My 20+ years of using Essbase I was told, and had no reason not to believe, only stored numbers. We obviously have lists and with Planning it appears we have text. If you aren’t familiar with how this works, the strings are stored in the Planning repository and the index is stored in Essbase. If you thought the same thing, you were as wrong as I was.

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Oracle is providing free access to Oracle Financial Statement Planning, including Strategic Modeling, to all existing Oracle Planning Cloud customers for the next 12 months.  This includes the use of Groovy.

You would be able to purchase Financial Statement Planning and Scenario Modeling if you choose to continue using it. Alternatively, your right to use Financial Statement Planning and Scenario Modeling will expire after April 30th, 2021.

And yes, Hackett Consulting is a preferred provider to help you take advantage of this.

The Oracle FAQ will provide answers to your most of your questions.  If you would like to take advantage of this, let’s get the ball rolling!  If you are a do-it yourselfer, the following classes will kickstart your ability to implement Groovy.

Try it out for free getting a few samples.

 

Oracle has recently added 2 fantastic new methods that significantly improve our ability to minimize our scripts and reduce the effort to build and maintain them.  The first is a method in the EPMScript class called cscParams.  The second is in the cube class named executeEssbaseScript. Read more

 

Have you ever gotten an error that reads, “Unable to retrieve variable variable name deployed in application?”  When you look at the error, the variable name in the error message doesn’t exist and you aren’t trying to retrieve such a variable?  Read more

 

One thing that I have spent a lot of time on is making calculations independent of forms so that they can be used on any form.  For example, rather than hard coding a script to look at a form with one column header and one row header, I am now building things to be dynamic so that the POV, the rows, and columns all are read dynamically and identifying the edited cells is independent of the source it is looking at.  This will be a multi-post article because there is a lot to cover. Read more

 

Often times, there is a need to lock cells from a user outside of the traditional dimensional security methods.  Maybe you don’t want to add dimensional security to accounts so your data push allows users to push data to another cube.  Or, maybe there is more complicated logic to identify who can and who can’t edit a cell.  The logic to do with is very simple. Read more

 

Data forms that have rules on them run when a user saves a form, regardless of whether the form has edited data.  Sometimes this is by design, to let a user run a calculation.  But, most of the time, it is an accident.  There is no reason to use system resources and have the user wait for a calculation to finish when it doesn’t need to be executed. Read more

 

If you haven’t heard, we now have the ability to execute REST API within a calculation script.  Not only does that mean we can interact with other environments and do things in calculations we couldn’t do before, we also have the ability to interact with any provider that has REST.  You could pull current prices for products from Amazon.  You could see how many open box items there are at area Best Buy stores.  You could pull in currency rates.  That doesn’t even touch on the things like DM processes, metadata updates, and application refreshes. You can even send emails!

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Identifying the months to calculate plan and forecast has always been a delicate balance between performance and maintenance.  Having a calculation for each required duplication of forms or calculating more than what was required.  Calculations required more complicated if logic than what it should have or (I hate when I see this) a calculation that just does both forecast and plan regardless of what needs calculated. Read more

 

I don’t normally write up monthly updated, but this month there are a number of intriguing changes/updates/enhancements that are important to know.  Some may change existing processes.  This is not an exhaustive list, but these are things I think all of us should take note of. Read more