Even I learn new things that are interesting, at least to me and a subset of the nerds. This is a post on something I find amusing and  others might as well.  I'm working on a project at a client converting Essbase from 11.1.2.4 to 21c (21.4.2) and ran into something interesting. We were comparing aliases we were building in the two systems. In 21c the alias  names were longer than in 11g.   I figured it could be that they increased it a little, but when I looked at the admin guide I was amazed. For BOTH member names and aliases the limit has increased to 1024 characte ..read more

 Smart View 32.1 was recently released and has some nice features included in it.  My favorite is the new freeze frames feature. I know what you are saying, you could already do this in Smart View using excel formatting. This is true, but the option in Smart View is better.  How is it better, well as you pivot dimensions between the POV, Columns and Rows, the freeze frame adjusts automatically to freeze all column and rows, so you can just scroll through the data. Excel freeze frames is fixed on whatever  you set it to prior to pivoting.  To set it, it is on the format ..read more

 The other day I was showing a client the LcmExport utility and noticed there are a few new options in it.  (I saw it in 21.4, I'm not sure if it is there in 21.3.  I looked at the embedded help on the options and noticed there was nothing there to tell me what these new options did. I reached out to my friends at Oracle Development and they enlightened me on what the options do. First, what does the new command look like? I've highlighted in RED what the new options are EssbaseLCM.bat export -server essbasehost:port -user username -password password -application appname -zipfil ..read more

 It has been over 30 years that I have been in the Essbase space and have had a wonderful time learning and helping others. For 14 of those years I have been with interRel that became a part of Argano. As of Friday January 27, 2023, I will be retiring from Argano (well semi-retiring). I say semi-retiring because although I am leaving Argano, I won't be completely retiring. I will be easing into retirement by consulting part time. To do that I have created a company "GSchwartzberg Consulting LLC". I'm not going to work full time, but take on projects for others. I'm already going to do som ..read more

 This will be a short post about a problem I encountered and the resolution.  A client had just been upgraded to Essbase 21.4 from 21.3 on OCI and the automated backup script we created using EssCLI started failing with a message "Session Expired Please log in". I don't know if it matters but their instance uses IAM instead of IDCS. Trying to just login with EssCLI would login and then give the same message (failing).   We tried a number of things and got Oracle support involved. Nothing any of us did would work. We could log into the Essbase instance Web UI with the ID wit ..read more

 Dear reader, I writing this post because every time I need to programmatically set a variable with quotes around it (Like a date or a member name with a space)  I have to look it up to remember how to do it. So this post is more for me to have a place to look it up. You get the benefit of me posting this to remind me.  A couple of things to know.  The code you see was tested on Essbase 21c, but should work on other version  For this to work, the variable must already exist. This sample is for a system variable, the code is not much different for a application of data ..read more

 This will be a short post about how to use Rules files (either Dimension build or Data load) from within MaxL.  If we look at the documentation for the import command; it has information on file based and SQL based load, but what if we want to load from a connection and Datasource?  It is not there. I thought it might be the same as a connection but did not know hat to put into the userID or password fields. I tried leavin them blank and putting in dummy information, but neither worked.  Finally, I reached out and got the answer. I was correct that you treat it like a SQL ..read more

 I have been getting a lot of questions about Essbase Administration Services (EAS) lite in 21c and what it can and can't do. This blog will attempt to shed some light  (as opposed to Lite) on the capabilities and restrictions.  Before I go into the detail, I think it prudent to mention that EAS is really meant to be an interim solution during your migration to 21c. Most things can be done through the Web UI and Cube Designer. You also have to tun on the Application to be managed by EAS in the Web Console. Remember if you turn this off, you can't turn it back on  (You co ..read more

Oracle loves it acronyms and changing them. What I think they love more is changing how Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)  works. he latest is a change from Identity Management Cloud Service (IDCS) to Identity and Access Management (IAM) . Often the development teams are not aware of the changes. I was installing a new client's Essbase 21c Marketplace and couldn't figure out where IDCS went. I looked at the documentation and it still talked about IDCS. I contacted the Essbase Development management and they did not know about the change.  Note this change is only applicable to custom ..read more

In the latest exciting news, Essbase 21.3 has been released today. This release is for the independent version (your data center). The Marketplace (Cloud) version will be available soon.  The Big thing about this release is you can get it in both Windows and Linux versions.  From the readme, yo can see there are some cool enhancements  "New Features and Enhancements Support for Microsoft Windows installation Support for Generic JDBC driver Datasource enhancement Support for substitution variables using Runtime parameters Drill-through enhancements Ability to define ma ..read more