Out of the Past

Introduction

You’re all Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas fans, right? And all film noir fans, too? No? You really should give this film a try. To say that they don’t make ‘em like they used to is putting it mildly. I will spare you my rant on the vast empty wasteland that is modern entertainment and instead take you on a different journey into the past. One that, if you have knocked around the Essbase world long enough, may cause pangs of longing. What oh what could this be?

Remember me?

 

Sob, yes, it is Essbase Application Manager. Oh, AppMan, how I miss your consistent keyboard driven functionality, your easy copy and paste into Excel for hierarchy, your easy to read outlines with nice clean and easy to read text, and your simple and easy installation. And in your place, we have…EAS Console. Sigh.

I know that I am not the only one that misses AppMan. What Cameron, more of your delusional thinking? Nope, I took that screen shot from the desktop of one of my current clients. Yep, Essbase 11.1.2.2 and a rather smart Hyperion admin realizes that she can better understand Essbase when viewing BSO databases through AppMan than when using EAS. Oracle, are you listening? AppMan = 1992 technology, and yet your customers prefer it. This isn’t the first one that I’ve bumped up against that has kept a copy of Application Manager around to make Essbase easier to understand.

I wish I had an old copy of AppMan.exe kicking around. Like a fool, I dumped Essbase 6.5.x’s binaries as fast as I could. Maybe I shouldn’t have been quite so impatient to embrace the future.

Parting shot

Here’s another picture to make you go all weak in the knees.

AppMan makes even Sample.Basic look good. Or in old Essbase-speak, Sample:Basic. Remember the colons instead of the periods as delimiters?

That does it, I’m doing my next automation project in Esscmd instead of MaxL, just because I still can. Okay, maybe I won’t do that, but I am going to look at old CDs and see if maybe I really did keep a copy of My Very Favorite Essbase Editor In The Whole Wide World.

Be seeing you, maybe in the past.