Category Archives: linux

GNU CoreUtils for Windows

Did you know that many Unix core programs are available as Windows executables? Because the code for these utilities is open source, there are a couple of different organizations that have taken the liberty of compiling them for the Windows platform and making them available. One such project is GnuWin32. If you want to, say, use common Unix text processing programs on Windows as part of your Hyperion automation, you definitely can. You would just install the programs on your server, probably add their folder to your system PATH, and then be able to call them like any other program.

Why would you want to do this? There are some really great programs available on Unix platforms that might be useful for some one-off processing you do as part of your automation. In the coming days I’m going to post a few examples of some interesting text processing examples you might do with these utilities that are inspired by Essbase/Hyperion. Of course, for those of you already running Linux/AIX, you should already be set (and of course, as a smug Mac user myself, I am good to go at least with my development machine…).

Another such project that otherwise makes Unix tools available on Windows is the Cygwin project, which you might want to check out too if you need to get this functionality on a Windows machine.

Using the Unix paste command to join files together by column

I can’t believe I didn’t know about command-line utility until very recently. I was doing a little research on some text processing utilities and came across the “paste” command. As a Mac user I have this installed already, and this appears to be a fairly common LInux/Unix tool as well. It’s part of a suite of text processing utilities that are fairly standard. Oddly, I am very familiar with the likes of sed, grep, awk, and so on, and yet have not stumbled upon this.

Anyway, imagine the following files, starting with names.txt:

Jason
Cameron
Tim

And numbers.txt:

555-1234
555-9876
555-2468

Then we just run paste:

paste names.txt numbers.txt

And we get this:

Jason   555-1234
Cameron 555-9876
Tim     555-2468

Paste just marries the files up by column, reading from each file. You can supply more than two files.

I don’t have an immediate need for this utility for processing Essbase data, but it just might come in handy someday, so I’m going to keep it in my back pocket. And for you Windows users out there, well, you know the deal: get cygwin or whatever the latest and greatest Unix-on-Windows environment is.

Hyperion Essbase rejected record automation one-liner

I’m just cleaning up some old files here and came across a post from quite some time ago that never got published. Whoops. This was before I officially released the Rejected Record Summary Java routine for analyzing/summarizing a Hyperion data load rejected record file.

So imagine row after row of something like the following:

\\ Member Ac.0170001 Not Found In Database
09 0170001 900 11 .00

\\ Member Ac.0170001 Not Found In Database
09 0170001 904 11 .00

\\ Member Ac.0170001 Not Found In Database
09 0170001 905 11 .00

\\ Member Ac.0170001 Not Found In Database
09 0170001 906 11 .00

You could run the following one-liner on it:

grep \\\\ sample1.txt | sed -e 's/\\\\ Member //' -e 's/Not Found In Database//' | uniq -c | sort -nr

And get something like the following:

24 Ac.0453902
24 Ac.0397511
24 Ac.0171026
24 Ac.0170926
24 Ac.0170126
23 Ac.0909100
23 Ac.0901100
23 Ac.0201220
23 Ac.0170326

Now, hopefully you aren’t getting any rejected records (and certainly not this many, but then again, it’s just test data), but no matter what, your Hyperion automation practices should include regularly inspecting your rejected records, if any, and this might help if you happen to work it in to some automation.

This example of course presumes your Hyperion automation server is running Unix command tools, so alternatively you could install Cygwin or something similar on Windows if you script there. And for complete platform independence, check out my Java library!

Linux troubleshooting guide for system admins!

Most, but not all of my Essbase administration experience is on Windows servers. Linux support appeared years ago and has gotten much better – and more common – as the years have progressed. I ran Linux as my desktop for many years (Slackware, Fedora, Gentoo [shudder], Ubuntu, and more) before falling in love with OS X so I’m pretty comfortable on a Linux command line (and an OS X command line for that matter). But I came across this server troubleshooting article awhile back that has some absolutely awesome stuff in it, much of it new to me. If you need to get into a Linux system and start digging around to see what’s going on, this is an absolutely awesome guide.