tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-69505688649800150662024-03-05T17:59:26.410-08:00Automation & Integration - Autogration!Steffen Ennihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04292216800284576733noreply@blogger.comBlogger19125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6950568864980015066.post-26172486686924204852012-11-09T17:18:00.001-08:002012-11-09T17:18:51.043-08:00Managing Essbase data load error kickoutsWith the latest version of the Star Command Center <a href="http://staranalytics.com/2012/11/09/scc-file-utilities-plugin-1-5-available-for-download/" target="_blank">File Plugin</a>, a list of of kickouts from an Essbase data load can be easily extracted. This function enables administrators to isolate values in the error file and use the results to perform a variety of tasks such as refresh metadata or notify users that an error has occurred with specific detail. Typically administrators need to write sophisticated code in PowerShell, Python or Perl to automate this type of task, but with Star Command Center a solution can be quickly created. In this post, we will explore how.<br />
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In the typical Essbase Error file, we see an example like the following. Note the Essbase members that are highlighted: <br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">\\ Member <span style="background-color: yellow;">Caffeine Free ColaX</span> Not Found In Database<br />California,Caffeine Free ColaX, Sales, 145,132,125,110,106,96,87,87,109,109,116,102<br /><br />\\ Member <span style="background-color: yellow;">CaliforniaX</span> Not Found In Database<br />CaliforniaX,Caffeine Free Cola, Sales, 145,132,125,110,106,96,87,87,109,109,116,102<br /><br />\\ Member <span style="background-color: yellow;">CaliforniaY<span style="background-color: white;"> </span></span>Not Found In Database<br />CaliforniaY,Caffeine Free Cola, COGS, 95,104,109,123,127,141,154,154,122,122,113,127<br /><br />\\ Member <span style="background-color: yellow;">CaliforniaX</span> Not Found In Database<br />CaliforniaX,Caffeine Free Cola, Marketing, 30,33,34,39,40,45,49,49,39,39,36,40<br /><br />\\ Member <span style="background-color: yellow;">CaliforniaY</span> Not Found In Database<br />CaliforniaY,Caffeine Free Cola, Payroll, 22,22,22,23,23,23,22,22,22,22,22,22</span></span><br />
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In Star Command Center, we leverage the <a href="http://staranalytics.com/solutions/solutions-article/extract-lists/" target="_blank"><b>Extract List</b></a> task and isolate any string after the "\\ Member". To provide more power in isolating string values, Regular Expressions can be used as in the example below:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE4VKNehtDJpmAhf5cKAfo9kVJC9T4OQ0hAU8Jqp4v-5alYHTDgB9eprawb1nD4kFHs09QCxe5DkyBjqwHKLanU1W4QN648UVbxhzPcLLAc116cRZbSsK90iM3m4ivddh1QLPDjQKyX3xQ/s1600/ExtractListExample1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE4VKNehtDJpmAhf5cKAfo9kVJC9T4OQ0hAU8Jqp4v-5alYHTDgB9eprawb1nD4kFHs09QCxe5DkyBjqwHKLanU1W4QN648UVbxhzPcLLAc116cRZbSsK90iM3m4ivddh1QLPDjQKyX3xQ/s320/ExtractListExample1.png" width="302" /></a></div>
The above task creates the following output. Note that 11 records have been identified.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzebWElVMAKtFm-xA__9y-3VKImVeE9zLgvkaxp912U3y4viRfnBg1JIIm666cx-RSEffPBEQYSWr-5Irj38MEGmbMbU_dmT79HhcM4-8WeCjgwQJoTjKklD6ylSFi7Bt0CZTmE6WxOoNK/s1600/ExtractListExample2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzebWElVMAKtFm-xA__9y-3VKImVeE9zLgvkaxp912U3y4viRfnBg1JIIm666cx-RSEffPBEQYSWr-5Irj38MEGmbMbU_dmT79HhcM4-8WeCjgwQJoTjKklD6ylSFi7Bt0CZTmE6WxOoNK/s320/ExtractListExample2.png" width="202" /></a></div>
Optionally, a few more tasks are added to remove the prefix and suffix to isolate just the kickout members that cause the data load error. The final results looks like the following: <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNsjx4jw4qNVUv2To6kBUD2AmmcwVg_ZRL7B2Z1lOjhTVPhvKp_RUcLV4ko0_jKpHIzn7b-KK4uM3iJu_bI_yrR3zBaGc0pnbqnqfuAXW453DPBWGlvu0INcJdOjsiCNyXygPiKye3AgqY/s1600/ExtractListExample3.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="303" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNsjx4jw4qNVUv2To6kBUD2AmmcwVg_ZRL7B2Z1lOjhTVPhvKp_RUcLV4ko0_jKpHIzn7b-KK4uM3iJu_bI_yrR3zBaGc0pnbqnqfuAXW453DPBWGlvu0INcJdOjsiCNyXygPiKye3AgqY/s320/ExtractListExample3.png" width="320" /></a></div>
A sample of this process can be downloaded <a href="http://staranalytics.com/solutions/solutions-article/extract-lists/" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
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<br />Quinlan Eddyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14311433419576485444noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6950568864980015066.post-35250062193298232212012-02-22T10:55:00.000-08:002012-02-22T11:22:25.111-08:00Monitoring the Health of Oracle EPM Services<br />
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Star Analytics has released a new Star Command Center (SCC)
Plugin for monitoring Oracle EPM Services. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many of the critical Oracle EPM services are
under the control of Oracle WebLogic and monitoring the “health” of these
services ensures that they are available to all the other application servers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes, the operating system will indicate
that the critical service is “Started” and the port is even listening (i.e “Hyperion
Reporting and Analysis Framework” or “Hyperion EPMA Server” ), but the “health”
of the service is a different story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Traditionally, the administrator or a user will hit the corresponding webpage
of the service with no response.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At this
point, it is time to restart the service. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The new functions in this SCC Plugin will prevent
this situation and instead all critical Oracle EPM services can be proactively
monitored.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Learn more at:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><a href="http://staranalytics.com/solutions/solutions-article/oracle-epm-monitoring/">http://staranalytics.com/solutions/solutions-article/oracle-epm-monitoring/</a>
</div>
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If you want to try it in your environment, try the <a href="http://staranalytics.com/products/product-trial-request/?dlv=scc">trial
license</a> and then import the <a href="http://staranalytics.com/public-downloads/scc/sample-processes/CheckOracleStatus.sfe">sample
monitoring process</a> via the "File" menu and choose "Import"
in the SCC Admin Console.</div>Quinlan Eddyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14311433419576485444noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6950568864980015066.post-57886128943928626792012-02-09T12:16:00.000-08:002012-02-09T12:16:08.852-08:00Start & Stop Hyperion Services the Right WayStar Analytics released a new Star Command Center Plugin for Systems administration. Included in the release are two new <span style="font-weight: normal;">prepacked processes to cleanly </span>start and stop Hyperion EPM services. Learn more here: <a href="http://staranalytics.com/solutions/solutions-article/windows-services-management/">http://staranalytics.com/solutions/solutions-article/windows-services-management/</a><br />
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The processes are available after you have installed a trial version of the software: <br />
<ul>
<li>Oracle Hyperion EPM Start-up Process – <a href="http://staranalytics.com/public-downloads/scc/sample-processes/StartHyperionEPMServices.sfe">Download</a></li>
<li>Oracle Hyperion EPM Shutdown Process – <a href="http://staranalytics.com/public-downloads/scc/sample-processes/StopHyperionEPMServices.sfe">Download</a></li>
</ul>
There are also new cross platform monitoring capabilities: <a href="http://staranalytics.com/solutions/solutions-article/systems-monitoring/">http://staranalytics.com/solutions/solutions-article/systems-monitoring/</a> and here is a full list of all the functions in this Plugin:<br />
<ul>
<li><strong></strong><b>Get System Information</b> - a cross platform (Windows, Linux and UNIX) feature to report current resources usage of a computing environment.</li>
<li><b>Get Process Information</b> - a cross-platform (Windows, Linux and UNIX) feature to report current resource usage of a running process.</li>
<li><strong></strong><b>List Windows Services</b><i> </i>- a feature to report current running state of all Windows services.<strong></strong><b> </b></li>
<li><b>Check Windows Service</b> – a feature to report current running state and the listening port of a single Windows service.<strong> </strong></li>
<li><strong></strong><b>Check Ports</b> now supports all platforms (Windows, Linux and UNIX).<strong> </strong></li>
<li><b><strong></strong>Check Ports</b> now reports all standard port states: LISTEN, ESTABLISHED and CLOSED.<strong> </strong></li>
<li><b><strong></strong>Manage (Start / Stop) Windows Service</b> now has integrated port monitoring with the management of a Windows service.</li>
</ul>Quinlan Eddyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14311433419576485444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6950568864980015066.post-61461900234096314032012-01-12T12:56:00.000-08:002012-01-12T15:23:33.694-08:00Super Fast Essbase ASO Extraction with New Release of Star Integration ServerThe latest release of Star Integration Server 2.8.6.2 has amazing extraction performance for Essbase ASO and BSO source cubes. This release introduces a new "Sparse Discovery" mechanism that identifies the pockets in the database where no data exists (which is typically over 90% of the possible intersection points) and only processes intersections where data does exists. In turn, this provides a tremendous performance boost especially with large sparse Essbase ASO cubes. <br />
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This release of Star Integration Server also removes any of the 2^32 limitations that Essbase administrators might experience when using traditional report scripts for data extraction as well as expanded parallel extraction with up to 128 extractor threads to leverage higher-CPU hardware. <br />
<br />
Another great improvement is client-side extraction. This feature removes the need to place a Star-specific Essbase CDF file directly on the Essbase server. The client-side extraction leverages native Essbase security filters so that users who need to extract data only get access to their authorized POV. The underpinnings of client-side extraction is either using Essbase MDX scripts or Reports scripts. However since the MDX and Reports scripts are spread across parallel extraction threads and only focus on areas where there is data, the extraction is very fast. As noted by a friend in the Hyperion Community, Gary Crisci, a side benefit of this approach is ASO Query hints can be optimized since SIS will quickly loop through all the combinations to help optimize the process. <br />
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Here is a press release announcing the product launch: <a href="http://staranalytics.com/2012/01/11/star-analytics-introduces-new-release-of-star-integration-server-to-speed-access-to-oracle-data-for-business-decisions/">http://staranalytics.com/2012/01/11/star-analytics-introduces-new-release-of-star-integration-server-to-speed-access-to-oracle-data-for-business-decisions/</a><br />
