There’s a new Essbase book out, and I was fortunate enough to receive a copy to review.   Glenn Schwartzberg already beat me to the punch with his review, which I would say is fairly thorough as well as fair.  There are precious few Essbase books out there, so the more the merrier, I say. The [...]

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 [...]

I started writing this recap at the airport in San Jose, waiting for my flight back to Seattle, but the article got a bit longer than I thought so I’m just not finishing it up here on Monday.  As expected, the conference itself was great, the food was even better, and it was fun meeting [...]

I got a call the other day from one of my fellow Essbase developers. One of the cubes in their budgeting system was taking a long time to finish calculations, whereas just days before the calculation time was just fine.  I have an almost unhealthy obsession with cube performance and optimization, so I jumped in [...]

No updates for awhile — last quarter was brutal in terms of balance work, school, and life.  I managed to make it through, though, and I am only taking one class this quarter, which should leave more time for everything else. I think I mentioned it already, but I just received the ODTUG program for [...]

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 [...]

I’m working on a writeup on how to get a fully functional Essbase server up and running in a virtual machine (using Sun VirtualBox).  I’m currently working on the steps — setting up the Essbase funtionality is relatively straightforward, although you need a relational database to store various information. “No problem,” I thought to myself, [...]

Here’s a quick post that is a bit of a precursor to some of my more in-depth performance analysis articles that will be coming out in the future.  One of my automation systems takes a bit over an hour to run.  There are a lot of people I know that need to squeeze performance out [...]