essbase

Uncategorized

A question which I never covered in my blog yet since it was too basic and should normally work at all times when you import an Essbase cube:
How do I get a fact to display in the BMM layer after importing a cube?

The question came up here and basically has its origin in a bizarre cube outline. Correctly defined cubes will never face this (and hence no one covered it yet, though I already spoke about changing the measure hierarchy).

Let’s look at an import without a working “fact” (in OBIEE terms…).

No fact columns…but why? Let’s open the properties of the physical cube table and check the properties of the hierarchy “Account” (my measure hierarchy).

Now that’s just wrong. The “fact” must be the measure hierarchy. Let’s change that.

Better. Now we’re still missing the actual fact columns (i.e. the members of the measure hierarchy in the Essbase outline.). In my case that should be Costs, Gross Sales, Net Sales, Returns and Sales.


Repeat that for the other four.

Now drag-and-drop the whole thing to your BMM layer.

Done.

Uncategorized

First of all a little disclaimer: No, I haven’t died in the meantime. Other topics took precedence over writing blog posts.

Back on track, I recently received a question from Jeff Tam who also works on a hybrid OBIEE-Essbase solution. Funny enough, jsut this morning there was another question on this on the OTN OBIEE forum here. Basically being a follow up on my post here botg JEff and the poster on OTN wanted to know the detailed steps which are to be taken to manually extend dimensional hierarchies of already imported Essbase outlines in the RPD. Oracle has their own MOS Note on this issue here.

“The workaround that the customer is using now is to copy this into a notepad, correct and paste it back.” is a bit too minimalistic for my taste, so I’ll take the concept in my previous post more into detail here.

We’ll start off with a 5 generation product hierarchy within an Essbase cube that’s already in the RPD.

In Essbase, the outline for the product hierarchy has grown from 5 levels to 6. In order to represent this, we repeat the steps outlined earlier and

a) create the new physical cube column “Gen6,Product”
b) add the new physical level “Gen6,Product” to the existing “Product” hierarchy object

Now that we have the structure built in the RPD, off to correcting the external level number (which isn’t possible through the Administration Tool!). For this we save the RPD and close the Admin Tool.

Open a command window and navigate to your serverbin folder. Then we run the UDML command line to create a txt representation of the RPD in question (paths and filenames need to be adjusted to your needs of course):

C:OracleOracleBIserverBin>nqudmlgen.exe -u Administrator -p Administrator -r “C:OracleOracleBIserverRepositoryShowcase_002.rpd” -o “C:OracleOracleBIserverRepositoryUDMLShowcase_002.txt” -8 -N

Open the resulting txt file in your trusty notepad and search for DECLARE PHYSICAL LEVEL “Sample Accounts”.”LOGIC_A”..”LOGIC”.”Product”.”Gen6,Product”

Modify the the “LEVEL NUMBER EXTERNAL” line to reference the correct external level. WARNING: counting starts at 0! So Gen6,Product is

LEVEL NUMBER 5 EXTERNAL “Gen6,Product”

Save the txt file. Switch back to you command window and run the nqudmlexec command to recreate the RPD from the modified definitions:

C:OracleOracleBIserverBin>nqudmlexec.exe -u Administrator -p Administrator -I “C:OracleOracleBIserverRepositoryUDMLShowcase_002.txt” -O “C:OracleOracleBIserverRepositoryShowcase_003.rpd” -8

After that you’re done and the dimensional level can now be accomodated normally in your BMM and presentation layers.

Cheers,
Christian

Uncategorized

UDML constantly keeps popping up in conversartions, questions I receive and – as can be seen from a quick query – on the OBIEE OTN forum. So before I go on with this post, a reminder: UDML is NOT supported as an rpd modification mechanism! Everything you do is at your own risk.

Right-o. I’d like to tie my post to the official OBIEE-Essbase modelling guide which can be found here.

Page 8, paragraph 4.1 “Subsequent Changes to the Essbase Outline” mentions the following:

“Cube structure changes (that is, adding or deleting dimensions, and levels) require either a re-import of the cube, or manual modification to the BI Server physical metadata objects to reflect changes.”