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It also should be noted that Star has a trial version available (<a href="http://staranalytics.com/products/product-trial-request/?dlv=sis">http://staranalytics.com/products/product-trial-request/?dlv=sis</a>) but has removed the metadata-only SIS "Express Edition".<br />
<br />
More details of this release can be found in the release notes: <a href="http://staranalytics.com/public-downloads/sis/documentation/SIS_2.8.6.2_ReleaseNotes.pdf">http://staranalytics.com/public-downloads/sis/documentation/SIS_2.8.6.2_ReleaseNotes.pdf</a>Quinlan Eddyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14311433419576485444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6950568864980015066.post-46113867240271093782011-11-30T12:19:00.001-08:002011-11-30T12:31:35.862-08:00Using QlikView with Hyperion Apps<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Some interesting updates regarding the integration of Hyperion with QlikView.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><a href="http://bi.cbronline.com/news/mcafee-partners-with-star-analytics-qliktech-to-power-their-business-intelligence-insights-301111">http://bi.cbronline.com/news/mcafee-partners-with-star-analytics-qliktech-to-power-their-business-intelligence-insights-301111</a> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">QlikView for Essbase: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vyBSi_mssE">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vyBSi_mssE</a> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><o:p>QlikView for HFM: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7TChKCYKEs">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7TChKCYKEs</a></o:p></span>Quinlan Eddyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14311433419576485444noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6950568864980015066.post-84534286798240360542011-09-08T12:27:00.001-07:002011-11-02T12:21:55.749-07:00Star Command Center Trial Edition<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBs-XIKxfWEvKRtnMJUOb6rZBQMOmQFVSjMGWHw2WeUfx6Nx8v1bPmFYx_cAqes47deQ3CBvsVQASnZF7P4epyFS5ABAivAJP53uZEKYEsmJOhGMVMziIp1px0gvgA86rJQlXsJ8GJ2234/s1600/SccNew.png"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5650076670403867874" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBs-XIKxfWEvKRtnMJUOb6rZBQMOmQFVSjMGWHw2WeUfx6Nx8v1bPmFYx_cAqes47deQ3CBvsVQASnZF7P4epyFS5ABAivAJP53uZEKYEsmJOhGMVMziIp1px0gvgA86rJQlXsJ8GJ2234/s320/SccNew.png" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 67px; margin: 0 10px 10px 0; width: 320px;" /></a><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />A free 30-day trial of Star Command Center is now available at: <a href="http://staranalytics.com/products/product-trial-request/?dlv=scc" target="_blank">http://staranalytics.com/products/product-trial-request/?dlv=scc</a>. The trial edition of the software is self-contained with its own pre-configured agent and automation repository, so you will be up and running quickly and efficiently – in less than 3 minutes! See how: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEJP3yl1W3M">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEJP3yl1W3M</a> </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br />The trial version of the software is completely compatible with the full version of Star Command Center. So, if you want to get your hands on the best application to address all your automation needs with full integration with products like Oracle’s Hyperion EPM products (Essbase, Hyperion Financial Management (HFM), Financial Data Quality Management (FDM), Hyperion Planning), QlikView, email automation and system administration, try it out today!</span><br /></span>Quinlan Eddyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14311433419576485444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6950568864980015066.post-89708768224280606882011-07-14T19:15:00.001-07:002011-07-14T20:18:29.194-07:00Running your BI and EPM applications in the Cloud<p style="font-family: verdana;font-family:verdana;"><span style=" ;font-size:100%;" >Hosted and Cloud-based application offerings are rapidly expanding their footprint in the enterprise application landscape. In the Hyperion EPM space, those offerings are available from Oracle On-Demand (</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><a href="http://www.oracle.com/us/products/ondemand/index.html"><span style=" "><span style="color:#0000ff;">http://www.oracle.com/us/products/ondemand/index.html</span></span></a></span><span style=" ;font-size:100%;" >), Key Performance Ideas (</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><a href="http://keyperformanceideas.com/"><span style=" "><span style="color:#0000ff;">http://keyperformanceideas.com/</span></span></a></span><span style=" ;font-size:100%;" >) and Full 360 (</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><a href="http://full360.com/"><span style=" "><span style="color:#0000ff;">http://full360.com/</span></span></a></span><span style=" ;font-size:100%;" >) to name just a few. <!--?xml:namespace prefix ="" o ns ="" "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /--><o:p></o:p></span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: verdana;font-family:verdana;"><span style=" ;font-size:100%;" >There are many benefits to moving applications to the Cloud. Cloud computing shifts the responsibility of the installation, configuration and management of the application from an in-house (on-premise) responsibility to an out-sourced and off-premise arrangement. It insulates the user from the complexity of the application and provides a consistent and fixed billing arrangement. As this new marketplace matures and the kinks are worked out, it is becoming a compelling option for rapid application deployment. <o:p></o:p></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:100%;"></span><p style="font-family: verdana;font-family:verdana;"><span style=" ;font-size:100%;" >Despite the many advantages of Cloud computing, the traditional complexities of application automation not only remain, but get compounded. <o:p></o:p></span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: verdana;font-family:verdana;"><span style=" ;font-size:100%;" >Hybrid computing environments require advanced orchestration of the critical steps between on-premise and Cloud environments. For example, a simple process might require running a task on-premise and then sequence a dependant task on a hosted application that resides in the Cloud.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>A seamless and unified handshake is required which is typically a thorny problem to solve with custom scripting and introduces significant security challenges and maintenance headaches.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Star Command Center can easily overcome these challenges that exist across a hybrid computing environment. This solution creates a unified computing environment between new applications in the Cloud and legacy applications that exist on-premise. <o:p></o:p></span><span style="line-height: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: verdana;font-family:verdana;"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; mso-fareast- mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi- mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SAfont-family:'Verdana','sans-serif';font-size:100%;" >Recently, Star Analytics announced that Key Performance Ideas will be using Star Command Center Azure Edition to enhance their client deliveries by using a packaged software product to orchestrate automation across environments instead of using customized scripting. Hence they eliminate variability in their delivery and introduce simplicity and control to their automation process. Find out more at</span> <a href="http://mwne.ws/neiaev.">http://mwne.ws/neiaev</a>.<br /></p><p style="font-family: verdana;" face="verdana"><br /></p>Quinlan Eddyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14311433419576485444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6950568864980015066.post-59702795039050517932011-06-28T17:02:00.001-07:002011-06-30T00:18:41.781-07:00Automate and Run Your Hyperion Environment with Zero Scripts, Zero Code and Zero Hassles<p style="font-family: verdana;">Presentation by Quinlan Eddy at K-Scope in Long Beach, CA – <strong><em>Automate and Run Your Hyperion Environment with Zero Scripts, Zero Code and Zero Hassles</em></strong>. </p><span style="font-family:verdana;">The presentation takes a case study approach on the following topics:</span><br /><ul style="font-family: verdana;"><li>General Hyperion EPM Automation<br /></li><li>Self-service automation for Business Users (via Web)<br /></li><li>Start & Stopping Hyperion Services<br /></li><li>Real-time Planning BSO to ASO Reporting<br /></li><li>HFM & FDM Automation<br /></li><li>Automated Data Validation</li></ul><p style="font-family: verdana; font-weight: bold;">Presentation Link: <a href="http://bit.ly/0Script0Code0Hassles">http://bit.ly/0Script0Code0Hassles</a></p>Quinlan Eddyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14311433419576485444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6950568864980015066.post-90536829165552856592011-06-20T11:37:00.000-07:002011-06-22T16:03:13.497-07:00A Fresh Approach to Essbase Backups<p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.25in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>Methods to automate the backup process for Essbase are certainly available but tend to be complicated and often times more than a business user maintaining Essbase wants to take on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Most companies have resources capable of writing old-fashioned hard-coded ESSCMD, MaxL & batch scripts to automate the process but the scripts are cumbersome to maintain, collide with existing processes and when something does go wrong like leaving Essbase in a read-only mode, the administrator only finds out in the morning!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Moreover, Hyperion administrators may not have time or may not have enough technical knowledge to maintain or modify these scripts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>On the other hand, IT systems analysts may not have enough business background to modify the process. From time to time, the process easily becomes outdated and not able to meet the business’ requirement and needs.</span></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.25in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>Star Command Center (SCC) gives Hyperion administrators the ultimate solution to automate these processes in a well-organized and manageable way without writing any custom scripts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Using SCC to automate the Essbase backup process can save an incredible of amount of time versus building and maintaining custom scripts.</span></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.25in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>The following steps details one approach to setting up an Essbase back up process using Star Command Center and the Essbase and Utilities plug-in tasks:</span></span></p><p style="TEXT-INDENT: -0.25in; MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; mso-bidi- mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latinfont-family:Calibri;font-size:100%;" ><span style="mso-list: Ignore"><span><strong>Step #1</strong>.