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 [...]

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 [...]

Your server may have dozens or even hundreds of cubes on it.  A common strategy with a large and slowly changing Measures dimension (or some other dimension like Product) is to spin off a copy of the cube after a certain time period, typically the fiscal year end.  There are a number of different reasons [...]

I freely submit that I am a complete geek.  But it’s okay, because I have come to accept and embrace that inner geek.  Anyway… Many organizations run jobs to perform a task as certain intervals.  Your job as a good Essbase/Hyperion administrator is to be lazy — that is, make the computers do the boring [...]

Due to various business requirements, some organizations end up archiving many of their cubes each year.  For example, if you have a huge Measures dimension that is constantly changing (even in subtle ways), but you need to be able to go back at some point in the future and see what some numbers looked like [...]

This one is a bit of a blast from the past.  And I mean that — the timestamp on this file is over five years ago.  You may have heard people refer to this method.  If you’ve ever found yourself getting confused over what-job-runs-when-and-on-what, then this might be a technique that works for you.  Obviously, [...]

Here’s a little quickie that I thought of and put in the other day. If you use the “export script” feature in EIS so that you can use that in conjunction with EIS in order to script your outline builds, you get a script that is specific to a particular server. I like to keep [...]