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02 June 2014

The sessions I want to attend at Kscope14

What this post is all about

Oh dear oh dear oh dear, Kscope14 is almost upon us.  This year’s conference is fraught with desperate preparation on my part (this past weekend was spent up to my armpits writing my ASO Planning presentation – fun, fun, fun, kind of) as I desperately try to hit the conference date with everything done.  Fingers crossed on this one but if I pull it off, the presentations will be good and there are one or two fairly awesome hacks to go along with it all.  I am excited, if slightly frazzled, so business as usual.

But this post isn’t about my neuroses, instead its purpose is to highlight the sessions I am most looking forward to at Kscope14, aka other people’s sources of stress.  

Schedule

There is simply too much to write about in one blog post so my look forward will have three parts:
  • This week – individual sessions
  • Next week – Thursday Deep Dives
  • Week of 15 June – Sunday Symposiums and oh yes I am flying to Seattle

As always with Kscope, there are way more sessions than there is time to attend.  Remember that many of these sessions are recorded so you can watch the screen and hear the presenters live and in person.  

For instance, to help figure out a component of my ASO Planning session, I listened (and listened and listened) to Josie Manzano’s Kscope13 session Using Calculation Manager with Essbase ASO until I finally got it.  This ability to go back and listen sessions when you need them is invaluable.  There are many, many, many sessions available at ODTUG’s web site and I encourage you take advantage of this valuable resource.  I have.

My top Kscope14 sessions

Essbase

Monday, 23 June 2014, 10:45 am to 11:45 am
Oh yes, I know, it works.  And then bits of it don’t.  I am doing a ton of stuff with this right now in ASO Planning and am super curious to see if Ludovic De Paz and Paul Hoch have gone down the same path I have or if they have figured out another way.  Like anything, there’s a good, bad, and mediocre way to do something – I wonder where my work falls.

Tuesday, 24 June 2014, 8:30 am to 9:30 am
I was part of the beta team (a very bad member of the beta team; I like to think I have somewhat redeemed myself with post-release bug finding, but then again maybe not), and I have seen some of the improvements Tim has come up with whilst in the Tim Tow Reality Distortion Field (The one where I feel almost smart enough to be a Java, aka real, programmer.  Alas, it goes up in a cloud of smoke as soon as the call ends.).  I’m not sure how much of what I’ve seen is going to make it in this release.  For sure it is a time of change for the tool, all for the better.

Tuesday, 24 June 2014, 11:15 pm to 12:15 pm
Kumar is the manager of Essbase development.  That’s right, the guys that write Essbase.  Do you suppose he might have some interesting insights into the future of Essbase?  Could be.

Tuesday, 24 June 2014, 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm
Do I suffer when I write MDX?  Oh yes I do.  Hopefully Jennifer Hanks can make at least this part of my coding life not be a soup sandwich.

Tuesday, 24 June 2014, 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm
Yes, you read that right, two MDX sessions at the same time.  And this one is by my colleague Gary Crisci who always does stellar work.  Let’s hope Jennifer’s (or Gary’s or each) session is recorded.

Tuesday, 24 June 2014, 3:30 pm to 4:30 pm
Why, Glenn, why?  Why am I not using it?  Perhaps because I have yet to attend your session oh older-not-really-brother?

Wednesday, 25 June 2014, 9:45 am to 10:45 am
Gabby Rubin will cover how Essbase and Exalytics are moving forward, sometimes in lockstep, other times in parallel.  I am super interested in this and hope fervently that commodity hardware continues to be supported as I’m not likely to hit an Exalytics project any time soon.

Wednesday, 25 June 2014, 8:30 am to 9:30 am
Dan Pressman will be the moderator (buffer?) between you, the panel audience, and Kumar, the Essbase development manager.  Ask your question, see if Kumar answers it.  :)

Wednesday, 25 June 2014, 11:15 am to 12:15 am
Yr. Obdt. Svt. is copresenting with Tim German, aided by Dan Pressman, and I think this session will be eye opening to say the least.  We will cover the biggest advance to Essbase since ASO both in its currently available 11.1.2.3.500 release and some as yet unreleased functionality.  You’ll see from this why Hybrid BSO Essbase will likely be the future of many of your projects.  Yes, I am excited.  :)

Planning

Monday, 23 June 2014, 10:45 am to 11:45 am
Movement, not balances, is what I think Amy Del Rosario will be presenting.  This can be a difficult concept to grasp but is quite a bit more efficient.  At least that’s what I think the session is about – of course the only way to know for sure is to attend.

Monday, 23 June 2014, 1:15 pm to 2:15 pm
Yr. Obdt. Svt. is copresenting with Tim German, aided by Dan Pressman, and this is a subject near and dear to my heart (and my wallet as almost all of my implementations contain at least a component of Planning).  I think we have some really great good practices for ASO Planning that aren’t discussed anywhere else, a hack or two that ought to make your eyes pop, and of course all of the things that will only bring Pain and Agony so they are best avoided.  