</span><span style="FONT: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </span></span></span><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>Create a backup directory for each Essbase application and database.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Note the highlighted areas in the example below: <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span><img style="width: 631px; height: 418px;" alt="" src="http://staranalytics.com/blog/image/EssbaseBackup/step1.png" border="0" /></span></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>Create a task “Create backup folder” using the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">SCC Utilities Task Pack</b> as the first step under the process “Backup – DemoApp” process.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Fill in the parameters such as the path and directory name.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Setup time – 2 minutes.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><p style="TEXT-INDENT: -0.25in; MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1" class="MsoListParagraph"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; mso-bidi- mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latinfont-family:Calibri;font-size:100%;" ><span style="mso-list: Ignore"><span><strong>Step #2</strong>.</span><span style="FONT: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </span></span></span><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>Disable connections for the target Essbase application:</span></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span><img style="width: 635px; height: 402px;" alt="" src="http://staranalytics.com/blog/image/EssbaseBackup/step2.png" border="0" /></span></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>Create a task to “Disables Connections” using the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">SCC Essbase Plug-in</b>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Setup time –<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>less than 1 minute.</span></span></p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><p style="TEXT-INDENT: -0.25in; MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1" class="MsoListParagraph"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; mso-bidi- mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latinfont-family:Calibri;font-size:100%;" ><span style="mso-list: Ignore"><span><strong>Step #3</strong>.</span><span style="FONT: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </span></span></span><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>Backup the target database to text file(s):</span></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span><img style="width: 638px; height: 439px;" alt="" src="http://staranalytics.com/blog/image/EssbaseBackup/step3.png" border="0" /></span></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>Create an “Export Data” task using the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">SCC Essbase Plug-in</b> to export data from Essbase to a text file.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Setup time – 1 minute.</span></span></p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><p style="TEXT-INDENT: -0.25in; MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1" class="MsoListParagraph"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; mso-bidi- mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latinfont-family:Calibri;font-size:100%;" ><span style="mso-list: Ignore"><span><strong>Step #4</strong>.</span><span style="FONT: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </span></span></span><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>Detect if any errors occurred during the Data Export:</span></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span><img style="width: 637px; height: 324px;" alt="" src="http://staranalytics.com/blog/image/EssbaseBackup/step4.png" border="0" /></span></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>This task is designed ensure the “Export Data” task has successfully run without error.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>If there is an error, it will skip the next three tasks: “Reset Data”, “DataLoad” & “Error File Existence – Export”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Setup time – 2 minutes.</span></span></p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><p style="TEXT-INDENT: -0.25in; MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1" class="MsoListParagraph"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; mso-bidi- mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latinfont-family:Calibri;font-size:100%;" ><span style="mso-list: Ignore"><span><strong>Step #5</strong>.</span><span style="FONT: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </span></span></span><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>Assuming the previous step is successful, clear the data in the Essbase cube to remove fragmentation:</span></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span><img style="width: 613px; height: 400px;" alt="" src="http://staranalytics.com/blog/image/EssbaseBackup/step5.png" border="0" /></span></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>Create a task to “Reset Data” using the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">SCC Essbase Task Pack</b>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Fill in the Essbase application and database names.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Setup time – less than 1 minute.</span></span><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><o:p><span> </span></o:p></span></p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><p style="TEXT-INDENT: -0.25in; MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1" class="MsoListParagraph"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; mso-bidi- mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latinfont-family:Calibri;font-size:100%;" ><span style="mso-list: Ignore"><span><strong>Step #6</strong>.</span><span style="FONT: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </span></span></span><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>Load data from the latest backup file(s) to the target Essbase database:</span></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span><img style="width: 616px; height: 426px;" alt="" src="http://staranalytics.com/blog/image/EssbaseBackup/step6.png" border="0" /></span></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>Create a task to “Data Load Text File” using the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">SCC Essbase Task Pack</b>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>F ill in the Essbase application and database names as well as the data file name.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Setup time – less than 1 minute.</span></span></p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><p style="TEXT-INDENT: -0.25in; MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1" class="MsoListParagraph"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; mso-bidi- mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latinfont-family:Calibri;font-size:100%;" ><span style="mso-list: Ignore"><span><strong>Step #7</strong>.</span><span style="FONT: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </span></span></span><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>Detect if any errors occurred during the Data Load:</span></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span><img style="width: 617px; height: 319px;" alt="" src="http://staranalytics.com/blog/image/EssbaseBackup/step7.png" border="0" /></span></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>This task is designed ensure the “Load Data” task has successfully run without error.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>If there is an error, it will simply skip to the following task.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Setup time – 2 minutes.</span></span><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><o:p><span> </span></o:p></span></p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><p style="TEXT-INDENT: -0.25in; MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1" class="MsoListParagraph"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; mso-bidi- mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latinfont-family:Calibri;font-size:100%;" ><span style="mso-list: Ignore"><span><strong>Step #8</strong>.</span><span style="FONT: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </span></span></span><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>Create current date/time directory in the backup directory:</span></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span><img style="width: 634px; height: 398px;" alt="" src="http://staranalytics.com/blog/image/EssbaseBackup/step8.png" border="0" /></span></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>Create a task to “Create new folder (data)” using the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">SCC Utilities Task Pack</b>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Fill in the root path where a new folder will be created in the DD-MM-YYYY format.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Setup time – less than 1 minute.</span></span><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><o:p><span> </span></o:p></span></p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><p style="TEXT-INDENT: -0.25in; MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1" class="MsoListParagraph"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; mso-bidi- mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latinfont-family:Calibri;font-size:100%;" ><span style="mso-list: Ignore"><span><strong>Step #9</strong>.</span><span style="FONT: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </span></span></span><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>Move backup file(s) & log file(s) to the current date/time directory:</span></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span><img style="width: 614px; height: 372px;" alt="" src="http://staranalytics.com/blog/image/EssbaseBackup/step9.png" border="0" /></span></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>Create a task to “Copy Logs” and fill in the required Source and Target path and file information.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Setup time – 2 minutes.</span></span><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><o:p><span> </span></o:p></span></p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><p style="TEXT-INDENT: -0.25in; MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1" class="MsoListParagraph"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; mso-bidi- mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latinfont-family:Calibri;font-size:100%;" ><span style="mso-list: Ignore"><span><strong>Step #10</strong>.