EPM Conversations — Episode 14, A Conversation with Sree Menon, The Calc Man

Sree Menon, The Calc Man

Many years ago (just over 10!), Yr. Obt. Svt. wrote a blog post on why he Hated and Loved Calculation Manager. I even did it twice. I am – oft times, still, it continues unabated – a complete smartass who pays little heed to what he says and writes and this was most definitely one of those times. These posts were a continuation of not altogether terrifically awesome judgement as they were an expansion of a similarly-snarky two parter on Hyperion Business Rules. 2009? 2012? My, but the time does fly.

So that’s four snide technical blog posts on two closely related Oracle products. As is typical and as has been noted, I performed zero thought on any potential consequences that might arise from click-bait (was that even a term in 2009?) titles: Oracle could have gotten annoyed and come down on my head with a bag of hammers or they could have ignored it and hoped that no one read my posts or they could have read it, realized that (somehow) there was a little value in it and reached out to me so that in future my posts on this

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EPM Conversations — Episode 10, A Conversation with Jodi Hill, Pattern Recognizer and Outlier

We’re all wired to see patterns

We live in patterns: seasonal, political, historical, and even atomic. Many live a life blithely unaware of them, which is to their disadvantage, for understanding those patterns is key to what makes us human, drives culture and society, and informs economics. We happy few in the performance management world figuratively live and die by the patterns in data. If careful observation of clients, customers, and conferences is an accurate guide, we are largely cut from the same professional and educational cloth. This is not always true. Those of us who come from outside that pattern have different perspectives, values, and insights. Jodi Hill is one such outlier.

Her path to a job in business strategy is atypical and is driven by its unconventionality: from Army translator to accountant to consultant to strategist is surely out of our norm. So too is an educational journey from the Defense Language Institute to a BS in accounting to multiple Masters in predictive analytics, public policy, and health economics. No matter how diverse this may seem at first glance, it is held together by the thread of transforming data into information by seeing, interpreting, and understanding patterns. I’ve

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A Free Form Planning aka Essbase SaaS Journey — part 4, Gonna Build An Outline

Gonna build an outline, from a little file

I’ve shown how easy it is to build an Essbase SaaS database from an existing outline .otl file. Read about my glorious experiences doing just that (and using LCM as well) here.

That’s all well and good but what if I want to do something other than migrating an outline? I thought at first that I’d have to create the smallest Essbase outline in the world ever and then import that, adding dimensions as required. Ugh. Regardless of the ugh, the ick, and the yuck, I wrote about just that approach.

I should have been more patient, because now Essbase SaaS (Have you noted that I call this product what it is – Essbase as a Service? You should.) can load from dimension files. Patience is a virtue but he who hesitates (or wants to write about something most ricky tick) is lost. I suppose that means that I am without virtue because I don’t hesitate to act before knowledge mysteriously comes my way. It was ever thus with Yr. Obt. Svt. But no matter, onwards.

Gonna build an outline, at least I hope I will

I have a

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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.

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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A n00b’s OneStream Journey No. 2.4 – Deleting (and building) dimensions programmatically

Part four of three

In my innumerate fashion, we have now reached the fourth part of a three part series on building dimensions. Why can’t Cameron count? Putting aside the more obvious, “’Cos he’s an idiot” answer, the reason is I had planned part three to include code to generate dimension deletes via the Metadata Builder. That was the idea but it would have been an absolute monster of a post. The point of this blog is to inform you (and me), not bore you (and me) to death.

So that’s the excuse, but what’s to be covered in this post? Answer – create dimension load files programmatically through the Metadata Builder so that you never have to it again. Will it be as easy as selecting Flying Pizza (that’s a punch card in Jane’s left hand for those of you born after 1980 and also just what is Flying Pizza)? Just about, with a wee bit of customization.

Foodarackacycle

Something that XF’s competitors ought to read

Yes, way back in the introduction to TheTruthAboutCPM when I said that this blog wouldn’t be about other products I meant it. Alas and alack, I fear I do need to address an important

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A n00b’s OneStream Journey No. 2.3 — Building deletions in dimensions

The final third

The last two posts on dimension building have focused on building dimensions either by hand or via the Metadata Builder. But what about deleting members?

You may not make mistakes but Yr. Obt. Svt. is, unfortunately, all too well familiar with, “Aw, bugger, I didn’t mean to add those 10,000 products/200 entities/14 departments/etc. I really didn’t mean to. Bugger. And now I need to get rid of some or all of them. Triple bugger.” Mayhaps you too have done so? Let’s hope so as how to do that is the point of this, the third and final (Hah! No, part four of three is now planned. Also, I can’t count.) part of this series on managing hierarchies.

Driving a manual

Stick shifts (or if you’re perverse and have an old car, a three on a tree, or if you’re really crazy, a Wilson preselector, or if you’re ultra cool, an epicyclic transmission which I finally learnt how to use) are a key component of driving enjoyment because of the control they provide. Wind out the engine way past a “reasonable” rpm just to hear the exhaust bark, hold it in gear round a corner …

A n00b’s OneStream Journey No. 2.2 — Building dimensions in batch

Don’t do it, the manual bit

In our last exciting installment, Yr. Obt. Svt. took you on a trip through the most basic of dimension building processes, to wit, building a dimension by hand.

That’s all well and good but it doesn’t really reflect true application development and administration as doing just about anything by hand (sawing wood, cutting the lawn, filling out that 1040A, casting a budget, etc.) is painful for anything other than one-offs, a small scope, or something that hardly ever changes. Repetitive actions should be automated else we revert to paper ledgers and spreadsheets, fountain pens (actually, I use one), and green eyeshades. Instead, I daresay and hope you’ll do most of your loading from batch.

But how oh how oh how does your average geek load a dimension?

One way might be to take an existing dimension, extract it to a file (in OneStream XF aka XF that’s an XML file whose format I’ll cover in the next post – see how I’m stringing you along?) and then use that file to load said dimension in again to this application or to another. Hint: this sentence just described how to migrate dimensionality

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A n00b’s OneStream Journey No. 2.1 — Building dimensions manually

A geek’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a blog post for?

With extensive apologies to Rabbie Burns aka the Bard of Ayrshire aka the Ploughman Poet (I hope that every lit prof I had in school is now beyond happy that I can remember a line from Andrea del Sarto – see, I did pay attention, sometimes) I had high hopes that I could cover the entire OneStream dimension build process from thinking about it to building and editing it manually to loading and editing it from external sources. Whew. And that’s not even counting applying said dimension to a cube. Double whew.

It’s simply too much to cover in a single blog post so I’ll ~~disappoint you bitterly~~ relieve you and me considerably by reducing scope as splitting this into multiple posts is the only way to reasonably approach the subject.

Along the way I’ll try to explain as much of the architecture and philosophy behind OSXF’s (I’m too lazy to write out OneStream XF more than once per post) metadata management but there will be much that I shan’t and can’t cover yet. There’s a lot going on and a lot of functionality that isn’t …