I am a software developer who regards the output of the software development process as skin to the woodworker making a fine jewelry box, the master chef perfecting a plate, or the musician crafting a song. I believe solutions should be elegant, robust, deceivingly simple, and polished. I take the same approach to code with my various open source Essbase related Java projects, GitHub projects, and perhaps more importantly, the critical filter through which I see and use Hyperion, Essbase, and related software.

To that end and just for my own amusement, I will be henceforth be writing about various “Essbase and Hyperion papercuts” that I see and perceive. This is in similar spirit to the Ubuntu Papercuts project that occurred some time ago. The idea was that in the aggregate, a lot of little issues start to become troublesome and lead to a worse user experience. As with many pieces of software, Essbase in general has this problem. It’s an awesome piece of software, but then has all these little warts and quirks. It’s like NASA puts a man on the moon (this is the scientific equivalent of Essbase at its heart) and then when stepping out of the lander on the surface of the moon, trips on a faulty stair leading to the surface (this is like any number of little Essbase quirks I run into).

That being said, if there is some small, seemingly trivial and inconsequential Essbase/Hyperion (or Planning, or FDM, or ODI, or…) issue that just really grinds your gears, let me know about it! This blog gets a few hits from Oracle headquarters, so maybe, just maybe, someone will see it and we can all make the world’s best EPM software just a little bit cooler.