</span><span style="FONT: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </span></span></span><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>Delete processing logs:</span></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span><img style="width: 631px; height: 408px;" alt="" src="http://staranalytics.com/blog/image/EssbaseBackup/step10.png" border="0" /></span></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>Create a task to “Delete Logs” using the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">SCC Utilities Task Pack</b>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Setup time – less than 1 minute.</span></span><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><o:p><span> </span></o:p></span></p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><p style="TEXT-INDENT: -0.25in; MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1" class="MsoListParagraph"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; mso-bidi- mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latinfont-family:Calibri;font-size:100%;" ><span style="mso-list: Ignore"><span><strong>Step #11</strong>.</span><span style="FONT: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </span></span></span><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>Delete any date/time directory which is 15+ days old:</span></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"><img style="width: 632px; height: 411px;" alt="" src="http://staranalytics.com/blog/image/EssbaseBackup/step11.png" border="0" /><br /></span></span></span><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>Create a task to “Delete log folders (15+ days old)” using the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">SCC Utilities Task Pack</b>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This unique task will dynamically remove any folder and all its contents with a naming convention of “DD-MM-YYYY”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Note: all other folders are ignored.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Setup time – less than 1 minute.</span></span><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><o:p><span> </span></o:p></span><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><o:p><span> </span></o:p></span></p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><p style="TEXT-INDENT: -0.25in; MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1" class="MsoListParagraph"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; mso-bidi- mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latinfont-family:Calibri;font-size:100%;" ><span style="mso-list: Ignore"><span><strong>Step #12</strong>.</span><span style="FONT: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </span></span></span><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>Enable connections for the target Essbase application:</span></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span><img style="width: 627px; height: 399px;" alt="" src="http://staranalytics.com/blog/image/EssbaseBackup/step12.png" border="0" /></span></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>Create a task to “Enable Connections” using the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">SCC Essbase Task Pack</b>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>F ill in the Essbase application and database names.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Setup time – less than 1 minute.</span></span><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><o:p><span> </span></o:p></span></p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><p style="TEXT-INDENT: -0.25in; MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1" class="MsoListParagraph"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; mso-bidi- mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latinfont-family:Calibri;font-size:100%;" ><span style="mso-list: Ignore"><span><strong>Step #13</strong>.</span><span style="FONT: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </span></span></span><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>Send out email notifications to in the event the process fails:</span></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><o:p><span><img style="width: 628px; height: 314px;" alt="" src="http://staranalytics.com/blog/image/EssbaseBackup/step13.png" border="0" /> </span></o:p></span></p><p><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast- mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SAfont-family:Calibri;font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal"><u><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; "><span>Tips:</span></span></u></b></span></p><p style="TEXT-INDENT: -0.25in; MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; mso-bidi- mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latinfont-family:Calibri;font-size:100%;" ><span style="mso-list: Ignore"><span>1.</span><span style="FONT: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </span></span></span><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>Review the Star Analytics plug-ins inventory and understand what the plug-ins can do for you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>A lot of time can be saved by using plug-ins, instead of writing custom code.<br /><br /></span></span></p><p style="TEXT-INDENT: -0.25in; MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; mso-bidi- mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latinfont-family:Calibri;font-size:100%;" ><span style="mso-list: Ignore"><span>2.</span><span style="FONT: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </span></span></span><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>Based on the above example, each task takes 2 minutes or less to setup and not a single line of custom code was used to setup this semi-complicated process. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><p style="TEXT-INDENT: -0.25in; MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; mso-bidi- mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latinfont-family:Calibri;font-size:100%;" ><span style="mso-list: Ignore"><span>3.</span><span style="FONT: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </span></span></span><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; font-size:100%;" ><span>Use Star Command Center’s environment or process variables when setting up the tasks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Most tasks above have hardcoded values that can leverage environment variables.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></span></span></p>Sunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17430107901084688504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6950568864980015066.post-640004575499205282011-05-31T20:43:00.000-07:002013-10-14T14:21:19.817-07:00Is there EAL for Hyperion Planning? Yes!Wouldn't it be great if you would be able to push Oracle Hyperion Planning data to an Essbase ASO reporting cube in real-time? Of course it would! Now you can and this article will describe the simple process on how to make it happen. Your system will work smarter, not harder. The requirements are as follows:<br />
<ul>
<li>Star Command Center</li>
<li>Off-the-shelf Oracle Essbase Report Scripts</li>
<li>Off-the-shelf Oracle Essbase Rules Files</li>
<li>Off-the-shelf Oracle Essbase MaxL script</li>
<li>Minor modifications to the Hyperion Planning ValidateData.js file</li>
</ul>
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Watch this 2 minute video that demonstrates the functionality within Star Command Center</span> – <span style="font-style: italic;">be sure to view in full screen mode:</span> <a href="http://youtu.be/AzhLM6Qew9c?hd=1">YouTube Link</a><br />
Regardless of Hyperion Planning complexity and product version v4, v9, v11, this process is fully supported and it is quick and easy to setup (less than one hour).<br />
<strong>Step #1</strong> – Edit your data configuration file. Depending on your Hyperion Planning web server (i.e. Weblogic, Websphere, Tomcat, etc) you will need to edit the “ValidateData.js” file (1) so either a new custom button can be placed on the Planning web form or (2) a new action can be defined such as ‘On Save’. For more details, see the blog post:<br />
<a href="http://autogration.blogspot.com/2009/12/cool-things-with-hyperion-planning.html">http://autogration.blogspot.com/2009/12/cool-things-with-hyperion-planning.html</a>.<br />
<br />
<strong>Step #2</strong> – Create an Essbase Report Script that represents the data set that you want to extract from the source Planning Essbase cube and load into the target reporting ASO cube. The report script should:<br />
<ul>
<li>Include all combinations of data within the scope of the Hyperion Planning web form or include an entire Essbase “block”.</li>
<li>Map the Hyperion Planning page slicers as parameters in the Essbase Report Script.</li>
<li>Have 'Row' definitions that define the dimensionality of the Essbase block.</li>
</ul>
<img alt="" border="0" src="http://staranalytics.com/blog/image/531Blog/RptScriptExample.png" /><br />
<strong>Step #3</strong> – Create an Essbase Rules File to load the exported data into the target reporting ASO cube. <br />
<ul>
<li>Tip: Often the target reporting ASO cube has dimensionality that is different from the source Planning Essbase cube to allow reporting users to see data in different ways. As such, the Essbase data load rules file should map the source text file to the target ASO cube which can be easily handled in the rules file. This in turn simplifies the Planning model while maintaining rich reporting functionality.</li>
</ul>
<img alt="" border="0" src="http://staranalytics.com/blog/image/531Blog/EssbaseLoadRuleExample.png" /><br />
<strong>Step #4</strong> – Create a simple MaxL script to run the report script against the source BSO cube and load into the target ASO cube.<br />
<ul>
<li>Tip: Star Command Center Essbase tasks could also be used for this step</li>
</ul>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Courier New; font-size: 85%;">login $(ESS_USER) $(ESS_USERPW) on $(ESS_SERVER2);</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New; font-size: 85%;">export database $(ESS_APP).$(ESS_DB) using report_file 'ExptData.rep' to data_file 'Delta.txt';</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New; font-size: 85%;">import database 'TotASO'.'Plan1ASO' data from data_file 'Delta.txt' using rules_file 'Delta.rul' on error abort;</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New; font-size: 85%;">logout;</span></blockquote>
<strong>Step #5</strong> – Create a simple task sequence in Star Command Center as illustrated:<br />
<ul>
<li>Tip: The above approach can actually be used with any other type of task sequence, for example loading Essbase data into relational data warehouse or running an external variable driven procedure.</li>
</ul>
<img alt="" border="0" src="http://staranalytics.com/blog/image/531Blog/SCCProcessExample.png" /><br />
<img alt="" border="0" src="http://staranalytics.com/blog/image/531Blog/SCCRunRptScriptExample.png" /><br />
<img alt="" border="0" src="http://staranalytics.com/blog/image/531Blog/SCCRunDataLoadExample.png" />Quinlan Eddyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14311433419576485444noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6950568864980015066.post-70972355200588536312011-03-31T22:53:00.001-07:002011-03-31T23:00:30.028-07:00Star Command Center 3.0 Launched<hr align="left" color="#ed712d" size="15" width="100%">
<p><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><img style="WIDTH: 301px; HEIGHT: 51px" title="Star_CommandCenter3_logo" border="0" hspace="0" alt="Star_CommandCenter3_logo" src="https://6f13b5248c-custmedia.vresp.com/0c59f4b213/Star_CommandCenter3_logo.gif" width="301" height="51" /></span></span></p>
