Stupid Programming Tricks No. 31 — Have you ever created a Unicode Planning application?

Don’t.  Don’t do it.

Or at least don’t if you work in a Latin character country like the Good Ol’ U-S-of-A. And it ain’t Unicode, not really, but instead it’s UTF-8. Yr. Obt. Svt. is not going to try to even attempt to explain what UTF-8 is and instead suggests that you enjoy Joel On Software’s explanation. I encourage you to Read The Whole Thing.™ as any blog post that goes into high- and low-endian byte orders has to be good. At least I think so but perhaps I need to get a life. Don’t be intimidated (or bored beyond description) – he really did write an excellent article and I think I almost understand it. Almost.

A note: Planning cloud applications are all Unicode but this is an on-premises tale, even in 2020.

Safely ensconced in the on-premises world (which isn’t going away any time soon I might note), why shouldn’t you create a (not-really) Unicode application? Because this when one tries to import Essbase data (this is on-premises) from a not-really Unicode application to a plain old “normal” one. Bugger. But why?

A screenshot of a social media post Description automatically generated

Test was created in Unicode, Development and Production were not. Of course. So when it

A n00b’s OneStream Journey No. 3 — OneStream XF Relational Blending 101, part 1

Introduction

This post is proof that my quite meager salesmanship skills are sometimes successful in convincing others to do my work. This time round, that means that my colleague Mike Gialanella agreed to write a guest post on XF’s relational blending. Thanks, Mike, for giving me the week off. And oh yeah, Gentle Reader, you too should thank Mike for writing about a really exciting and unique tool bit of functionality.

And with that, heeeeeerrrreeee’s Mike.

XF Relational Blending 101

When Cameron Lackpour asks you to write a guest blog post, the answer is yes. It is one of those things that you just can’t say no to. If Santa Claus asked you to deliver Christmas presents to kids-in-need, you would need an incredibly good reason to decline such a request.

XF networking event Nov 2017. Me on the right, Santa on the left.

So, for all you technical and finance experts that are attracted to Cameron’s wit and wisdom this blog, here’s my best-most-humble effort to deliver, by request of the man Cameron himself…. here you go:

OneStream XF is a unified SmartCPMTM platform solution, it is not a siloed set of solutions that are fused together.