This is something that quite some people have contacted me about and honestly, I doubt that there’s really any case which justifies re-import of a cube if you know your way around the Admin Tool and UDML. Even though it’s an Essbase source! (I’ll stick to using the term “cube” to denominate Essbase “databases” for this post.)
One thing needs to be noted though. It’s a small thing, but it basically forces you to use UDML rather than manual modification through the Admin Tool.

Let’s start with a basic cube which I have already imported into my RPD while I was still developing on the Essbase side. So far – where OBIEE is concerned – it only consists several accounts which I can analyze by time.

On the Essbase side, the cube has grown somewhat and I’ve added my “Scenario” dimension.

To get this into OBIEE, I have two possibilities: re-import of the cube of manual creation of the dimension in the physical layer. Not wanting to lose my work on the BMM and Presentation layers, I choose the latter.

Right-clicking on the “Physical Cube Table” object, select “New Object” -> “Hierarchy”.

Then create two new “Physical Cube Columns” below the physical cube table:

Now I have the hierarchy and the two columns:

Next we create the actual hierarchy tree out of them. “New Physical Level”:

And add the column:

And the same thing for level 2 giving us this:

Now this structure is correct, usable and transformable into a corresponding business model:

However in the background there is one little thing going wrong which can give you headache in Answers…especially since tracking down the source of the weird errors this produces is a real pain. I have to admit it took me a while to figure it out.

Let’s take both the time and the scenario hierarchy and copy+paste them into a text editor.

Looking at the top level of the exported UDML, the two hierarchies are alike and don’t differ:

DECLARE HIERARCHY “Demo”.”Sample”..”CustomDemo”.”Time” AS “Time” UPGRADE ID 2161957949 HAVING
(
“Demo”.”Sample”..”CustomDemo”.”Time”.”Gen1,Time”,
“Demo”.”Sample”..”CustomDemo”.”Time”.”Gen2,Time”,
“Demo”.”Sample”..”CustomDemo”.”Time”.”Gen3,Time”,
“Demo”.”Sample”..”CustomDemo”.”Time”.”Gen4,Time”,
“Demo”.”Sample”..”CustomDemo”.”Time”.”Gen5,Time”,
“Demo”.”Sample”..”CustomDemo”.”Time”.”Gen6,Time” ) MEMBER TYPE ALL EXTERNAL “Time”
FULLY BALANCED
BELONGS TO TIME DIMENSION
DIMENSION UNIQUE NAME “Time” TYPE 1
ALIASES NOT UNIQUE
PRIVILEGES ( READ);
DECLARE PHYSICAL LEVEL “Demo”.”Sample”..”CustomDemo”.”Time”.”Gen1,Time” AS “Gen1,Time” UPGRADE ID 2161959167 HAVING
(
“Demo”.”Sample”..”CustomDemo”.”Gen1,Time” )
KEY “Demo”.”Sample”..”CustomDemo”.”Gen1,Time”
LEVEL NUMBER 0 EXTERNAL “Gen1,Time”
PRIVILEGES ( READ);

DECLARE HIERARCHY “Demo”.”Sample”..”CustomDemo”.”Scenario” AS “Scenario” UPGRADE ID 2161960605 HAVING
(
“Demo”.”Sample”..”CustomDemo”.”Scenario”.”Gen1,Scenario”,
“Demo”.”Sample”..”CustomDemo”.”Scenario”.”Gen2,Scenario” ) MEMBER TYPE ALL EXTERNAL “Scenario”
FULLY BALANCED
DIMENSION UNIQUE NAME “Scenario” TYPE 3
ALIASES NOT UNIQUE
PRIVILEGES ( READ);
DECLARE PHYSICAL LEVEL “Demo”.”Sample”..”CustomDemo”.”Scenario”.”Gen1,Scenario” AS “Gen1,Scenario” UPGRADE ID 2161960612 HAVING
(
“Demo”.”Sample”..”CustomDemo”.”Gen1,Scenario” )
KEY “Demo”.”Sample”..”CustomDemo”.”Gen1,Scenario”
LEVEL NUMBER 0 EXTERNAL “Gen1,Scenario”
PRIVILEGES ( READ);