<p><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif">Star Command Center 3.0 is a major release, with a host of new features. Note that the 3.0 launch includes a product name change: <strong>Star Finance Command Center</strong> is now<strong> </strong>called<strong> Star Command Center (SCC)</strong>.<br /><br />You may have seen recent announcements about Star Command Center’s ability to run and monitor your Business Intelligence applications from a Smartphone. We now have a live cloud-based installation of SCC available for you to access from a web browser, from your Smartphone, or from other browser-enabled devices. The URL is <a href="http://stardemo.staranalytics.com/">http://stardemo.staranalytics.com</a>. Use these logon credentials: Username: "seestar" / Password: "seestar".</span></span></p>
<h3><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif">New in Version 3.0</span></h3>
<ul>
<li><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif">Command Line Client, a new license option. The command line client supports: </span></span>
<ul>
<li><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif">Querying, starting, pausing and stopping processes.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif">Testing Agent connectivity.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif">Full and partial exports of the automation repository.</span></span></li></ul></li>
<li><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif">Web Services Interface, a new license option. The web services interface supports: </span></span>
<ul>
<li><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif">Starting, stopping and querying processes.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif">Support for all major BPEL engines, including Oracle BPEL Process Manager, Microsoft BizTalk Server and SAP NetWeaver.</span></span></li></ul></li>
<li><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif">An improved Client user interface. The most noticeable changes are:</span></span>
<ul>
<li><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif">There are now tabbed views of documents, enabling multiple automation objects to be viewed, and/or edited, at the same time.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif">The Process Overview view now uses search in place of drill-down navigation. It is similar to the existing web interface.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif">It is now possible to edit a process from the run view with a single click.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif">You can now run a Process directly from the Setup and Design view. You can run the entire Process, part of the Process starting at a particular Task , or just a single Task. </span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif">It is now possible to manage both 2.0.8 and 3.0.x servers using the same Client.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif">You can now see user activity via the Web and Windows Client Run & Monitor consoles.</span></span></li></ul></li>
<li><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif">An Audit Log is now available for all objects. The Audit Log answers the question of who did what, and when they did it.</span></span></li></ul>
<p style="MARGIN-LEFT: 40px"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><img style="WIDTH: 626px; HEIGHT: 133px" title="audit 2" border="0" hspace="0" alt="audit 2" src="https://6f13b5248c-custmedia.vresp.com/0c59f4b213/audit%202.jpg" width="626" height="133" /></span></span></p>
<ul>
<li><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif">Previous versions of processes and file resources can now be viewed and promoted to become the current version.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif">A new Label object has been introduced. By labeling a set of specific process and file resource versions, this state can later be restored in a single operation.</span></span></li></ul>
<p style="MARGIN-LEFT: 40px"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><img style="WIDTH: 439px; HEIGHT: 218px" title="labels 2" border="0" hspace="0" alt="labels 2" src="https://6f13b5248c-custmedia.vresp.com/0c59f4b213/labels%202.jpg" width="439" height="218" /></span></span></p>
<ul>
<li><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt">Productivity packs are now managed directly from Command Center. They can be downloaded and installed from the Star Analytics web site, thereby providing a seamless upgrades from one version to another.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt">The ability to set schedules with different frequencies on different dates.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt">A new Run Process task type allows one process to start another process.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt">A new Sleep task type suspends process activity for a specified period of time.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt">There is now an option to skip a task.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt">Process and ecosystem variables have been improved. Previously a variable could be expanded only once, and you could not nest variable references. Now you can use variables like: </span></span>
<ul>
<li><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt">VAR_A = Command</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt">VAR_B = Star $(VAR_A) Center</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt">And $(VAR_B) will expand to "Star Command Center"</span></span></li></ul></li>
<li><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt">Mathematical expression handling has been enhanced. This is used primarily for automated data validation. The new engine supports the following: </span></span>
<ul>
<li><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt">Support for basic mathematical operators: + - * / ().</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt">Support for mathematical rules of operation.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt">ABS - Returns the absolute value of a specified number. Example: Abs(-1) returns 1.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt">Ceiling - Returns the smallest integer greater than or equal to the specified number. Example: Ceiling(1.5) returns 2.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt">Floor - Returns the largest integer less than or equal to the specified number. Example: Floor(1.5) returns 1.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt">Max - Returns the larger of two specified numbers. Example: Max(1, 2) returns 2.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt">Min - Returns the smaller of two numbers. Example: Min(1, 2) returns 1.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt">Round - Rounds a value to the nearest integer, or to a specified number of decimal places. Example: Round(5.22, 0) returns 5.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt">Truncate - Calculates the integral part of a number. Example: Truncate(1.7) returns 1.</span></span></li></ul></li></ul>
<p style="MARGIN-LEFT: 80px"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><img style="WIDTH: 352px; HEIGHT: 200px" title="math" border="0" hspace="0" alt="math" src="https://6f13b5248c-custmedia.vresp.com/0c59f4b213/math.jpg" width="352" height="200" /></span></span></p>
<ul>
<li><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif">Import/Export now allows you to import an ecosystem using a different name. Thus, you can now create a copy of an ecosystem on the same server.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif">Agents can now process tasks from multiple servers simultaneously. If your setup includes multiple Command Center servers, you can have them execute tasks through the same physical server using a single agent.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif">In addition to the product rename, the following components have also been renamed:</span></span>
<ul>
<li><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif">Windows services are now SccAgent, SccServer and SccQueue</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif">The UNIX installation directory is now SccAgent</span></span></li></ul></li>
<li><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif">Upgrade includes numerous quality improvements detailed in the release notes.</span></span></li></ul>
<h3><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif">Star Command Center Plug-in Task Packs</span></h3><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt">There has been an expansion of the Star Command Center Plug-in Task Packs. The current inventory is as follows:</span></span><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt">Oracle Essbase Task Pack - Standard administrative functions for Essbase such as run calculation, load data, set and receive server-side variables.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt">Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) Task Pack - Standard administrative functions for HFM, such as clear, copy, and move data, consolidate, open and close period, and execute Extended Analytics extractions.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt">Oracle Financial Data Quality Management (FDM) Task Pack - Standard administrative functions for FDM, such as Import, Validate, Export and Load, run custom scripts, run standard FDM reports.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt">Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Architect (EPMA) Task Pack - Ability to run an EPMA script.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt">Utilities Task Pack - Various utilities used for data, file management and systems management.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt">Email Task Pack - Email automation, providing the ability to send plain and HTML emails with file attachments.</span></span></li></ul><br />Quinlan Eddyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14311433419576485444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6950568864980015066.post-8202481384974940652011-03-01T23:33:00.001-08:002011-03-01T23:35:19.502-08:00Introducing Star Command Center 3.0<p>The next major release of Star Analytics’ flagship product is undergoing the final steps in the QA process. It will be released at the end of this quarter (Q1 2011). We are very pleased with this release, and we would like to provide an overview of some of its new features.</p><p>With new capabilities, and with increased support for cloud-based computing environments (discussed in a future blog post), the 3.0 release has a new product name: Star Command Center (SCC). SCC provides a significant expansion of capabilities that go well beyond the initial use within finance departments of Fortune 1000 companies, such as MasterCard, EDMC and Symantec. <br />See and read more:</p><ul><li>EDMC Webinar: <a href="http://bit.ly/EDMC-SCC">http://bit.ly/EDMC-SCC</a> </li><li>MasterCard Webinar: <a href="http://bit.ly/MC-SCC">http://bit.ly/MC-SCC</a> </li><li>Symantec Information Management Article: <a href="http://bit.ly/SYM-SCC">http://bit.ly/SYM-SCC</a> </li></ul><p>Based upon user feedback, the Star Command Center Client has improved usability, enhanced audit tracking, and an additional interface to handshake with 3rd party IT-based schedulers and enterprise management systems. The screenshots below, combined with short descriptions, help to illustrate the new capabilities found in Star Command Center 3.0.