Showing off the power of Drillbridge query translation

Lately I have been working on new materials and demo ware to help show off the power, flexibility, and sophistication of both the Dodeca Spreadsheet Management System and Drillbridge/Drillbridge Plus. I came across a really great Drillbridge mapping example today that I hadn’t specifically solved before, but with a little creativity I was able to write the proper Drillbridge query and get exactly what I wanted.

Consider an Essbase cube with the following dimensions:

  • Years: FY15, FY16, etc
  • Periods: Periods/Quarters/Months
  • Scenario: Actual, Budget
  • Departments: balanced hierarchy with four levels
  • Location: Total/Division/Store
  • Measures: Ragged hierarchy with accounts at level-0

For this post I am going to design a Drillbridge query that maps from this cube back to its related relational data, with the additional wrinkle that we want upper-level drill in several dimensions, including one where the dimension in the cube is represented by two different columns in the source data.

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Deleting multiple files from PBCS using PBJ client

Earlier in the week, my archnemesis colleague Cameron Lackpour hosted a guest blog article by Chris Rothermel with a trick for deleting multiple files from PBCS using the epmautomate tool. The basic idea is that you can use the listfiles command to export the list of files to a temporary file, then use some batch scripting to iterate over every line in that file, then call epmautomate to delete the specific file. It’s a good example that will undoubtedly come in useful for many people.

Upon reading the article I thought it would interesting to do the same thing, but using the PBJ library. The PBJ library is an open source, 100% Java library for interacting with PBCS via its REST API. It can easily be dropped in to enterprise Java projects by including its dependency in your Maven configuration file (if you’re so inclined). The PBJ library is also used in at least one major piece of software: it’s the library that allows Drillbridge to perform upper level drill from PBCS to a relational database.

That all said, one of the nice things about having a domain specific library in a high-level language such as Java is that it is sometimes very easy and straightforward to implement functionality that doesn’t come out of the box. This doesn’t make it better than the batch scripting technique, just different.

Here’s the whole code file:

package com.jasonwjones.pbcs.misc;

import com.jasonwjones.pbcs.PbcsClient;
import com.jasonwjones.pbcs.PbcsClientFactory;
import com.jasonwjones.pbcs.TestHarness;
import com.jasonwjones.pbcs.interop.impl.ApplicationSnapshot;

public class DeleteAllFiles extends TestHarness {

	public static void main(String[] args) {
		PbcsClient client = new PbcsClientFactory().createClient(createConnection());
		
		for (ApplicationSnapshot snapshot : client.listFiles()) {
			client.deleteFile(snapshot.getName());
		}
	}

}

Most of this is pretty standard boilerplate Java. You can that after we setup a PbcsClient instance, we can very easily get a list of files (using listFiles()), and then iterate over those. To delete a file, we can use the deleteFile(String filename) method and pass in the actual file name from the “snapshot” object (which also contains a little bit of other information).

That all said, as I’ve written before, the best tool for the job is the one that fits in to your environment the best and is easiest to maintain. If you’re doing much in the way of batch scripting, then epmautomate is probably going to fit into your environment the best. If you’re writing an enterprise app in Java, you’re going to absolutely want to use the PBJ library rather than try and execute shell commands.

Hyperion Parent Inferrer Updated (after four years!)

I had a need for the Hyperion Parent Inferrer functionality for an internal project I am working on. It didn’t quite do what I needed out of the box so I updated things a bit. As quick background, the Hyperion Parent Inferrer is a simple one-off Java program/library I developed (apparently four years ago, wow) to parse indented data into an explicit parent/child file.

There are a few (apparently rare) cases where this is useful. In my case, I was modeling some hierarchical data and I find the indented format to be much easier on the eyes. Like so:

Time
 Q1
  January
  February
  March
 Q2
  April
  May
  June
 Q3
  July
  August
  September
 Q4
  October
  November
  December

But when it comes time to load in to Essbase, clearly we need something more explicit. The Hyperion Parent Inferrer takes that preceding as input and then outputs something like the following:

,Time
Time,Q1
Q1,January
Q1,February
Q1,March
Time,Q2
Q2,April
Q2,May
Q2,June
Time,Q3
Q3,July
Q3,August
Q3,September
Time,Q4
Q4,October
Q4,November
Q4,December

The program has been enhanced to allow for a custom indentation character (such as tabs), to be able to specify the text rendered when there is no parent (instead of null), and a couple other little cleanups.

Hyperion Parent Inferrer is free, open source (Apache Software License version 2), and can be run as a standalone command-line Java program or as a Java library that can be incorporated into a typical Java program. The updated code is available at the Hyperion Parent Inferrer GitHub page.

Essbase Renegade Members Revisited

For some reason the other day I was thinking “Whatever happened to that renegade members feature?” So I did some digging.

Renegade members, by the way, refers to this concept where instead of a data record being rejected, you can map it to some other member. Other names for this feature might have been “shovel members”, but renegade members sounds cooler. That said, it’s a feature with a cool name but an apparently terrible publicist.

Renegade members were blogged about as early as a few years ago, such as on Cameron’s blog (during the 2013 OpenWorld), in Russian (apparently), and even over at Rittman Mead’s blog (before Mark spent his days trying to get tea kettles to work with the internet, but I digress).

But there’s a a curious lack of information on renegade members since then. There is, however, just enough information on the internet to piece this together. There’s a little documentation about renegade members over on the official documentation. Just as important (for my purposes), there are two methods relating to renegade members that are in the Essbase JAPI Javadoc.

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Dodeca Technique: Multiple Essbase Data Sources in View

When I’m talking about Dodeca features, one that very often comes up is that Dodeca views have great support for multiple data sources. I’ve seen customers and clients use this to give them a cutting edge in terms of developing reports that tie together information from disparate data sources in a flexible way that was previously very cumbersome or impossible with the tools at hand. Among other instances, this feature comes into play when it would be beneficial for a user to view data that happens to reside in multiple databases, but for the sake of the user experience, we don’t want them to have to run multiple reports.

So today I want to look at a very simple Dodeca view that taps into multiple sources. There are a couple of nuances to consider for this development scenario. Consider that a typical view with a single data source will just have its connection specified explicitly as a property on the view, and the selectors on the view (if any) will assume that they are to be populated based on that connection as well. For example, let’s say we have a view based on the Sample/Basic database, and we have two selectors that are dynamically generated: Time and Product. When Dodeca goes to generate the list of Products to display to the user to make their selection(s), it knows to use the Sample/Basic database. However, if we want to have multiple selectors and have their contents be based on a particular cube’s outline, then we need to simply associate the proper connection with the selector.

For today’s example, I’m going to build a simple view that has one tab based on Sample/Basic and another tab based on Demo/Basic (as a brief aside, Demo/Basic is Sample/Basic’s less popular, less-talked about sibling that is eagerly awaiting its day in the spotlight). Note that while this example will have multiple Essbase connections and multiple selectors (one on each database), this isn’t necessarily how a view will always need to be configured. If you have a selector whose contents aren’t dependent on a particular database, then you wouldn’t need to worry about the connection specification for that selector.

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