The Compleat Idiot's Guide to PBCS No. 13, LCM aka Application Management

Danger 5

I have been accused of being somewhat conservative in my consulting career:  taking the simple approach over the clever even when the clever is…clever ‘cos it inevitably blows up when the consultant genius who put it in leaves/is fired/can’t get it to work in the new release, never develop in production (oh, the arguments I have over this and if you think “There’s no test like production” you’ll be sooooooorrrrrrrryyyyyyy), actually running calculations through regression tests, and always making sure I’ve got stuff backed up before I make a change.  You say cowardly, I say deeply burnt by terrible experiences and am thus quite good at avoiding danger.  That’s why you hire experienced practitioners – they’ve (or at least I’ve) made almost every mistake there ever was and have learnt to never ever ever ever do it again.

Back it up

And with that, we’ve come to an awfully important part of our series, and one that I jumped over but didn’t forget in my excitement over diving into how to manage the Vision PBCS application.  In a word:  backups.  Boring, yes.  Vital, absolutely when things go pear shaped.  And PBCS gives you two (sort of) different ways of doing it.

I’m not going to recap how to do an on-premises Essbase back up as I’ve covered it here:  A lightweight, modular, and better Essbase backup.  So long as I’m trying to encourage you, note that the code I’ve written is error checked, parameterized, and extremely lightweight.  I’ve seen more complex backups – actually a lot more complex, cf. my comment about complexity vs. simplicity above – but I haven’t actually seen any that back up Essbase more completely.

But when it comes to Planning and FR and SS and who knows what else, an Essbase backup isn’t going to cut it.  Instead, in the on-premises world, we use LCM to either back up application components through the UI or via the LCM utility.

NB – Some of the more perspicacious amongst you may note that LCM backups Essbase data as part of the Planning application.  That’s as true as far as it goes but it’s pretty crippled and a far more flexible approach is to have a separate Essbase backup.  To each his own.

In the land of Cloud (Sky of Could?  Heaven of Cloud?  Hope and Glory?) things are both easier and the same.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Let’s stick with Good Old On-premises for the time being.

On-premises

What’s easier to archive?  Essbase via that backup code I wrote?  LCM backups of Shared Services groups, users, and provisioning?  Or Calculation Manager?  Or Financial Reports?  Or the Planning application itself?  All of these must be (at least in the UI if LCM is to be used) backed up one after the other.  It’s a complete pain.

It’s easy enough to do just involved.

You’d have to (and we will do this in the next post) script the whole thing using the Lifecycle Management Utility and then schedule it unless you really are a glutton for punishment.  All of my readers (the three or four of you) are of course of the Best and Brightest so there’s little chance of that happening.  Right?  Right.

In the meantime I will spare you the selects and exports but here’s what you end up with:

Navigating through the products isn’t so awful, it’s just that I had to select ‘em all.

Downloading it is dead easy:

And here it is on my local drive:

Do with it what you will.  In the real world, a nightly export is often archived off to a safe location.

Not really Workspace, not really the Simplified Interface

And in PBCS?  It backs up the application automagically each night.  There’s no need to script anything or run a utility or fire up your OS’ scheduler or think about having a separate Essbase backup (although the backups are a bit odd – see my post on migrating from PBCS to on-premises).  It just isn’t necessary.  All that you, Gentle Reader, need to do is to make two simple selections  from the admin landing page.

And then pick when you want the backup to occur having set your time zone.

And you are done.  That was nice, wasn’t it?

So just what does the scheduled snapshot show?

Workspace

Let’s go take a look from the traditional soon-to-be-gone Workspace:

And there it is.  Instead of on-premises’ “File System” LCM backups are called “Application Snapshots”.

The Artifact Snapshot is the system-generated backup and it has everything but everything all together.  

Just as with on-premises, if last night’s backup needs to be restored or just a part of that backup, simply navigate to the object and click on import:

And then confirm that you really want to import the object:

There it is.

Also note that the Migration Status Report shows the nightly backup.  Of course that makes sense because that’s exactly what was scheduled.  If you’re trying to reconcile the time between what you see in this screenshot and the Maintenance Time dialog box, remember that 22:00 Pacific = 01:00 Eastern.

All or nothing at all

And here’s a bit more than the on-premises backup as I only downloaded the Vision Planning application.  Remember that on-premises doesn’t combine products.  

You have a choice

That’s the scheduled export.  What about if a manual backup is needed?  This use case is solved almost exactly the same as on-premises LCM:  pick the product, click on Select All then Export then name the file:

Ta da, we have a single product export.