</p><ul><li>Tabbed/Multiple document view, enabling multiple automation objects to be viewed and edited at the same time.</li></ul><p><span style="font-family:ved;"><strong><u>Example #1</u></strong>: In tabbed view mode:</span></p><p><span style="font-family:ved;"><img alt="" src="http://www.staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/SCC3.0/Image1.png" border="0" height="281" width="644" /></span></p><p><strong><u>Example #2</u></strong>: In document view mode:</p><p><img alt="" src="http://www.staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/SCC3.0/Image2.png" border="0" height="314" width="644" /></p><ul><li>The Process Overview view uses filters instead of drill down navigation</li></ul><p><img alt="//www.staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/SCC3.0/Image3" src="http://www.staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/SCC3.0/Image3.png" border="0" height="171" width="644" /></p><ul><li>It is now possible to edit a process from the Run View with a single click, thereby allowing an iterative approach to automation setup.</li></ul><p><img alt="//www.staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/SCC3.0/Image4" src="http://www.staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/SCC3.0/Image4.png" border="0" height="124" width="649" /></p><ul><li>Is it now possible to run a process directly from the Setup and Design View. This allows a user to run the complete process, to run a single task, or to do a partial run starting from a task.</li></ul><p><img alt="" src="http://www.staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/SCC3.0/Image5.png" border="0" height="140" width="485" /></p><ul><li>The system of Task Plug-ins has been vastly improved, and it can now be managed directly from the Star Command Center client. Task Plugins are used to add new Computing Resources and Task Types to the system. </li></ul><p><img alt="" src="http://www.staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/SCC3.0/Image6.png" border="0" height="268" width="652" /></p><ul><li>An Audit trail is now available for all objects. The audit trail answers the question of who did what and when they did it, which is especially important when managing automation.</li></ul><p><img alt="" src="http://www.staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/SCC3.0/Image7.png" border="0" height="125" width="654" /></p><p>For processes and file resources, old versions of a file resource can be promoted to become current versions, thereby providing the ability to restore from a previous state. Combined with the new labeling system in 3.0, a baseline of processes and file resources can be created. This can be restored in a single operation, thereby becoming the new baseline version.</p><ul><li>The Star Command Center Server audit log now can be filtered.</li></ul><p><img alt="" src="http://www.staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/SCC3.0/Image8.png" border="0" height="461" width="661" /></p><ul><li>As noted earlier, a new Label object has been introduced with Star Command Center 3.0. A label can be created with a set of specific process and file resource versions, which later can be used to restore in a single operation. During an Ecosystem Export operation, Star Command Center automatically labels the automation repository before doing an import, easily allowing the import to be undone.</li></ul><p><img alt="" src="http://www.staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/SCC3.0/Image9.png" border="0" height="333" width="665" /></p><ul><li>A new Run Process task type has been introduced. This task type allows an automation process to be started as a subroutine.</li></ul><p><img alt="" src="http://www.staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/SCC3.0/Image10.png" border="0" /></p><p><strong>Functional changes</strong></p><ul><li>Improved scheduling: It is now possible to schedule a process to run at 2pm on Wednesdays and at 3pm on Thursdays.</li><li>Improved process and ecosystem variable usage: Previously, a variable was expanded once and did not allow for nested variable references. With this enhancement, variables behave like this:</li><ul><li>VAR_A = Command</li><li>VAR_B = Star $(VAR_A) Center<br />In turn, $(VAR_B) will expand to "Star Command Center"</li></ul><li>Import/Export now allows ecosystem import using a different name. This enhancement allows making a copy of an ecosystem on the same server.</li><li>Agents can now process tasks from multiple servers simultaneously. With a setup that includes multiple Star Command Center servers which utilize a common remote agents, the agents can now execute tasks from each server.</li></ul><p><strong>Command Line Client</strong></p><p>With the release of Star Command Center 3.0, a command line client has been added as an additional licensed feature. The command line provides the following capabilities: </p><ul><li>Start/stop/pause a Star Command Center processes</li><li>Query the state of a running process (not started, running, paused, warning, error, complete)</li><li>Query process statistics (run time, last run, number of runs, run by user)</li><li>Test connectivity to a Star Command Center agent</li><li>Export one or more ecosystems</li></ul><p><img alt="" src="http://www.staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/SCC3.0/Image11.png" border="0" height="274" width="696" /><br /><br /></p><p>The Command Line Client complements the existing Event Listener interface and the Web Service interface. It enables Star Command Center to be part of a larger automation ecosystem traditionally made up of IT-based scheduling and enterprise management tools such as CA AutoSys, IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler, BMC Control M, UC4, ActiveBatch and HP OpenView.</p><p><br /></p><p>A link to the above can be downloaded <a href="http://staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/SccFeatures.pdf">here</a>.</p><p><br /></p><p></p><br /><br /><div style='clear: both;'></div>Steffen Ennihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04292216800284576733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6950568864980015066.post-31860600557669189442011-02-08T22:15:00.001-08:002011-11-02T12:52:04.544-07:00QlikView for EssbaseIn the previous posts, we discussed Hyperion Automation and noted that long time Hyperion luminaries within Oracle have been very supportive in lending their praise to the Star Finance Command Center (SFCC) and its value proposition for automating processes not only across Hyperion products, but a whole ecosystem of other applications as well. This post focuses on our second product: the Star Integration Server (SIS).<br />
<br />
Star Analytics’ goal is to provide software that truly opens and connects application processes and data with other applications. SIS is designed to provide high volume extract of any level of data and metadata from Oracle Essbase, Oracle Hyperion Planning and Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) to a standard Star Schema. Star has many customer cases of SIS being used to not only move data between the varying dimensionality of Hyperion applications, but also to data warehouses for consumption by various reporting and BI tools. Thus, SIS far more fully enables users to have open application solutions and more easily use their tool of choice around their Hyperion data.<br />
<br />
One BI tool of choice that has been gaining popularity over the past few years is QlikView. At Star, we’ve seen a notable uptick in QlikView at large enterprise accounts, and a growing interest to bring Hyperion data into QlikView for mashing with other operational data for a more comprehensive organizational view. <br />
<br />
Recently, Star Analytics released a new version of SIS that serves up QlikView ready data; making it easy to share all levels of Essbase data across financial and operational oriented dashboards. To see more, check out the PDF file: <a href="http://staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/Integrating_Hyperion_to_QlikView.pdf" target="_blank">http://staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/Integrating_Hyperion_to_QlikView.pdf</a><br />
<br />
As a final note, consulting companies like NxGen Consulting see the demand for this solution which is contributing to growing their practice: <a href="http://nxgenconsulting.com/services_Star.html">http://nxgenconsulting.com/services_Star.html</a><br />
<br />Quinlan Eddyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14311433419576485444noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6950568864980015066.post-63986336333130458442011-01-31T09:32:00.001-08:002011-11-02T12:50:41.073-07:00Automating Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) TasksIn the previous posts, Star Finance Command Center (SFCC) was introduced as an alternative to scripting and manual processes. In this post we discuss the automation of Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) Tasks.<br />
<br />
Since SFCC was launched over 18 months ago, Star Analytics has focused on the need to automate a complete finance systems environment. One of the key areas that our early adopters asked us to focus on was automation of the HFM environment. Simply put, there was no real way to automate the updating, calculating, consolidating, and exporting of an HFM application. All this required “all or nothing” access by an HFM administrator to go into the HFM console and manually run processes. The alternative was to whip out some Visual Basic code and perhaps tie it into a Windows scheduler or use the rudimentary capabilities of HFM Task Scheduler. Either way, a costly and/or inflexible, and un-scalable approach for business users at any HFM installation of significant size.<br />
<br />
In fact, in showing SFCC to the HFM product team, they seemed to be impressed enough with the product’s capabilities to drive us to release our first SFCC Automation Task Pack for HFM. With that, some long time Hyperion luminaries like John O’Rourke saw the tremendous value-add for their customers and have spoken on the product’s behalf on numerous occasions:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
<i>“We are pleased that Star Analytics is leveraging Oracle’s open application framework with the Star Finance Command Center,” said John O’Rourke, vice president of product marketing at Oracle. “This helps makes it easy for Oracle Hyperion Financial Management customers to automate their financial processes across multiple applications and systems.”</i></blockquote>
<br />
Since introducing the HFM Automation Task Pack, we have had some of the world’s most prominent HFM shops, like Pfizer, embrace SFCC to connect, automate, and eliminate manual processes in their finance systems environment. As the buzz for SFCC has grown at various user groups, and the list of customer success stories has grown, John recently co-presented with EDMC at a recent Star Analytics webinar and provided some additional thoughts:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
<i>“Organizations are always looking for ways to speed close cycle times while improving the integrity of their financial data,” said John O’Rourke, vice president of product marketing at Oracle. “The combination of Oracle’s market-leading financial close and reporting applications and the Star Finance Command Center is a powerful one-two punch that helps achieve that goal by streamlining systems for more consistent, timely, transparent and accurate financial data and processes.”</i><br />