Looking at the two respective extracts for the second level, we see the difference:

DECLARE PHYSICAL LEVEL “Demo”.”Sample”..”CustomDemo”.”Time”.”Gen2,Time” AS “Gen2,Time” UPGRADE ID 2161959169 HAVING
(
“Demo”.”Sample”..”CustomDemo”.”Gen2,Time” )
KEY “Demo”.”Sample”..”CustomDemo”.”Gen2,Time”
LEVEL NUMBER 1 EXTERNAL “Gen2,Time”
PRIVILEGES ( READ);

DECLARE PHYSICAL LEVEL “Demo”.”Sample”..”CustomDemo”.”Scenario”.”Gen2,Scenario” AS “Gen2,Scenario” UPGRADE ID 2161960614 HAVING
(
“Demo”.”Sample”..”CustomDemo”.”Gen2,Scenario” )
KEY “Demo”.”Sample”..”CustomDemo”.”Gen2,Scenario”
LEVEL NUMBER 0 EXTERNAL “Gen2,Scenario”
PRIVILEGES ( READ);

For the imported hierarchy “Time”, the “LEVEL NUMBER EXTERNAL” is correctly incremented and stored as “1” (and in fact represents the level number in Essbase) while for the manually created hierarchy “Scenario” the external level number stayed at “0”.
If you have hierarchies with more than 2 levels, each level from 1 to N has an external level number of “0”.

In the rpd, there is no way for you to affect the external level number, so UDML is your only choice. In all honesty, I normally write my new dimension hierarchies – which should be reflected in the rpd due to cube changes – simply inside a text editor. Starting with an existing hierarchy which I copy+paste, I then write the UDML to fit the Essbase outline and then adapt the external level number to fit the real Essbase level number.

With that problem out of the way there’s really nothing you can’t represent in terms of cube outline changes without having to re-import the whole thing.

So much for today. Until next time!

Uncategorized

I realized this one while importing a rather large cube on a test machine. After the initial import of the cube definitions into the physical layer, I pulled everything over into the BMM layer and saw that dimensions I’d expect were missing completely from the business model. Checking back on the physical layer I saw the corresponding hierarchies were missing as well.

Re-importing and fumbling around didn’t resolve this while doing a cross-check import on my laptop produced a correct representation in both the physical layer and the BMM layer.

Luckily, it seems I wasn’t the only one hitting this issue since a Metalink search yielded document 872342.1. The issue is, that the Essbase API doesn’t find enough open ports to import the outline successfully.

Workaround: Open the registry and navigate to:

\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesTcpipParameters

Modify / create the DWORD parameter “MaxUserPort” to / with value 65534. Then apply the changes, start the Admin Tool again and re-run the import.

Cheers,
Christian

Uncategorized

I’m pleased to announce that the RittmanMead training days for Oracle BI are now officially open for registration.

Speakers at this event will be Mark Rittman, Venkat Janakiraman and myself.

Agenda:

Day 1
o Oracle BI and EPM architecture overview – Mark Rittman
o Oracle BI EE Data Modeling against DW and 3NF sources – Mark Rittman
o Oracle BI Delivers + Integration with Java and BI Publisher – Venkat Janakiraman
o What’s new in Oracle BI, DW and EPM from Oracle Open World – Mark Rittman

Day 2
o Oracle BI EE Data Modeling against Essbase – Venkat Janakiraman
o Leveraging MDX functions and calculations in OBIEE – Christian Berg
o Integrating Security across OBIEE and EPM – Venkat Janakiraman
o I can do this in Hyperion – how do I do it in OBIEE? – Christian Berg and Venkat Janakiraman

Day 3
o OBIEE Systems Management with OEM BI Mgmt Pack – Mark Rittman
o OBIEE Configuration Management Best Practices – Christian Berg
o ODI functionality in Oracle BI Applications – Mark Rittman
o ODI Integration with Essbase, Planning and Oracle EPM Suite – Venkat Janakiraman

Once more, here’s the link to the full event details:
http://www.rittmanmead.com/trainingdays2009/

You can find the registration page at http://www.regonline.co.uk/rmtrainingdays2009

Cheers,
Christi@n

Uncategorized

Fiddling around with some more functional options we’ve all come to know, like and use frequently, I found that “in between” filters in answers requests going against MDX sources (Essbase, MS Analysis server etc) don’t work as expected.