Tuesday, 24 June 2014, 8:30 am to 9:30 am
I was never a fan of Planning’s Capital Expenditures application, finding it was easier and more flexible to roll my own.  Oracle must have heard my whining as they have released Project Financial Planning (PFP).  Matt Ward’s customer success story should be interesting.

Wednesday, 25 June 2014, 9:45 am to 10:45 am
Ricardo Giampaoli and Rodrigo Radtke de Souza are both huge fans of ODI (as am I) and really understand and hack it to pieces (as alas, I do not at their deep level).  I have however been known to twist Planning into a pretzel for fun and profit and I do have at least a basic appreciation of ODI.  Hopefully that all means I will be able to keep up.  Hopefully.

Wednesday, 25 June 2014, 11:15 am to 12:15 am
As I am (as noted above) hip deep in a competing presentation, I am beyond interested to see how Jake Turrell has approached ASO Planning and what he has on offer.  Jake does good stuff and will be sure to have at least a somewhat different take on the tool.  Unfortunately, I am going to be presenting my Hybrid Essbase session at the same time so I do hope this is a session ODTUG records.

Wednesday, 25 June 2014, 3:15 pm to 4:15 pm
Brian Marshall is going to catalogue Things That Planning Cannot Do, And How To Do Them.  This ought to be fun.

Wednesday, 25 June 2014, 4:30 pm to 5:30 pm
Shankar Viswanathan is the Planning product manager, so if he speaks about the functionality of Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS) I daresay he will lay down the definitive word.  I just hope he keeps his energy levels up, because he’s 50% of the Thursday Planning Deep Dive panel session.

EPM Business Content

Tuesday, 24 June 2014, 11:15 am to 12:15 pm
Elizabeth Ferrell will be covering one of my favorite tools, AppliedOLAP’s Dodeca, works as a budgeting tool in an environment of 500 (!) Essbase cubes.  This ought to be fascinating stuff.

Wednesday, 25 June 2014, 9:45 am to 10:45 am
Juan Porter will cover the business and functional side of moving from yearly to rolling forecasts.  Important stuff, and important for customers (and EPM geeks, come to think of it) to understand.

Wednesday, 25 June 2014, 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm
Did Charles Beyer wrap Smart View in many layers of Kevlar?  Shelter it behind armor as thick as a King George V class battleship?  Sometimes I am blown away by the awesomeness of Smart View, other times I have a visceral desire to blow it away.  Hopefully Charles can make it all better for me and everyone else.

Reporting

Monday, 23 June 2014, 1:15 pm to 2:15 pm
Matt Milella and Toufic Wkim, both of Oracle Corp, will show how to exploit Smart View to the fullest extent with every data source imaginable.  Matt and Toufic are excellent and entertaining speakers.

Tuesday, 24 June 2014, 8:30 am to 9:30 am
Gary Adashek will cover how he managed the transition from the Excel Essbase add-in to Smart View.  I imagine he has a few new gray hairs because of that but I also he also has more than a few tips to help all of us make the transition.

Wednesday, 25 June 2014, 4:30 pm to 5:30 pm
Celvin Kattookaran dives deep into the Workspace API to manage reports like never before.

Wednesday, 25 June 2014, 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm
If you build rolling forecasts in Planning you must build rolling reports.  Come to Scott LeBeau’s session to find out how.

Wednesday, 25 June 2014, 8:30 am to 9:30 am
Glenn Schwartzberg, older-not-really-brother will be presenting on Smart View.  His session is short on details but Glenn always does excellent work.

Tuesday, 24 June 2014, 3:30 pm to 4:30 pm
Sarah Zumbrum will cover the transition for functional users of Smart View.  I hear the transition is a bit akin to chopping one’s hand off with an axe held in that same hand.  In other words, a difficult and frustrating task, so this should be a session worth attending.

Is that enough?

Yes, that isn’t every hour of every day (you will note that Saturday’s volunteer event, Sunday’s symposium, and Thursday’s Deep Dives are all not, yet, covered), but it sure is an awful lot.  Will I get to attend all of these sessions?  Given my role(s) behind the scenes at the conference, probably not, but I am as always hopeful.

I’m sure you have your favorites – what are they?  Send ‘em in to the comments section of this blog.

Be seeing you.
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27 May 2014

I need your help to put Oracle EPM on the spot at Kscope14

Why help out?  

This year, Thursday at Kscope14 is going to be different than years past.   What do I mean by that?  Simply that instead of the normal fare of technical session after technical session, ODTUG is trying something different this year on the last (sob) day of the conference – deep dives into technology.  These are longer and different in focus sessions that allow you, the Kscope14 attendee, to really get to the very heart of whatever tool or track tickles your geek fancy.

