Due to various business requirements, I often find that one of the strategies I use for preserving point-in-time reporting functionality is to simply spin off a copy of cube.  In many organizations, the Measures dimension in a financial cube (modeled on the chart of accounts) can be quite large — and a moving target.  By [...]

I’ve been wanting to write this post for awhile.  Like, for months.  Some time ago I took an in-depth look at profiling the performance (duration-wise) of an automated system I have.  The system works great, it’s worked great, I don’t need to touch it, it just does its thing.  This is the funny thing about [...]

There’s an automation trick I’ve been using for awhile that I like.  Having talked about automation and such with other people at ODTUG this year, it seems that several people are using this technique or a variant of it on their own systems. Basically, the idea is that you want to be able to sync [...]

Did you know that you don’t have to run your MaxL automation on the Essbase server itself?  Of course, there is nothing wrong with running your Essbase automation on the server: network delays are less of a concern, it’s one less server to worry about, and in many ways, it’s just simpler.  But perhaps you [...]

A very common task for Essbase automation is to move data from one cube to another.  There are a number of reasons you may want or need to do this.  One, you may have a cube that has detailed data and another cube with higher level data, and you want to move the sums or [...]

There are a lot of different ways to update your substitution variables.  You can tweak them with EAS by hand, or use one of several different methods to automate it.  Here is one method that I have been using that seems to hit a relative sweet spot in terms of flexibility, reuse-ability, and effectiveness. First [...]

The Old In many companies, there is a lot of code laying around that is, for lack of better word, “old.” In the case of Essbase-related functionality, this may mean that there are some automation systems with several ESSCMD scripts laying around.  You could rewrite them in MaxL, but where’s the payoff?  There is nothing [...]