Category Archives: presentations

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!

Oracle Open World 2016 Recap

As I mentioned a week or so ago, I made a last minute appearance at Oracle Open World this year. It was my first time attending and presenting at OOW. I actually didn’t catch too much of the conference as I only flew in on Wednesday and flew out on Thursday. Nevertheless, I had a bit of a whirlwind experience, but a very good one. While I hadn’t planned on it (I’m more of a Kscope guy), I am now looking forward to attending Open World next year.

As for the presentation I was part of, I think it went pretty well. Many thanks to Gabby Rubin of Oracle for coming up with the idea for the presentation and facilitating it. The presentation was on “Essbase Tools and Toys” and was meant to highlight, at a high level, some of the interesting things that folks such as myself are doing that involve the Essbase APIs or otherwise work with Essbase. The presentation discussed items created by me, Tim Tow, and Harry Gates. Additionally, Kumar Ramaiyer (also from Oracle) talked a bit about what’s coming with Essbase Cloud Service (EssCS).

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You’re going to love this.

I don’t usually talk about things I’m planning on doing or haven’t done yet, but I’m going to make an exception. I’m putting together a webinar for ODTUG (you are a member, right?) that I’ll be presenting in late October (October 28th to be exact, MARK YOUR CALENDARS!). The webinar will be on – you guessed it – Drillbridge (maybe I need to change this to Jason’s Drillbridge Blog…).

Thankfully, this won’t be my first presentation or webinar. Your humble author has presented on all manner of topics, including load rule optimization, Oracle Data Integrator tips and tricks, Dodeca, Essbase Web Services, and a few other things for good measure. I am delighted to report that this will be my first webinar on a piece of software I have created, though, so I’m pulling out all the stops and designing what I’m tentatively calling the Drillbridge WOW demo.

The overall webinar will be about an hour long, but what I want to do is have a section or segment where I kind of race to deploy drill-through functionality to a cube and show off how powerful the Drillbridge features and expression language can be.

So here’s what I’d like to do, all in one fell swoop: download and install it, configure a datasource, define a report, deploy the definition to a cube, AND use complex mappings/features, namely that the report itself will feature drill to bottom where the lowest level of the dimension needs to be mapped (such as from Jan to ’01’ or similar) and the other dimensions need some sort of similar mapping such as removing a prefix or otherwise altering the member from the point of view. On top of that, we’ll then flip on Smart Formatting with a different locale (French, anyone?), re-run the report, then download it to Excel. And to top it all off, I’ll do this all in 10 minutes or less.

That’s right – 10 minutes (or less!). That’s crazy. To think, I once spent hundreds of hours achieving this same result using different tools.

Sound good? Sound crazy? Well, the good news, as I said, is that this functionality all exists already and is ready to go in 1.3.0. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m just cleaning things up and testing them to ensure that Drillbridge is as robust as possible before releasing this major release.

I’m pretty excited, but more importantly I am excited to be able to help the larger Hyperion community provide drill-through to its users in an evolutionary and incremental way with this great little tool. Stay tuned for more.

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!

Thoughts on my Kscope Session ‘Practical Essbase Web Services’

My session went alright. I asked the audience to please be gentle on account of my first time presenting the deck and the material. They were quite gentle. I’d like to give a big huge shout out to my favoritest Essbase peeps in the world on Team Kroger for all coming and cheering me on.

My big takeaway from the audience was that a demo would have been helpful. Duly noted. I didn’t think there’d be time but the session actually came in a bit under time so there’s definitely a way to retool it and include a demo with real code and a real working example. So if I run this deck again I’ll be sure to incorporate that.

Many people were also very thankful for my apparent candor about the technology. I start off with a high-level overview of the available technologies for practically getting data out of of Essbase and come to the conclusion that while Essbase Web Services have a use case, it’s not one that I will personally be likely to use. This is largely due to my large investment in the infrastructure for Saxbi Server, which is based on the Essbase Java API.

One of my more recent thoughts about EWS is that it’s probably something that is largely intended to be used internally by Oracle and was something they knew they could clean up a bit and toss over the fence for other people to leverage. As I mentioned in the presentation, I hit some bumps in my research and will hope to see them cleaned up in future releases. Now that I have names with faces of a few more Oracle folks from the conference I’ll be looking forward to providing actual feedback to them instead of just bitching writing about it on my blog.

Anyway, as promised, here is the presentation for those of you that want to skim it. The bullets might be too high-level to be incredibly insightful but if you have any questions please feel free to mail me! I am happy to help and for extensive development needs I am available to consult through my firm.  I have some related code I will clean up and get into a GitHun repository as time permits.