What that means is that there are sessions on:

And a panel session on Good ‘Ol Planning consisting of the Planning and Essbase product managers, hosted by none other than yr. obt. svt.

What’s it all about, Cameron?

I am so glad you asked – the Planning Deep Dive is your chance to ask direct, possibly slightly painful, and definitely interesting questions to both Gabby Rubin, Essbase product manager, and Shankar Viswanathan, Planning product manager.  

Huh, you say (you do say this, right?), what’s the Essbase product manager doing at a Planning deep dive session?  Remember, Essbase is at the heart of Planning, so asking why Planning does this or that without asking why and how Essbase does the same thing is all a bit pointless.

Gabby and Shankar graciously accepted the chance to be mercilessly grilled by you.  What I mean is that this is a panel of two (Gabby and Shankar) with me as moderator, and you get to lob questions, hopefully difficult and maybe a little painful, directly to them.  Oracle of course has the option to grin or grimace at you and then refuse to answer your question but I have found that typically Oracle are quite open.  It at least ought to be entertaining.

What I plan on asking them

As you will see, I am not exactly pulling my punches.  These are items of intense interest to me, and I suspect many in the Hyperion Planning world:
  1. When will Hybrid Essbase be certified for Planning?
  2. Why can’t we report on attribute dimensions via Planning data connections; this is especially puzzling in the light of ASO Planning and ASO Essbase’s superior attribute performance.
  3. Why is ASO Planning not an Essbase data source?  Again, attribute dimensions work so much better in ASO than BSO – it is very puzzling.
  4. Planning seems to be the engine that drives Essbase sales, yet Essbase functionality appears to be influenced by OBIEE.  Why?  How is Planning impacting Essbase’s future direction?  What about other tools?  Will Essbase retain its EPM focus or become just another component of the Oracle database?
  5. ASO Planning allows (by Planning standards) huge databases, yet Planning’s administrative performance cannot keep place, e.g., extraordinarily long dimension build (and even longer delete) times, slow refreshes, and poor form execution.  How will Planning’s performance improve?  When?
  6. Planning and Essbase have at least seven (EPMA, EAS, Studio, Classic Planning, Outlineload, ODI, BIFS, and I’ve likely forgot a few) ways to build dimensionality and load data.  Each method has its merits, each has its weaknesses.  Why isn’t there a single optimized metadata and data management tool?  Or at least fewer ones.
  7. Documentation for the EPM schemas stopped with 11.1.2.1.  Are there any plans for releasing new schema maps or is that someone’s KScope15 session?
  8. When, when, when will SQL be used to read and write Essbase data and metadata aka when do Load Rules die?
  9. When will BSO Essbase perform the following using the Hybrid engine:  Attributes, Time Balance, Cross dimensional references, and add all of the Calc Script functions?
  10. It appears as though many aspects of Essbase (Exalytics-only functions) and Planning (tied more and more closely to EBS and Fusion) are losing their technology-agnostic nature, historically one of the benefits of the Oracle Hyperion EPM technology stack.  Are we looking at a future in which the EPM suite only works on Oracle hardware and with Oracle back-end software?

But those are just my questions.  I don’t actually expect to get answers to all of the above (I think they alone could fill our two allotted hours but I am a firm believer in over-preparing), but you now have an insight of the EPM Mind of Cameron.  It’s not too scary, is it?

Shankar and Gabby didn’t actually agree to me as Privy Councilor for a Planning-themed Star Chamber.  The Planning Deep Dive is your opportunity to ask your questions to the very people who define the future of Planning and Essbase.  

How you will ask questions before and during the Deep Dive

I have a sneaking suspicion that you will have many, many, many questions and I want to give everyone a fair chance at them.

While I will be taking questions in the normal way during the session, i.e., you raise your hand, ask the question, I repeat it, and maybe Oracle answer it, that approach single threads the Q&A process and doesn’t necessarily let the best ones bubble to the surface.  

To try to get round that, I am asking that you send your questions now, yes right now, to the following Twitter hashtag:  #PlanningDeepDive.  Before the conference, I will monitor that tag for your oh so valuable questions.  During the Deep Dive session I (or more likely a “lucky” volunteer as I cannot walk and chew gum at the same time) will monitor the same.  I (we?  confusing isn’t it?) will see if they share common themes and guide the discussion around those lines.

And that’s it

I think this will be a lot of fun, perhaps even for two very brave (and very generous) Oracle EPM product managers.

Yes, there are lots of other cool things going on at the same time (as always, I wish there was a way to attend, oh, the Planning, Essbase, Business Intelligence, EPM Foundations, and BI/EPM Reporting Deep Dive sessions all at the same time but of course that just can’t be) but I think what the Planning track has on offer simply isn’t matched anywhere else on Thursday.  