<i></i></blockquote>
<i></i><br />
<br />
A replay of the webinar is available by clicking <a href="http://bit.ly/EDMC-SCC">here</a>.<br />
<br />
In recent times, we have also been asked by perspective customers to compare and contrast SFCC to the newly released Financial Close Manager (FCM). Having seen previews before its commercial release, we were pleased to see its workgroup oriented features to manage the “to do” tasks of the financial close process. We were even more pleased to see that FCM and SFCC were designed to address different sides of “automation”. While FCM is inwardly focused on the HFM close environment, SFCC is all about the connection, automation, and monitoring of HFM in conjunction with the whole ecosystem of application processes that surround it.<br />
<br />
Samples of how our SFCC HFM Task Pack works are explored in this PDF file: <a href="http://staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/Automating_HFM_Tasks_with_Star_Finance_Command_Center.pdf" target="_blank">http://staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/Automating_HFM_Tasks_with_Star_Finance_Command_Center.pdf</a><br />Quinlan Eddyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14311433419576485444noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6950568864980015066.post-69826931918777575932011-01-24T06:08:00.001-08:002011-11-02T12:48:26.343-07:00Automating Oracle Essbase TasksIn the previous posts, Star Finance Command Center (SFCC) was introduced as an alternative to scripting and manual processes. In this post we discuss the automation of Essbase Tasks.<br />
<br />
Since the early 1990s, Essbase has been the market leading multidimensional database solution for planning, reporting, and analysis. Despite its popularity, and strategic importance in serving the needs of large user communities, the product relies heavily on scripting and custom coding to work in non-trivial customer environments. The lack of better tools to orchestrate, automate, and monitor the Essbase environment creates a significant cost for the initial implementation, and ongoing maintenance of the system. <br />
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<b>A bit of history</b>…Back in 1992, initial Essbase customers asked for some way to automate the loading and updating of Essbase cubes. At that time, the Essbase roadmap was full of more important features to improve usability, scalability, etc. However, lurking in a back-cubicle of Arbor Software, the Essbase QA Manager, Ron Cho, had built his own Essbase command line interface using the Essbase API; he called it ESSCMD. Despite the fact that it was built for internal QA use, the utility was put in a few customer’s hands, and it did the trick. As the early Essbase installed base quickly grew, more customers ended up with the utility in hand, so basic documentation was provided. <br />
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Fast forward to 1999, the Essbase install base was large, and despite its many shortcomings, ESSCMD had become part of the product family. As the demands for more enterprise class deployability continued to grow, it was clear that ESSCMD was not up to the challenge. MaxL was born to provide a more programmatic language based interface that could be more easily used with Perl, Python, or other scripting languages. <br />
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The basic idea however, was still to provide the rudimentary command line interface, and let the more technically oriented administrators fend for themselves with scripting languages and scheduling tools. While the Essbase command line interfaces make automation possible, they were never designed to or actually perform the automation of tasks. That is where SFCC comes into the picture. Over the past 18 months the product has been used by a number of long time, and not so long time, Essbase shops to automate and interconnect their ESSCMD and MaxL processes with a whole ecosystem of applications that surround Essbase.<br />
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Interestingly enough, one of the frequent requests that we receive from Essbase customers is for pre-defined Tasks in SFCC to perform all the update and maintenance operations on Essbase; without having to resort to ESSCMD or MaxL. Many of them would rather eliminate their scripts, and other code, altogether with out-of-the-box features that are provided by SFCC.<br />
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In response to our Essbase customer demand, a library of over 20 Essbase specific tasks is now available for SFCC. Samples of how this works are explored in this PDF file: <a href="http://staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/Automating_Essbase_Tasks_with_Star_Finance_Command_Center.pdf" target="_blank">http://staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/Automating_Essbase_Tasks_with_Star_Finance_Command_Center.pdf</a><br />
<br />Quinlan Eddyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14311433419576485444noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6950568864980015066.post-40188338934212198332011-01-05T20:13:00.001-08:002011-11-02T12:46:55.678-07:00Automating Oracle Hyperion FDM TasksOracle's Financial Data Quality Management (FDM) is heavily relied upon as a preprocessor of data in advance of loading into Oracle's Hyperion Financial Management (HFM), Hyperion Planning and occasionally into Oracle Essbase. The product does an excellent job validating, parsing, merging data based upon rules that ensures the output data is correct for loading into the target system. This summary does not nearly give the product justice and more information can be found at: <a href="http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/ent-performance-bi/hyperion-data-quality-management-066557.html">http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/ent-performance-bi/hyperion-data-quality-management-066557.html</a>.<br />
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Despite all the benefits that FDM brings to enhancing data quality, it lacks significant ability to automate the various tasks that are necessary to keep the application running across an ecosystem of applications, servers and processes that typical finance administrators need to interact with. FDM does have a built-in “localized” scheduler but it is difficult to job chain FDM processes with other running processes outside of the control of FDM. As a result, clients who depend upon FDM often rely upon manual processes to do such tasks such as running custom file splitters, loading data to various applications via the “4 Fish Process” and generating and emailing reconciliation reports in PDF or XLS formats. In the typical environment, where there is a heterogenous mix of applications and computing environments, each step along a job chain typically requires human intervention which is time consuming, error prone and ultimately undermines SOX compliance.<br />
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In the previous post, Star Finance Command Center (SFCC) was introduced as an alternative to manual processes and how a current Command Center customer helped educate their team about the product's capabilities through a comparison of current processes and those under the control of SFCC. In this post, the following three main FDM tasks will be highlighed and how SFCC automates them:<br />
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<li>Running a FDM Custom Script</li>
<li>Running the “4–Fish” Process (Import, Validate, Export & Load)</li>
<li>Running the FDM report engine</li>
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Details of how Star Finance Command Center interacts with FDM will be explored in this PDF file: <a href="http://staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/Automating_FDM_Tasks_with_Star_Finance_Command_Center.pdf" target="_blank">http://staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/Automating_FDM_Tasks_with_Star_Finance_Command_Center.pdf</a>Quinlan Eddyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14311433419576485444noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6950568864980015066.post-16238602407733997582010-12-22T03:28:00.001-08:002011-11-02T12:54:23.251-07:00A Client Justification for the Purchase of Star Finance Command CenterThe <a href="http://www.staranalytics.com/products/command_center.htm">Star Finance Command Center</a> (SFCC) is a packaged finance automation software product. It is designed to overcome the challenges of the abundance of technology platforms within many of today's finance departments. SFCC provides business users with a highly accessible solution that allows them to manage the variety of complex processes across these different platforms. The product offers strong control and compliance management while allowing remote access to securely run and monitor all finance processes through web applications and smart phones.<br />
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SFCC automates the heterogeneous mix of software products that exists in today's corporations. Finance departments are tasked with maintaining, integrating, automating and ultimately orchestrating systems from Oracle Hyperion, SAP Business Objects, QlikView, Oracle RDBMS and Microsoft SQL Server as well as many home grown products. Any product with a command line interface can easily integrate with SFCC to orchestrate processes across servers, applications, and environments with a minimal amount or complete elimination of custom code. SFCC smoothes the rough edges across the thorny integration points within a cross-platform operating environment. <br />
