An Essbase Book You Won't Want To Miss!

You may have noticed that I haven't been posting consistently over the past few months. The main reason for that is that I have been involved in writing a book.  

About a year ago Cameron Lackpour threw caution to the wind and recruited 12 souls to help write a book about, what else, Essbase.   Entitled Developing Essbase Applications: Advanced Techniques for Finance and IT Professionals, this book is focused on providing both newer and experienced Essbase professionals with information that benefits from experience and wisdom; information and wisdom never before found in a published text on the subject. The chapters are as follows:

• Essbase infrastructure
• Data quality
• Essbase Studio
• BSO in depth
• BSO to ASO conversions
• Designing ASO for performance
• Practical MDX
• Essbase Java API
• Automating with Groovy
• Advanced Smart View
• Administering Essbase

If you work with Essbase, I'm sure by now you're more than just a bit interested to know more.  Cameron recruited a team of Essbase professionals with large amounts of real-life Essbase experience. Almost all of these authors are speaking at Kscope12 as well.   See if you recognize any names:  Dave Anderson, Joe Aultman, John Booth, Gary Crisci, Natalie Delemar, Dave Farnsworth, Cameron Lackpour, Michael Nader, Dan Pressman, Robb Salzmann, Tim Tow, and Angela Wilcox.  Jake Turrell edited.  Many more people contributed with their edits, comments, and ideas.

The first draft of the book is now complete and has been sent to the publisher. We are hoping to have the book available in September of this year.

What is Oracle Proactive Support?

If you haven't heard of it yet, Oracle Proactive Support is a key feature of your Oracle Premier Support.  Proactive Support consists of a comprensive package of features and enhancements to My Oracle Support (MOS) designed to help you easily get the most value from your organization's Oracle product investment.

Great.  A nice flowery paragraph with lot's marketing.  So what does that mean to me, the blog reader, the person actually working with, deploying, and supporting Oracle products?  Before we go any further, I want to point out that this topic and more will be covered in great depth at this year's ODTUG KScope12 conference in a two-hour presentation:

Getting The Most From Oracle Support
Five Ways To Make Oracle Support Work Best For You

This two hour presentation / panel discussion will deep dive into topics such as:

• Getting to know My Oracle Support (MOS)
• Introducing the new Information Centers
• Explaining MOS Communities
• Looking at what’s now available in MOS Certification
• Viewing other sources of information (Newsletter, BI/EPM Blog)

To whet your appetite, these topics will include a comprehensive look at the ways Oracle Support has built out its world class support offering:

• Knowledge Management
• Lifecycle Advisors
• Information Centers
• Consolidated Notes
• Patch & Bug Info at your fingertips
• Product Improvement
• Release Readiness
• Diagnostic tools
• Healthcheck
• Education & Outreach
• Advisor Webcasts
• Newsletters & Email blasts
• Social Networking
• Oracle on LinkedIn
• My Oracle Support Twitter
• My Oracle Support Blog
• Enhancements to MOS
• Advanced Searching <- yes, the pain of searching the Knowledge Base is over.  This Search really works!
• Knowledge Base
• Customer Articles
• Ability to rate Knowledge Base material
• Information Centers - One stop shop for product information with an index of popular & recommended notes
• MOS Communities:
• Access to peers, industry experts, support engineers all in one online destination.
• Product related announcements.
• Polls and Webcasts
•  Advisor Webcasts

Don't forget to subscribe to the Oracle EPM/BI Newsletter, Index Doc ID: 1347159.1.  Send an email to epmnews_ww@oracle.com

I hope to see you at the conference, and especially at the presentation.  If you came by way of this blog, please stop me and introduce yourself!

KScope12 Is In Your Hands

Yes, you read it correctly!  This year the KScope content teams want to hear from you.  When you were are KScope11, did you think "if only there was a session on ___________", or "I've always wanted to know more about ________".

Or was the lack of certain subjects a reason for not attending?  Now is your chance to change that.

Are you on the fence about attending?  Are there sessions, that if offered would tip you in favor of attending?  We want to hear from you.  KScope12's content selection teams are dedicated to providing the most valuable content possible for the the conference attendees.  The more they know about what you want, the better prepared they will be to select the right content.

Every one of us has that one or two things that if we could spend just one hour with an expert, would make our job so much easier.  The link below is where you ask for that.  Ask for as many things as you think would help you.  Its a matter of filling in four very short questions and you're done.

 Just go to My Kscope12 Session Ideas and tell us what you want to see covered. It's quick and easy, do it now and be heard. 

Create and Update Substitution Variables in a Calc Script Using Essbase CDFs.

This set of Essbase CDFs is yet another way to automate the process of  updating Substitution Variables.  Period and year sub vars are a good example.  You may want to ensure that your calc script you run will calculate for the correct periods before you run it.

The attached CDFs will allow you to do this.  The source code is also included so that you may re-use it to create Sub Var updating CDFs of your own.  My only request is if you do create something with this, let me know about it - I enjoy the creative ways people go about solving things.

setSubVarMonth and setSubVarYear
These two CDFs all you to set a period and year substitution, or several if you want, in a calc script.  Here's how it works:

@SETMONTHSUBVAR(String app, String db, String subvar, String dateFormat, double offset)
@SETYEARSUBVAR(String app, String db, String subvar, String dateFormat, double offset)

These functions takes the Application name, Database name, the Sub Var name, a JAVA SimpleDatFormat String, and an offset value as arguments:

Offset Value
The offset value is the number of months to offset the current period by.  If this is Jan and you offset -1, the subvar will be set to Nov.  Conversely passing an offset of 5 will set the subvar to Jun.

Date Format
The Date Format argument tells the function what your period or year looks like.  "MMM" in Java SimpleDatFormat means Jan, Feb, Mar, etc.  "MM" is 01, 02, 03, etc.  If you use FYnn for years, then in Java you would write "'FY'YY". four digit years are "yyyy".  any available Java API doc will describe date format in detail.  Here is one place to find it:  http://download.oracle.com/javase/1.4.2/docs/api/java/text/SimpleDateFormat.html

SubVar
This is the name of the subvar without the amperesand.

App and Db
These arguments are optional.  If the DB is "", the empty string, the subvar is assumed to be associated with the App argument.  If app and db are both empty strings "", "" then the subvar is treated as a server (global) subvar.