If you don’t show up, I will of course be crushed, but then again I will have two rather hard to reach Oracle PMs at my mercy to ask, whine, and beseech about the future of the two tools that have come to define my (and very likely your) career.

This will of course be more meaningful if you do attend – you will have insights, concerns, and questions that I could never come up with.  Your participation is key to the success of this session.

In case you can’t tell, I am tremendously excited by this opportunity as I think this will be a dynamic, exciting, and educational session like no other at Kscope and one that will be driven by you, the audience member.

Join us, won’t you?
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19 May 2014

Come one, come all, to the EPM carnival

Only two things scare me

As a child of the Cold War, I share Austin Powers’ first fear all too well, but the second?  Carnies?  Really?  On the other hand, Kscope does nomadically wander from city to city.  But do we all smell bad?  Have small hands?  Hopefully at least not the middle property (I, and I believe most of ODTUG bathe on a regular basis, with soap) and I think I have pretty large hands, so that’s only one out of three.  G’wan, watch the clip.  I’m pretty sure Michael York’s look of incomprehension pops up on my face at least once a day in reaction to all kinds of interesting statements.

But not this time

No need for a look of incredulity – what I’m about to relate is dead easy to understand.  

The EPM community will be hosting an EPM (‘natch) carnival at Kscope14, Monday, 23 June 2014, from 8 till 10 pm.  Why oh why oh why would you go?  Simply because it will be about fun, networking, and help.

What is this thing you call “fun”?

For once it isn’t my current project that is driving me, in sequence, to rage, tears, and anxiety, but instead preparing for my way-too-many-OMG-why-did-I-agree-to-this Kscope presentations.  As almost always, I have no one to blame but myself.  No matter the source of your current angst, the EPM carnival will be a salve to your troubled waters (yes, I am mixing metaphors but bear with me) because it will include:
  • Bean bag toss – your favorite(?) EPM ACED’s face will be superimposed onto a clown’s mouth and you get to throw the bag in the mouth.  We certainly talk enough; perhaps this is your opportunity to shut us up?
  • Road Rally - this is a multi-player game where everyone rolls dice and if your “lane” number is rolled you advance your car (hot wheels)
  • Say Ahh - this is a put-put golf game
  • Skee Roll - smaller version of the classic skee ball game
  • Balloon Darts
  • Hoopster /Electronic Shooting – basketball
  • Ring Toss - classic coke bottle ring toss

Although I am crushed to relate that health and safety regulations preclude the ACE Director dunk tank (I have a strange feeling that this would be quite popular), you must agree that the above activities contain at least a scintilla of fun.  Those fun times are a great motive to be there, but they aren’t the only reason you, oh Kscope EPM attendee, should come to the EPM Carnival.

Networking

While the education that Kscope provides is second to none, an equally compelling reason I (and I suspect you as well) come to Kscope is to meet, if only once per year, with my peers from around the globe.  This is where the elite Oracle geeks meet and greet; the EPM Carnival gives us all a relaxed, friendly, and open way to meet people from all walks of EPM life, free from the pressures of work responsibilities.

Informal contacts can be just as valuable as the ones forged through work.  Kscope’s social events, from the Community Service Day to the big Wednesday night Special Event, are the place to forge those relationships.  Don’t ignore the Monday night EPM Carnival as another avenue to do just that.

The spirit of giving

As many of you know, Mike Riley, Kscope14 conference co-chairman and former ODTUG president is battling cancer.  Cancer is a cruel disease and Mike needs all of the help – spiritual, material, and financial – that he and his family can get.  ODTUG is Mike’s professional family, and when a member of our family needs help, we give it.

The EPM Carnival will give you an opportunity to do just that – you will be able to donate unused Carnival tickets (it’s just like going to a Grange Fair, right down to how you pay for the rides) or even purchase additional ones for Mike’s fund.  Yes, this is a naked appeal for your help.  You expected dignity from me?  You haven’t been reading my blog much, and certainly not on this subject.  

As so many of we EPM geeks are a bit, um, hopeless when it comes to examples of physical dexterity, you will be able to supplement the carnival tickets for whatever game you are playing not so well with cold hard cash to move your middling score up to the winner’s circle.  The real do-re-mi that you contribute will go towards the fund for Mike.

The EPM community owes Mike a huge professional debt because he is really the reason why EPM is part of ODTUG and thus Kscope.  He is also one hell of a nice guy.  He needs our help and you can provide it.  Isn’t that enough to cause you to cough up a few tickets?

Summing it up

So there you have it:  fun in the form of possible ritual humiliation of EPM ACE Directors, a chance to informally meet your peers, and an opportunity to aid Mike Riley.  All made possible by the fine folks at Secure-24.  

I’ll be there.  Will you?
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