Enterprise Transformations, It's all About Performance Management

There are times when we need to delete all the Alias, Descriptions, Formulas, UDAs, Smart Lists, or Attribute Binding etc. from an existing planning application. All these requirements are achievable, if you want to do it at once one of the options is: our good old Outline Load utility. In such scenarios "<NONE>" is your best companion! While loading members all we need to do is to add <NONE>  in the required column, this will remove all the existing associations and values. Let's take a scenario, as a last minute requirement your client needs cross tab reporting, your solution architect has decided to use Attributes instead of UDAs, as  repercussions you need to delete all the UDAs, change all the calcs etc. Now, in order to delete all UDAs you can: 1. Go to each member and delete UDA,  2. Go to relational database and do some unsupported background changes,  3. Use LCM, 4. Use the Outline Load utility, Here, we will be discussion

The FIX…ENDFIX command block restricts database calculations to a subset of the database. All commands nested between the FIX and ENDFIX statements are restricted to the specified database subset. What I know about FIX is, it takes the union of the members which are in different FIX or (Hypothetically) are repeated in the same fix, so even if you mention FIX("E1","E1","E1") it will work on "E1" and just once, not thrice! . Say you have fully populated data cube and you need to delete the data for one Entity(say E1), the fastest thing you will probably write is: FIX(@REMOVE(@RELATIVE("Entity",0), "E1")   CLEARBLOCK ALL; ENDFIX Yes, its done! This will remove the data for all the level 0 entities but not for E1. This will happen assuming there is no alternate hierarchy. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Lets go in detail: the

Most of the times we have to refer data from one cube to another. There are many ways in which you can transfer or refer data from a cube, few  of the most popular ways are: 1. Create a partition, 2. Create a XREF, 3. Create an export and import script, etc. Every way has its own pros and cons. Today our discussion will be focused on XREF. Trust me if you are working with Planning applications you are dealing with XREFs all the time. If there is a  planning application with multiple plan types, Planning automatically creates the XREFs between cubes for the members. If we have a planning application with two plan types, say REV and INCSTMT and we have a stored member say "OtherRevs". Let's say this member has the source plan type as REV and its enabled for both the PlanTypes. In this case Planning will create this member in both the cubes, however in REV cube it will be a stored member but in INCSTMT it will be a dynamic calc member with an auto generated XREF. Th

How many times my DB is refreshed from planning interface?  In order to get answer to this question you have to deploy O2B, create one additional table and a trigger on the Planning Database. Here I am taking an example to create trigger on MS SQL Server, same can be done on the Oracle Db too. Create an additonal table with the Name HSP_LOCK_O2B, this table should have the same set of columns including an additional one for time stamp, its name should be DateAndTime. You can create the following trigger on the HSP_LOCK table: CREATE  TRIGGER For_DB_Refresh_delete ON HSP_LOCK    FOR INSERT          AS    declare @Object_Id int;    declare @Session_Id int;    declare @User_Id int;    declare @Server_Id int;        select @Object_Id=i.Object_Id from inserted i;    select @Session_Id=i.Session_ID from inserted i;    select @User_Id=i.User_ID from inserted i;    select @Server_Id=i.server_id from inserted i;        -- Insert rec

No I don't want to touch my existing up and running EPM environment and I want to explore O2B, what should I do? You can Deploy it on any machine, why don't use Apache for that! 1.      Download the Apache Tomcat for windows 32/ 64 bit . Apache Tomcat can be download from the given below URL , for both the 32 bit and 64 bit windows. http://tomcat.apache.org/download-70.cgi . You can choose: 32-bit/64-bit Windows Service Installer   2.      Install of the Apache Tomcat -: After the download is finish  and run the Apache setup.   We have to click on  the Service Startup and Native option under the Tomcat , and then click on the next Button. Default the server shutdown port is 8005 and Http / 1.1 Connector Port is 8080 which can be changed  and we can give  a User Name and Password for the installing the Apache Tomcat , it is optional . Select the path for Java Virtual Machine and path should be of Jre , if the JRE or JDK 

There are  times when we have to query the Hyperion Planning Application's relational database to get the Auditing reports, alas! we don't have an option to get them from our Planning interface. Many times we have wondered how to get the list of dimension members, data forms, there layouts, users security reports, task list status, supporting details, account annotations etc. Moreover, a report of a Planning's metadata refresh  to essbase, who made it, when was it refreshed last time. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we can get a small report for this? What if I say I have created a simple web based utility which can take care of all this and even more! Ladies and gentleman introducing  our own O2B Utility . Its a utility that is created out of the common needs of every individual who uses Hyperion Planning in some way or the other. 1.  A very simple deployment, you can start be up and running on this utility in minutes, 2.  A lot faster then fetching the reports

There are few things which we need to know about O2B before we go further. There will be two kinds of users for this utility: 1. Admin 2. Reporting Admin user will first setup the environment for all the reporting users. At a time O2B can be connected to one planning application, however admin can change the connection information to different planning application, if needed. This change can be done at run time. O2B Stores the O2B Admin, Reporting user information, JDBC URL and DB related information in O2B.properties files. The only (optional) pre-requisite is to create a System Environment variable which will help you in choosing the default location of the properties file. Remember as its a system variable you need to restart the machine in order to activate the variable. Good part is you can skip that step if you want to, but doing that O2B will automatically create nullO2B.properties files in a default location (In case of weblogic under domains, in case of Tomcat und