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One of Star Analytics' clients recently allowed the posting of their purchase justification which clearly illustrates their challenges prior and desired state after SFCC is implemented. Any references to the client has been removed. Please see this PDF: <a href="http://staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/Client_X_SFCC_Purchase_Justification.pdf" target="_blank">http://staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/Client_X_SFCC_Purchase_Justification.pdf</a><br />Quinlan Eddyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14311433419576485444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6950568864980015066.post-70238745416249952162009-12-08T09:46:00.001-08:002009-12-08T10:36:30.709-08:00Cool Things with Hyperion Planning Custom Buttons<p>Have you ever wanted to capture the various Hyperion Planning slicer settings information or even capture the connected user? If so, then hopefully this post can show you the technique to use. Hyperion Planning has a nifty way to add “Custom Buttons” to any web form. These buttons can then be attached to an action.</p><br /><p>The Hyperion Planning documentation has deployment information for other application servers, but this post will focus on Tomcat. There is a directory called “custom” and in this directory will be a fill called “ValidateData.js”. Here is an example of where to find the file:</p><br /><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><font face="Courier New">C:\Hyperion\deployments\Tomcat5\HyperionPlanning\webapps\HyperionPlanning\custom </font></p><br /><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"> </p><br /><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal">In the file you will find various functions. You will need to add the code to the functions to draw the buttons and assign actions to the buttons.</p><br /><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"> </p><br /><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal">The first function that needs to be modified is the “drawCustomButtons” and following is an example that can be cut and pasted into your code (note: you need to update the application name and form name in the red font):</p><br /><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"> </p><br /><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><font size="1" face="Courier New">function drawCustomButtons() {</font></p><br /><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><font size="1" face="Courier New"> if (equalsIgnoreCase(<font color="#ff0000">applicationName,"TotPlan"</font>)) <br /> {<br /> if (equalsIgnoreCase(<font color="#ff0000">formName,"Dept Exp"</font>)) <br /> {<br /> document.writeln('<table cellspacing=2 cellpadding=0 border=0><tr><td>');</font></p><br /><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><font size="1" face="Courier New"> // First row of buttons<br /> document.writeln('<tr>');<br /> document.writeln('<td>');</font></p><br /><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><font size="1" face="Courier New"> DrawCmdBtn("actionButton1", "Action 1", null, "submitAction(1)", "This executes Action #1");<br /> document.writeln('&nbsp;');</font></p><br /><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><font size="1" face="Courier New"> DrawCmdBtn("actionButton2", "Action 2", null, "submitAction(2)", "This executes Action #2");<br /> document.writeln('&nbsp;');<br /> DrawCmdBtn("actionButton3", "Action 3", null, "submitAction(3)", "This executes Action #3");<br /> document.writeln('&nbsp;');<br /> <br /> document.writeln('</td>');<br /> document.writeln('</tr>');<br /> <br /> document.writeln('</table>');<br /> }<br /> <br /> }</font></p><br /><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><font size="1" face="Courier New"> if (equalsIgnoreCase(<font color="#ff0000">applicationName,"<<SOME OTHER APP NAME>>"</font>)) <br /> {<br /> if (equalsIgnoreCase(<font color="#ff0000">formName,"<<SOME OTHER FORM NAME>>"))</font> <br /> {<br /> document.writeln('<table cellspacing=2 cellpadding=0 border=0><tr><td>');</font></p><br /><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><font size="1" face="Courier New"> // First row of buttons<br /> document.writeln('<tr>');<br /> document.writeln('<td>');</font></p><br /><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><font size="1" face="Courier New"> DrawCmdBtn("actionButton1", "Action 1", null, "submitAction(1)", "This executes Action #1");<br /> document.writeln('&nbsp;');</font></p><br /><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><font size="1" face="Courier New"> DrawCmdBtn("actionButton2", "Action 2", null, "submitAction(2)", "This executes Action #2");<br /> document.writeln('&nbsp;');<br /> DrawCmdBtn("actionButton3", "Action 3", null, "submitAction(3)", "This executes Action #3");<br /> document.writeln('&nbsp;');<br /> <br /> document.writeln('</td>');<br /> document.writeln('</tr>');<br /> <br /> document.writeln('</table>');<br /> }<br /> <br /> }</font></p><br /><p>Once the buttons are created, we then need to assign an action. In the above code we are referencing a function called “submitAction(X)”. </p><br /><p><font size="1" face="Courier New">function submitAction(buttonNumber)<br />{<br /> // Get User Name<br /> var userName = getUserName();<br /></font></p><br /><p><font size="1" face="Courier New"> // Get slicer settings<br /> var slicerParameters = ""<br /> var SlicerValue;<br /> var index;<br /> for (index = 0; index < currentDataGrid.numberPages; index++)<br /> {<br /> if (index == 0)<br /> {<br /> SlicerValue = document.DataGridSilent.Page_0_0.options[document.DataGridSilent.Page_0_0.selectedIndex].value;<br /> slicerParameters = slicerParameters + "&param1=" + escape(SlicerValue);<br /> }<br /> else if (index == 1)<br /> {<br /> SlicerValue = document.DataGridSilent.Page_0_1.options[document.DataGridSilent.Page_0_1.selectedIndex].value;<br /> slicerParameters = slicerParameters + "&param2=" + escape(SlicerValue);<br /> }<br /> else if (index == 2)<br /> {<br /> SlicerValue = document.DataGridSilent.Page_0_2.options[document.DataGridSilent.Page_0_2.selectedIndex].value;<br /> slicerParameters = slicerParameters + "&param3=" + escape(SlicerValue);<br /> }<br /> else if (index == 3)<br /> {<br /> SlicerValue = document.DataGridSilent.Page_0_3.options[document.DataGridSilent.Page_0_3.selectedIndex].value;<br /> slicerParameters = slicerParameters + "&param4=" + escape(SlicerValue);<br /> }<br /> else if (index == 4)<br /> {<br /> SlicerValue = document.DataGridSilent.Page_0_4.options[document.DataGridSilent.Page_0_4.selectedIndex].value;<br /> slicerParameters = slicerParameters + "&param5=" + escape(SlicerValue);<br /> }<br /> else if (index == 5)<br /> {<br /> SlicerValue = document.DataGridSilent.Page_0_5.options[document.DataGridSilent.Page_0_5.selectedIndex].value;<br /> slicerParameters = slicerParameters + "&param6=" + escape(SlicerValue);<br /> }<br /> else if (index == 6)<br /> {<br /> SlicerValue = document.DataGridSilent.Page_0_6.options[document.DataGridSilent.Page_0_6.selectedIndex].value;<br /> slicerParameters = slicerParameters + "&param7=" + escape(SlicerValue);<br /> }<br /> else if (index == 7)<br /> {<br /> SlicerValue = document.DataGridSilent.Page_0_7.options[document.DataGridSilent.Page_0_7.selectedIndex].value;<br /> slicerParameters = slicerParameters + "&param8=" + escape(SlicerValue);<br /> }<br /> else<br /> {<br /> alert("Too many slicers. Please update ValidateData.js");<br /> }<br /> }</font><font size="1" face="Courier New"><br /></font><font size="1" face="Courier New"> url = "?user=" + escape(userName) + "&app=" + escape(applicationName) + "&form=" + escape(formName) + "&button=" + buttonName + slicerParameters + "&datetime=" + nowString;<br /> alert (url);<br /> //url = ("RequestTest.html");<br /> openPopupWin(url);<br />}<br /></font></p><br /><p>There were a few other functions called. Simply cut and paste the following into the “ValidateData.js” file and you will bring all the pieces together.</p><br /><p><font size="1" face="Courier New">function get_cookie ( cookie_name )<br />{<br /> var results = document.cookie.match ( '(^|;) ?' + cookie_name + '=([^;]*)(;|$)' );</font></p><br /><p><font size="1" face="Courier New"> if ( results )<br /> return ( unescape ( results[2] ) );<br /> else<br /> return null;<br />}</font></p><br /><p><font size="1" face="Courier New">function getUserName()<br />{<br /> // Uncomment this to see all cookies in case user name cookie not called "MRUUsername"<br /> //var cookie_string = document.cookie;<br /> //alert (cookie_string);</font></p><br /><p><font size="1" face="Courier New"> var userName = get_cookie ( "MRUUsername" );</font></p><br /><p><font size="1" face="Courier New"> if (userName)<br /> {<br /> //alert("userName: " + userName);<br /> return userName;<br /> }<br /> else<br /> {<br /> //alert("userName not found");<br /> return "";<br /> }<br />}<br /></font><font size="1" face="Courier New">function openPopupWin (URL)<br />{<br /> var height = 300;<br /> var width = 400;<br /> var top = (window.screen.availHeight - height)/2;<br /> var left = (window.screen.availWidth - width)/2;<br /> <br /> window.open(URL,"", "height=" + height + ", width=" + width + ", top=" + top + ", left=" + left <br /> + ",menubar=no,location=no,toolbar=no,status=no,directories=no,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes",replace="true");<br />}<br /></p></font><br /><p>In closing, I hope this example can help achieve the customization often required in Hyperion Planning. As this example demonstrates, it easy to pluck off the Hyperion Planning information with a little Java Script and then use the information in other applications such as passing to another application or a scheduler. </p><br /><p>Future posts will integrate this example with <a href="http://www.oracle.com/us/products/middleware/index.htm">Oracle Fusion 11</a> and <a href="http://www.staranalytics.com/products/command_center.htm">Star Finance Command Center </a>whereby the content can be passed and used in a variety of ways.</p><br /><p>Lastly, if you are having trouble with any of the code, please feel free to reach out to me.</p>Quinlan Eddyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14311433419576485444noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6950568864980015066.post-10221620860386617472009-12-04T13:25:00.001-08:002009-12-04T13:25:56.349-08:00Automate *ANY* Interface from a Command Line<p>Given that this is the first post of the blog Autogration, I thought it would be worthwhile to describe an approach that will allow *ANY* interface to be automated and subsequently integrated with a job stream. There are a myriad of legacy interfaces that either have no ability to be automated which requires a human to interact with the system or if there is a command line interface, it does not provide the entire feature set required to automate the task at hand. To over come this, there is the completely free and very light “AutoIt Script” product. Some highlights include:</p><br /><p>* Free download at: <a href="http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/">http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/</a> <br />* Very simple Basic like scripting in plain text<br />* Ability to compile stand-alone EXEs with full digital signatures</p><br /><p>Parameterize the scripts and execute the Windows automations as well as pass in the appropriate parameters to execute the specific reports you want to run. Here is an example with NOTEPAD.EXE.</p><br /><p><font face="Courier New">SYNTAX: <<script name.exe>> << # of Params>> <<Param1>> <<Param2>> <<Param3>> <<etc>></font></p><br /><p>$CmdLine[0] is number of parameters<br />$CmdLine[1] is param 1 (after the script name)<br />$CmdLine[2] is param 2 etc</p><br /><p>EXAMPLE: <font face="Courier New">RUN_REPORTS_NOW.EXE reports Vermont Cola</font></p><br /><p>Note: AutoIt Scripts can be easily compiled with full digital signatures</p><br /><p>Here is an example script:</p><br /><p style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px" dir="ltr"><font face="Courier New">Run("notepad.exe")<br />WinWaitActive("Untitled - Notepad")<br />Send($CmdLine[2])<br />Send("{ENTER}")<br />Send("{ENTER}")<br />Send($CmdLine[3])<br />WinClose("Untitled - Notepad")<br />WinWaitActive("Notepad","Do you want to save")<br />send("!y")<br />WinWaitActive("Save As")<br />Send($CmdLine[1] & ".txt")<br />send("!s")</font></p><br /><p>Here is the result:</p><br /><p><img border="0" alt="Auto_script_example" src="http://www.streampointconsulting.com/blog/image/auto_script_example.jpg" /></p><br /><p>In summary, the above is fully automatable with only a few lines of code and with the complete ability to run from the command line. Now I am ready to automate the download and streaming of my own personal BBC podcast off of live updates from my XM Radio which is far superior and relevant news versus what they offer as Podcast or their website.<br /></p>Quinlan Eddyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14311433419576485444noreply@blogger.com0