To showcase this, I have created a simple request. Planning and Current numbers by Fiscal Month within Europe. And I’m interested in all months between Q1 2009 and Q4 2009:

Checking the results tab we see that it’s not necessarily what we’d expect:

Doing a full data scroll reveals that basically all Fiscal Month members are being pulled up.

Here’s the MDX from the log:

With
set [Geo3] as ‘Filter([Geo].Generations(3).members, (([Geo].CurrentMember.MEMBER_ALIAS = “Europe” OR [Geo].CurrentMember.MEMBER_Name = “Europe”)))’
set [Time Period3] as ‘Filter([Time Period].Generations(3).members, ( NOT (([Time Period].CurrentMember.MEMBER_ALIAS < "Q1-09" OR [Time Period].CurrentMember.MEMBER_Name < "Q1-09"))) AND ( NOT (("Q4-09" < [Time Period].CurrentMember.MEMBER_ALIAS OR "Q4-09" < [Time Period].CurrentMember.MEMBER_Name))))'
set [Time Period4] as ‘Generate({[Time Period3]}, Descendants([Time Period].currentmember, [Time Period].Generations(4),SELF), ALL)’
member [Scenario].[MS1] as ‘AGGREGATE(crossjoin {[Geo3]},Scenario.[Current])’, SOLVE_ORDER = 100
member [Scenario].[MS2] as ‘AGGREGATE(crossjoin {[Geo3]},Scenario.[Planned])’, SOLVE_ORDER = 100
select
{ [Scenario].[MS1],
[Scenario].[MS2],
[Scenario].[MS3]
} on columns,
NON EMPTY {{[Time Period4]}} properties ANCESTOR_NAMES, GEN_NUMBER on rows
from [Sample.Sample]

And here’s the important bit:

set [Time Period3] as ‘Filter([Time Period].Generations(3).members, ( NOT (([Time Period].CurrentMember.MEMBER_ALIAS < "Q1-09" OR [Time Period].CurrentMember.MEMBER_Name < "Q1-09"))) AND ( NOT (("Q4-09" < [Time Period].CurrentMember.MEMBER_ALIAS OR "Q4-09" < [Time Period].CurrentMember.MEMBER_Name))))' I’ve opened an SR for this since there’s no mentioning on metalink, the release notes or the new features guides. Cheers,
Christi@n

Uncategorized

In one of my recent posts I was talking about the different patch levels for 10.1.3.4.0 and 10.1.3.4.1 and their impact on functionality and the MDX produced. Interestingly enough not all of the problems appear with every cube outline imported into OBIEE. Oracle initially had troubles reproducing some of the errors (using the normal OOB Essbase sample cubes).

To recap: the changes to the connectivity DLLs first introduced in patch 7349048 (for 10.1.3.4.0) enabled OBIEE / Essbase security integration, but had some side effects. Performance dropped up to 3000% in some cases, standard report level totals or pivot totals stopped working etc. This is mostly due wrongly produced MDX. Especially for the grand totals the situation is quite clear:

With
set [Currency2] as ‘Filter([Currency].Generations(2).members, (([Currency].CurrentMember.MEMBER_ALIAS = “US Dollar” OR [Currency].CurrentMember.MEMBER_Name = “US Dollar”)))’
set [Time Period2] as ‘Filter([Time Period].Generations(2).members, (([Time Period].CurrentMember.MEMBER_ALIAS = “2009” OR [Time Period].CurrentMember.MEMBER_Name = “2009”)))’
set [Time Period3] as ‘Filter(Generate({[Time Period2]}, Descendants([Time Period].currentmember, [Time Period].Generations(3),SELF), ALL), (([Time Period].CurrentMember.MEMBER_ALIAS = “Quarter 1” OR [Time Period].CurrentMember.MEMBER_Name = “Quarter 1”)))’
member [Currency].[CurrencyCustomGroup]as ‘Sum([Currency2])’, SOLVE_ORDER= AGGREGATION_SOLVEORDER
member [Time Period].[Time PeriodCustomGroup]as ‘Sum([Time Period3])’, SOLVE_ORDER= AGGREGATION_SOLVEORDER
select
{ [Account].[Sales]
} on columns
from [Sample.Sample]
where ([Currency].[CurrencyCustomGroup],[Time Period].[Time PeriodCustomGroup])

The MDX simply contains no “on rows” specification. These changes remained in all subsequent patches and are also part of 10.1.3.4.1. Hence, this release suffers from the same problems.