What about the Simplified Interface

It’s a bit of a work in progress.  Oh, it looks like it’s there in the Navigator.  So go on, click on it:

A new window opens:

And here we are again:

Look for this and everything that is in Workspace to eventually be transferred to the Simplified Interface but not quite yet.  One of the problems with this series in particular is that PBCS is changing so quickly some of this will be out of date far faster than on-premises products.  Customers are still on 11.1.2.2 as of the date of this writing – there won’t be PBCS instances three plus years out of date in future.

How hard was that?

There are two axes of effort:  automatic versus custom full exports.  Automate PBCS backups consist of one step of set and forget.  On-premises we’ll have to tackle next time because it’s all got to be scripted and then scheduled; that post will also take on EPM Automate’s backup functionality.  Let’s take it as read that on-premises is way harder.

As for interactive backups, on-premises vs. PBCS Workspace/Simplified Interface is largely the same.  One could argue that having to navigate through multiple application in on-premises makes the process a bit harder but that’s counting how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Our next post will be tying all of this together – backups, metadata loads, data clears, data loads, data aggregations – in an overall script.  It’s not hard to predict which will be the more painful although if you can’t guess you’ll just have to wait till the next post and All Will Be Revealed.

Be seeing you.

The Compleat Idiot's Guide to PBCS, No. 12, PBCS and calculations

I have spared you Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.  Are you grateful?

After my last bout of dead language infatuation, the answer is almost undoubtedly yes.  

Although I am sticking to the Queen’s English this time, like Caesar and what became France, I am at the third and last post on the current month Actuals in Forecast use case via the various UIs.

In part one of this series I covered what it takes to get new metadata into PBCS, in the last post I reviewed loading data (and had a mildly epic rant about Planning’s native data format), and I shall now illustrate what it takes to write and run a Calculation Manager Business Rule.

With that let’s begin.

Calculation Manager is everywhere

Calculation Manager is Calculation Manager is Calculation Manager

Using version 16.2.2.0.0 of Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud service, Calculation Manager doesn’t have a Simplified Interface, uh, interface.  Oh you can get to Calc Mgr through the SI, but once done, it’s the same Workspace we all know and love.

Navigating to the Navigator’s Rules…

…launches (briefly) a new window…

…and then finally into good old Workspace:

Alternatively, for those of us Bittereinders who are holding on to Workspace with every ounce of energy we can muster, it looks just like on-premises and takes us to the same Calc Mgr explorer.

What does the code actually do?

Let’s take a quick break to review the very simple code.

Again coming back to the steps that a monthly Actual load automated process has to go through, it must:

1. Load new metadata
2. Refresh the database
3. Clear out the most current month’s data
4. Load that data
5. Aggregate the data

Clearing the deck

The data clear is simple.  I’m showing it in PBCS but the code is the same in on-premises.

The logic is simple – FIX on all level 0 members for the current month using the Essbase Substitution Variable &CurMth to clear out the Forecast Scenario.  Easy-peasy.

Sum of the parts

After the data has been loaded there’s an even easier aggregation of the Entity dimension.  Believe it or not, in the PBCS Vision application all other dimensions are either fully dynamic sparse or dense so there’s just Entity that needs to be aggregated.

Executing Business Rules

Traditional from Workspace

Whether on-premises or PBCS, Workspace navigation is the same:

And then run from the list:

It runs:

It’s done:

Simplified Interface

In the SI, things are a bit different but conceptually it’s the same.

Navigate to Rules:

Find the one you want, in this case ClearCurrentMonth, and run it.

No confirmation message pops up when complete.  Instead go back to the good old Console’s Jobs tab to see the results:

Smart View

Finally, it’s possible to run business rules from Smart View – both on-premises and PBCS work the same way:

Just as with Workspace and SI, there’s notification of both execution:

And completion:

How many ways to skin this cat?  Four.

Other than the title bar that says, “Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service Workspace” can you see a subtle addition to the Calc Mgr code snippet above?  Look on the top toolbar in the editor.  See it?  No?  It’s oh so little and yet oh so useful.  

Let’s make it a bit more explicit.

That launch button is not in on-premises like so many other functions.  Sigh.

Putting aside my eternal lament about feature parity, this is Yet Another Pretty Cool PBCS Function (YAPCPF, pronounced yapkapfif).  No more need to deploy the rule to Planning to test it although for Workspace, the SI, and Smart View that will have to be done..  Fwiw, if you didn’t find it, be glad because I had to really exercise my inner OCD to see the difference as I compared icon-by-icon-by-icon across the two platforms.

