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 [...]

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 [...]

There are numerous ASO cubes among my flock.  Usually the choice to use ASO was not arrived at lightly — it was/is for very specific technical reasons.  Typically, the main reason I have for using ASO is to get the fast data loads and the ability to load oodles of noodles… I mean data.  Yes, [...]

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 [...]

Many people I talk to are amazed that a company can get by with just Essbase and Dodeca.  No Planning deployment, no HFM, none of that other stuff.  The core Essbase analytic engine brings a lot to the table, which is this: multi-dimensional analysis and all of the associated functionality for building, automating, and managing [...]

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 [...]