Tag: Planning

A Free Form Planning aka Essbase SaaS Journey — part 2, loading from LCM

Whoopsie

In my last exciting post, I stated:

Whoopsie, that’s not right. Bugger. Why? ‘Cos my Younger Taller Smarter and Definitely Better Looking Brother From Totally Different Parents noted:

Whoopsie. That’s usage of that word three times (so far). Surely some kind of record in a technical blog?

It’s up to you decide which is the bigger whoopsie: me getting it wrong or Celvin reading LinkedIn on vacation. Celvin, buddy, if you’re commenting on my many technical (and otherwise, frankly) mistakes, errors, and own goals, surely that can wait for your return to the grindstone?

My mea culpas aside, let’s see what happens when I load Sample.Basic from an LCM file. I’m not going to do this step by step as you’ve already hopefully read that bit.

Let’s look at that LCM file again

Data

A screenshot of a computer Description automatically generated

Ooooh, in addition the outline file, there’s something called Data. Let’s open that up:

A screenshot of a cell phone Description automatically generated

Oooh, again. That’s all of the data. See the fourth row from the bottom and the “100”? That’s a product total. LCM doesn’t export the PAG/IND files (apparently at one time it did per Celvin and I sort of remember that) but instead text, I believe because it can be

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A Free Form Planning aka Essbase SaaS — part 1, creating an app

Essbase as διαχείριση επιδόσεων των επιχειρήσεων or Essbase as τη βάση δεδομένων?

Free Form Planning as a product name? Really? Yeah. No. Free Form Planning is really Essbase SaaS. I don’t think Oracle’s EPM product management team cast themselves as Greeks seeking to enter the city state of Troy through subterfuge, but make no mistake: Free Form Planning is Essbase, it is Software as a Service, and it is an application option within the Enterprise EPM product sku that you really, really, really ought to look at.

A close up of a horse Description automatically generated

Most definitely not the Oracle EPM product management and development teams. Maybe.

Don’t believe me? This post is but the first of a multipart series on Free Form Planning as I make my case for FFP (I am so over writing the full name, cf. my well-known laziness and also remember this is really Essbase).

Before I document this first pass at creating an Essbase SaaS aka FFP application, I should note that the below is not the only way to create an application and it has twists and turns. As noted, this will be a series of posts on how this works.

With that, let’s create the app.

You’ve Got Possibilities

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My take on OGB Appreciation Day: An Essbase Hacker’s POV

“Smart boy, doesn’t follow instructions, must try harder”

Pretty much every teacher I tortured with my intransigence and folly gladly received tutelage from as a wee lad noted that while I had a certain level of base intelligence, (note that I didn’t use words like, “overmuch”, “gratifyingly high”, or even just, “barely adequate for the purpose at hand”) I really, really, really wasn’t terribly good at following instructions. It’s a skill that alas seems to be forever beyond my reach. And still is, as you’ll soon see.

Tim Hall, aka OracleBase, (Oracle-Base? Dunno.) organizes OGB (Oracle Groundbreakers) Appreciation Day as a way to thank all of the people in the Oracle community that have helped others. In my (OMG, surely it isn’t possible if you follow the corporate ownership path of Essbase) 25 years in the Oracle space I have: helped some, been helped by many, and confounded and confused just about everyone I’ve crossed paths with.

Tim has suggested the following potential topics:

  • My favourite feature of {the Oracle-related tech you work on}.
  • What is the next thing on your list to learn.
  • Horror stories. My biggest screw up, and how I fixed it.
  • How the
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OpenWorld 2019, day 4, but in fact not even then

Why do I even bother?

At the beginning of conferences I am filled with fresh will and enthusiasm, sure that this time I really and truly will keep you, Gentle Reader, as informed as informed can be when it comes to this conference; any conference really. And I don’t. Ah, a man’s reach must exceed his grasp else what’s a heaven for?

Having firmly established the fact that I am either a fool (almost certainly), unreliable (the evidence speaks for itself), or simply unduly optimistic in my estimation of how hard I’m really going to try to do this (this is what I choose to believe although I think there’s something about the road to Hell and pavement in the form of good intentions), and before I get to the main plate of delicious geeky information, allow me to give you some impressions of what OpenWorld was like this year. And oh yeah, day four of the conference finds me on an aeroplane on the way back to the Right Coast, so all of the cool EPM stuff that Oracle cruelly scheduled for Thursday – missed the whole thing. Argh. Disirregardless of my poor timing (next year I’ll stay through

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OpenWorld 2019, live blog, part the zeroeth and first

Zero? One?

Every good(ish) geek knows the difference between zero and one based numbering systems. Said geek also knows that Powers That Be flip between them, seemingly arbitrarily. When I want to fool mathheads/real programmers, I use a zero-based convention. When I interact with normies, I use one.

Said geek also knows that different conversations and contexts seem to drive usage in a seemingly arbitrary way. I flip between the two contextually:  when I want to fool mathheads/real programmers into thinking I have a brain, I use a zero-based convention. When I interact with normies, I use one as my starting point.

In this case, I’m using both. Unpossible! In fact all of this falderal means is that I’m combining yesterday’s pretty-much-arrive-in-San-Francisco-at-OpenWorld and EPM partner meeting with an ongoing live stream today and, with luck, every day.

I can’t tell you much (actually, nothing) about yesterday’s partner meeting, but I can share with you this list of sessions Oracle recommended to us. Also, as a bonus you get the top of someone’s head. Lucky whoever that may be.

Many of these sessions are already full, but if not and you’re at OOW, check them out.

I’ve got to go

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A n00b’s OneStream Journey No. 8 — Why Two Is Not Better Than One

Apologies and yet without apology

Apologies up front as the subject of this blog post is both n00bie-ish as well as somewhat advanced and awfully, awfully, awfully important. It’s super-duper important that you understand what follows because a common design requirement and an equally common design solution won’t and doesn’t take into account OneStream’s core storage model. I’ll be making references to Data Management jobs, Finance business rules, as well as Data Buffer processing which is all rather a lot for a n00b post. But all of that is exposition – the key thing for we n00bs is to understand that a design approach we all take for granted in other tools is a Bad Idea in OneStream. Happily, the solution is straightforward.

The 42 people who regularly read this blog probably know a fair bit – although logic demands that I ask why you lucky 42 read it if you already know it. Perhaps you enjoy irrelevant links to popular culture from a year that predates your time on this planet by at least 50 years. Ask your parents or better yet your grandparents to help with that sort of confusion; hopefully the balance of the post will make

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Kscope19 live blog, so many days after the conference it can’t really be called live

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know: late

I plead a vacation, freedom from technology, and a healthy-ish communion with dirt, or in other words: tent camping. It was great, thanks for asking. And oh yeah, I’m on doxycycline, thank you .

And with that mea culpa, let’s jump right into Kscope19 and its import

I’ve been out of the Oracle world for the last two years to it’s all been a bit overwhelming as I try to catch up with lo the many new announcements. To wit, Oracle really seem to have their act together for the first time in quite a while.

By that I mean that there’s been a concerted effort to take the multiple SaaS products that make up the Oracle EPM product suite and combine them into a single offering. I am by no means an expert in product pricing (There are those, perhaps quite rightly, who believe that I am by no means an expert in anything – who can argue with such logic given abundant supporting evidence?) but it seems to me that a move away from EPM a la carte pricing on a product by product basis to a broader enterprise license is

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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.

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