On 10.1.3.4.0, there exists patch 8444119 which basically was constructed after 10.1.3.4.1. 8444119 itself does not solve any of the issues mentioned above. It does however include a small, non-documented switch which resolves all these issues. NOTE: this is NOT documented and will only work on 10.1.3.4.0! Oracle told me they’re working on a similar fix for 10.1.3.4.1 and on updating the patch information, but no sign of either yet.

In a 10.1.3.4.0 environment, install patch 8444119, then create a new environment variable: “OBIS_Essbase_CustomGroup_Generation”. Set the value to “0” (without the quotes). This will correct the issues and correct the MDX fired against Essbase. Also, performance will be stabilized and go back to the level of an unpatched 10.1.3.4.0.

Oracle unfortunately didn’t specify in detail what this OBIS_Essbase_CustomGroup_Generation “performance knob” (as they call it) does behind the scene and what the other two available settings “1” and “2” entail. Hopefully they update patch 8444119 soon since its documentation still says nothing about the existance of this environment variable.

Document 845594.1 has been created an published on Metalink. This is the only document existing which points to or mentions OBIS_Essbase_CustomGroup_Generation. So if you’re out there, going against Essbase cubes and running 10.1.3.4.0 with 8444119 (or any MDX-influencing other patch below) or a full blown 10.3.4.1 then check it out.

WARNING: While document 845594.1 outlines the issue and the solution, the version it refers to is WRONG!

“Applies to:
Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition – Version: 10.1.3.4.1 [1900] – Release: 10g”

Patch 8444119 and the use of environment variable “OBIS_Essbase_CustomGroup_Generation” do only apply for patch 10.1.3.4.0. You can not use this solution with 10.1.3.4.1.

Cheers,
Christi@n

Uncategorized

Hi guys,

Just quickly to let you all know. I’m not cutting you out of the loop by not writing on the details, but if I’d have to document all tests I run and all issues I find, I will still be here next month.

Bottom line:
– watch out for 10.1.3.4.0 with 734908
– watch out for 10.1.3.4.0 with 844119
– watch out for 10.1.3.4.1

With those three versions be VERY careful that you test each and every report you have running against Essbase.

I will update you as soon as I can with a finalized overview. Probably only once Oracle has come back…

Uncategorized

Last week I had the chance an (honestly) privilege to take part in the BI Forum in Brighton. First and foremost, I’d like to say a huge thanks to the team of RittmanMead for organizing this and giving us geeks a chance to unite. We’ve got to do this more often!

Next up, something personal. I was extremely happy to finally meet Venkat face to face. We seem to have developed one of those friendships that start online and when you meet, it’s like you know each other since years. Also, I was extremely content to meet Ed again. Damn already a year since we finished our last project together.

Let’s get back to business. The lineup of speakers was quite something to say the least. I’m not going to name anyone in special since I then need to name each and every one of them…….ok here we go: Craig Stewart, Edward Roske (We’re not wooorthy!), Mark Rittman, John Minkjan, Venkat (I think, you’re actually entitled to carry “Venkat” as your sole identifier. Everyone else must change his name ;-)), Adam Bloom, Andreas Nobbmann, Mike Durran, Emiel von Bockel, Maarten-Jan Kampen, Adrian Ward, Antony Heljula and Peter Brink. Total quality in all presentations and here’s my 10 cents on them:

a) “BI Apps with ODI” from Craig Stewart: Now here we have an interesting new piece in Oracles product portfolio. Good for new customers. Questionable (at best) for existing ones.

b) Edward Roskes “Internals of Essbase”. What can I say? Edward Roske. On Essbase. Ocean. Lots of Water. Understatement. And I just loooved his texan humour.

