The newest release of Smart View (Release 11.1.2.1.102) includes many helpful, long-awaited features sure to both enhance the end-user experience and increase productivity. Many of the new features are examined below while a complete list and their descriptions can be found here.

Ad Hoc Operations in Multiple Cells

Previous versions of Smart View limited users to cell level ad-hoc operations. For example; say you wanted to ‘Zoom In’ on a member, Smart View limited this action to a single cell (single member). The newest version allows users to select a range of cells before performing an action allowing for quicker answers. Multi-cell actions such as Zoom In, Zoom Out, Keep Only and Remove Only are now permitted.   More...

There are times when planning and forecasting databases grow for apparently no reason at all. The static data (YTD actuals) that is loaded hasn’t changed and the users say they aren’t doing anything different.

If you load budgets or forecasts to Essbase, you probably do what I’m about to tell you. If you are a systems administrator and have never seen how finance does a budget or forecast, this might be an education.

The culprit? More...

Many companies have started to push IE8 to their user community, upgrading their users from earlier versions such as IE6 or IE7. As this evolution occurred I’ve noticed many of these same users experiencing timeout issues with Oracle/Hyperion Smart View for Excel. The Smart View application utilizes timeout settings set within the internet browser, IE in this case. The timeout occurs when attempting to perform ‘large’ retrieves or data submissions, any process which takes 30 seconds or more to perform. Users receive this message 30 seconds into an Excel process.

The newer versions of IE (both IE7 and IE8) have reduced timeout settings (30 seconds) vs. what was default in IE6 (60 seconds), thus any Smart View process resulting in activity 30 seconds or longer produces the Smart View timeout message shown above.

In order to resolve the issue, the default timeout settings must be modified. This can be accomplished by making registry modifications (using regedit) on the user’s machine. Three “DWORD (32-bit) Value” environment variables need added with timeout values longer than the default 30 seconds. The location and names of the three DWORD variables needing added are shown below. Keep in mind that these variables can be added to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE areas. Be sure that no spaces exist in the DWORD variables being added. Caution should be taken when modifying environment variables.

 Registry Path: 

"HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings" OR "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings"

If you have users that rely on SmartView to pull data from your Essbase and/or Planning application, many of them may have large spreadsheets.  One way to improve the perception of the performance of Essbase is the method in which SmartView (client side) communicates with the server.

APS, Planning, and HFM have the ability to take advantage of compression during the communication process.  When large queries, retrieving and submitting data, are initiated, the performance can be significant.

The default compression settings for APS and Planning are not turned on.  The good news is that turning this on is relatively simple.

Find the essbase.properties file on the APS server and change it to false.  The path to this file is different in versions 9 and 11.  In 11, the path is \Products\Essbase\aps\bin.

smartview.webservice.gzip.compression.disable=false

Open the Hyperion Planning application in question and change the SMARTVIEW_COMPRESSION_THRESHOLD in the System Properties (Administration/Manage Properties – System Properties tab) to a value no less than 1.  This threshold is the minimum size of the query in which compression will be used.  So, a value of 1000 would mean compression would be used for anything greater than 1,000 bytes.

For smaller queries, compression may not be necessary.  It may even decrease performance because of the overhead to compress and uncompress the data.  Every environment is different so there is no "right" answer as to what this value should be. 

If you have used compression, please share your experiences.