Clicking on that button delivers a Validation before run (remember, if it’s deployed it’s validated):

And then a processing message:

And then finally a completion message:

Btw, there’s a Log Messages panel in Calc Mgr to give you log file information.  Note that there is no other way to get to the log file. Bummer on that one.

So what’s it all supposed to do?

Let’s take it in calculation steps.

Assuming this:

The ClearCurrentMonth business rule gets executed.  As July is the current month and there is no data, nothing changes.

Data gets loaded in as per The Compleat Idiot's Guide to PBCS, No. 11, PBCS and data which now looks like:

To aggregate it, run the AggregateCurrentMonth rule.  I chose to run it from Smart View but it could happen in Workspace, the SI, or Calc Mgr itself:

Ta da, aggregated data:

Btw, I am almost resigned used to working with Planning ad hoc forms in lieu of Essbase ad hoc connections.  Almost.

Summing it all up

If I were to look at the four approaches and count clicks as a way of measuring complexity, I see the following:

• Workspace – four including clicking on OK when the process is finished
• Simplified Interface – four including navigating to the Jobs console
• Smart View – six including closing the Business Rules dialog box
• Calc Mgr itself – two assuming being already in the editor

So not much of a difference in terms of effort between traditional Workspace and the Simplified Interface.

PBCS really moves beyond on-premises with that ostensibly simple ability to run the business rule from within the editor.  No more writing the code, deploying it, watching it fail/having useless junk in your Planning application.  Instead, just write, run, edit, run, edit, run, approve, deploy, drink a celebratory beverage of your choice.

Let’s take stock of where we are with this series:

• Compleat Idiot's Guide to PBCS No. 10, PBCS and metadata illustrated loading metadata and refreshing the Planning application.
• The Compleat Idiot's Guide to PBCS, No. 11, PBCS and data reviewed how to load data.
• This post showed how to calculate.

With those three posts we’ve covered how to interactively load current Actual into Forecast.  That’s all well and good but in the real world no one (hopefully) would ever do this.  Instead it needs to be scripted so it can be run on demand or through a scheduler.

And that scripting process for both on-premises and PBCS will be the subject of the next post.  Expect to see quite a few differences between the two platforms.  You’ll have to decide which one is the best for you although I think that will be pretty obvious.

Be seeing you.

Installing 11.1.2.3 – Can an Essbase and Planning consultant possibly do it?

Introduction

Why, yes, he can, much to his (and maybe everyone else’s) amazement.

Those of you who have followed this blog (ah, Mum, you do still follow the blog, right?) know that I am, uh, infrastructurally challenged.  Yes, I am able to, somehow, make a living at this stuff implementing solutions based on Essbase, Planning, ODI, and various and sundry SQL hacks.  But installing this stuff?  Alas, not so much.  (Alas because it is quite remunerative and even more than that, when I get to a client that has the EPM Environment From Hell, I could help make it better.)

So it is with not a small amount of trepidation that I approached the 11.1.2.3 install this week.  Yes, yes, I know, it came out in April, and world+dog already has it installed, but I’ve been on projects, went to New Zealand/Australia to help run ODTUG’s SP conferences, had this wee event known as Kscope13 come up (remember that I am on the ODTUG BoD, am responsible for the technical side of the labs – also note that I did not do the Amazon installs, had a total of six presentations – some before Kscope, others were private, participated on two panels, I could go on but you get the idea), and have in general been running around like a one armed paperhanger.

But all of that, thankfully, has passed, and I am now able to put my mind to an install. My last go round with 11.1.2.0 was on my old Dell Latitude e6400 (I bought the maxxed out 64 bit, 8 GB RAM model) was not exactly a success.  I’ve turned to the Amazon Cloud in the meantime and it has been great.  But all along I’ve wondered – if I had a Big Enough Box, could I have gotten away with doing this all in a VM?  During my Latitude days, I worked with Dan Pressman to prove that we could convert John Booth’s 11.1.2.2 AMI to VMWare (and someone converted that to Oracle’s Virtual Box) but of course 8 GB of RAM is simply not adequate.

However, I splurged earlier this year on a Dell Precision M4700 laptop (lest you get jealous, remember that while I have the privilege of picking whatever gear I want, I also have the responsibility of paying for it – ah, the carefree life of an independent consultant) and it has 32 GB of RAM and a superfast (if a bit small) SSD drive.  What would happen if I installed everything from scratch?  Could I handle it?  Good question.

