what’s called “syntactic sugar” in the programming world. This essentially means that a language provides features or inherent abilities that reduce the need for verbose boilerplate code. Groovy more or less delivers the goods in this regard. Furthermore, Joe has created some idiomatic Groovy enhancements specifically for the Essbase Java API that reduce the need to include some “clutter code”.

I definitely liked what I saw, although as an apparently diehard Essbase Java API guy I don’t think I’ll be switching anytime soon (you’ll convert me yet, Joe!). If you didn’t make the presentation then definitely give his slides a look. Joe is working through the red tape in his legal department to be able to post his code under an open source license. Joe, if you haven’t picked a license yet, give me a call and I’ll help point you in the right direction if I can.

In any case, nice job on the presentation, man.

In other news, I have been working a little bit on the side on a wrapper for the Essbase Java API that repents for some of its sins and modernizes the usage a bit more. This is tentatively called Java Essbase Antikythera Layer (JEAL). If you use the Essbase Java API at all you might really like how this simplifies your life. It’s unfortunately a labor of love that I can’t dedicate a lot of time to so if you want to help please drop me a line!