c) Mark Rittman spoke about “BI Apps Optimization”. Do have to say “see b) ?”. Didn’t think so.

d) John Minkjan had a very nice presentation on caching. I would have like to taped it and hit a lot of people over the head with the tape (and the camera). Listen to him, people. Caching is a tool, a technique, something that can help you. It’s NOT the solution for your problems! Thanks John.

e) Venkat had a cool gimmick prepared. He had actually written a program to keep OBIEE and Essbase security in line. Extremely nice stuff! It was his first presentation in a forum like this and in Europe. Well done! I’m going to steal that 😉

f) Then we “blew up a BI server” with Adam Bloom. Talk about small cuase with huge effect. Ouch.

g) Andreas Nobbmanns “UDML and XML for grown-ups” session. I vote for his presentation to be judged “Too dangerous to be known widely!”. Please don’t let kids touch that one. They destroy enough as it is. Personally…I loved it 😉

h) Friday started with Mike Durran on 11g. I won’t say more. Or I will have to kill you. Seriously. Ed Roske has the gun.

i) Emiel von Bockels presentation. Now THAT spawned discussions. Great stuff! I’d love to see how their solution evolves over the nexst 3 to 5 years. I hope he keeps us up to date.

j) Oh yeah…I’m still not over Maarten-Jan Kampens statement on using “a bit of code” for his “OBIEE and Mapviewer” integration. Dude…copyright that stuff.

k) Adrian gave me permission to skip his session since I had stuff to do, so not much to say here.

l) Antony Heljulas “SOA” bit was cool. Reminded me of my first trials after Marks mastclass last year. Gotta say though. Very nicely presented. Better than most of Oracles sales force.

m) Peter Brinks “Cube Organized Materialized views”. Essbase cubes? Oracle OLAP? Cube Organized Materialized Views? It seems we’re actually getting too many options from Oracle right now. Would be interesting to see how Oracle positions those options with the clients.

Wrapping the whole event up in one word sounds like this: awesome. In two words: fraking awesome! Loved it, look forward to the next, want to do one myself in Switzerland now. (Check my blog or Andreas for news on that idea).

That’s it from my side for today. Off to catch some sleep.

Cheers,
Christi@n

Uncategorized

I noticed something very disturbing after applying 10.1.3.4.1 to our development environment: report grand totals for tables and row totals for pivots don’t yield any results anymore unless you manually set all fact columns to “Sum” or “Avg” in the report. The “Aggr_External” which has normally had its effect (by importing it from the cube through the physical to the BMM layer to presentation layer) no longer takes care of this.

Let’s look at the issue in detail:

Upgrading to 10.1.3.4.1, this is what we find as a default behaviour in a simple table report:

And in a pivot:

Now think about the concept behind building an rpd on top of an Essbase source for a second. Ponder what Venkat wrote about aggregations in for 4-article series here, here, here and here. No longer utilizing Aggr_External and just no longer aggregating at all is just plain stupid. (Yes, I’m on kind of a rant here…)

Now to correct that quick & dirty in the report, we assign an aggregation rule in the column formula:

And…oh miracle…we have data again:

Now as I said, I find this nothing but retarded.
Why has this been changed? Is this actually expected behaviour? If so…what’s the rationale behind that? Normally, aggregation rules set on the BMM layer always persist unless they are explicitly overwritten either in the column formula or for pivots in the measures. Why drop this all of a sudden?

My manual intervention is a workaround, but I’m facing several cubes and almost a hundred reports. Furthermore, one of the Account dimensions has more than 400 members. So manually changing 400 potentially mapped account members isn’t fun…

So the solution (if I will actually keep 10.1.3.4.1 and not just drop if for a downgrade) would be to modify the BMM layer and change all normal account members to “Sum” and all percentages to “Avg” as aggregation rule.

Stay tuned for my upcoming rant on dimension members and filters. Another extremely intelligent change with 10.1.3.4.1.

Update:
Venkat reacted to my post here. I tested it and it seems that despite having label only top level members like he mentioned, some analyses seem to work with totals and grand totals. This will need more investigating.

Cheerioh,
Christi@n