What took the longest

Believe it or not, the bit of the install that took longer than anything else was the install and patching of Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise, SQL Server 2008 R2, and Office 2010 (32 bit).  Yes, these are all legitimate licenses (remember that bit above about making decisions and then paying for them) that I get through Microsoft’s Action Pak program for MS Partners.  DVD ROMs simply aren’t all that fast (I never did go for those .iso images although I have to wonder given how long it took to install).

Downloading, now that I no longer have the slowest “broadband” connection in the world (DSL was fast in 1999, not so much when the world changes round you), EPM 11.1.2.3 was pretty fast.  I was able to pull down much more than I needed for my EPM install (I downloaded just about everything off edelivery in 11.1.2.3) in the space of an afternoon while the MS world was installing.  So far, so good.

The actual install

I’m not going to cover how to do this because you can:

1. Read the documentation (gasp, and I didn’t, sob, do it, partially on purpose and partially because I am lazy).  It bit me in the you-know-what a bit later as you shall see if you but read on.
2. Read John Goodwin’s blog on 11.1.2.3 installation.  Also see his post on separately installing the ODI Console and Studio – I have not yet done this but it is on my list of things to do.  Lastly, take a look at his post on Essbase PSUs – that too is on my list of Things To Do.
3. Read the Finnish Hyperion Guy’s post on Rapid Deployment.  Although in the end I did a full install as I wanted bits outside of either the Planning or Essbase rapid deployment it’s still a good read.  Also, every time I see his web site come up I am reminded of Sibelius’ Finlandia.  Suomi!  

A slight digression

Okay, true story that is tangentially related to this post:  When I was living in Europe, one of my buddies (I’ve known him since 8th grade) came over for a visit to the land of Cheese and Beer and then continued on to Finland.  He was (and is) a huge Sibelius fan and knowing not one single word of Finnish when he got out of passport control he went to the taxi rank and said to the driver two words:  “Sibelius, Finlandia”.  The driver took him here.  How cool is it that a classical composer is such a national hero that everyone knows his name.  And that one of his best known pieces (Finlandia) is an act of rebellion against an imperialist power?  Try that in the US of A with “Copland, Rodeo” even if most of us (I am making a bit of a leap here) would at least recognize the music.

Clawing my way back to relevancy

So what to say about the install?  I used SQL Server instead of Oracle (sorry, but it just easier for me although I have a feeling that I will regret it when I get round to installing all the components of ODI – I know when I created an Amazon AMI with ODI and SQL Server Express it was a total stinker) so I differ somewhat from John G’ and Henri’s path.

The other thing I didn’t do was read the documentation.  Do that, won’t you?  Here’s the bit that I missed on MS SQL Server (see, I told you I was going to be sorry I didn’t use Oracle) database creation requirements.

If you, like me, don’t end up doing this, the following SQL queries will:  

1. Tell you how stupid you were for not reading the docs
2. Fix it the way you should have before you did the install

Stupid, stupid, stupid

This is bad:

You want those to be 1’s, not 0’s.

The fix

I reached out to John Booth (John, believe it or not, I really constrain myself from asking you question as I would otherwise have to set up a retainer account with you.  And I hear you are a bit busy.  Thanks again.) on this one and he pointed out that this was noted on a Network54 thread.

Submit this query and all should (hopefully) be well:

Fwiw, I had issues with getting the snapshot isolation to take – it ran and ran and ran and never seemed to finish.  I killed it and then went looking and found this thread on StackOverflow re figuring out if this would ever finish or not.  I ended up stopping all of the EPM services and reissuing the command and all was good.

I should note that while the formal documentation states to set this for all EPM SQL Server databases I found that I only needed to do it for EPMA.

Here’s what it all looks like when things are working:

And that’s it

It’s running.  And quite nicely, too.

I don’t know if the above is blind luck (not all that likely), adequate resources (quite a bit more likely), or a reflection on Oracle’s part to make at least compact deployments easier to do (winner, winner, chicken dinner).  Thanks, Oracle, for making this a wee bit simpler.  I just want to use the tools, not be an infrastructure expert.  Infrastructure just isn’t my particular cup of tea and now I don't need to drink it.

What’s next?

I have to get all of ODI installed and apply the patches I noted.  After that…start working on those Kscope14 sessions.  All on my laptop.  Forgive me Amazon, because I will not be dumping the Cloud but honestly, AWS can be a bit expensive for a one man band.

Be seeing you.