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8.13.2008

My first Oracle Hyperion Training

I just attended my first Oracle Hyperion Sales and Pre-Sales Training at the Oracle Philippines office here in Makati City last Aug 11 and 12. Thanks to Sean, Julia, Chris, and Anne for sharing their thoughts and selling skills!

Just to share, here's a list of what i saw or have found out about Hyperion:
1. I've learned that the BI Foundation is composed of the EssBase and the OBIEE tools
2. I've learned that thru the EssBase, Hyperion is able to produce information that answer's the How? and the What if's?.
3. I've learned that the BI Applications sits on top of the BI Foundation.
4. I've learned that all the BI Applications are pre-built and are ready to install hot pluggins. This means that these are not templates that need to be configured. But if you have an existing datastorage built from oracle, sap, peoplesoft, or siebel, then it can easily use those datastorage.
5. I've learned that the EPM applications such as the Planning, Financial Manager, Performance Scorecard, and Data Quality Management all sits on top of the BI Foundation.
6. I've learned that the Workforce Planning and CapEx Planning have a different license.
7. I've learned that there are still a lot more that i want and need to learn about datawarehousing.
8. And best of all, with these kinds of new BI applications, I've learned that anyone withought IT education can easily create their own applications!

8.05.2008

What's the difference between OLTP and OLAP?

This two words which both starts with the letters OL, both ends with the letter P, and both consists of four letters are very much different IT/BI(Business Intelligence) jargons.

How are they different?
By Definition :
OLTP which stands for Online Transaction Processing or simply transaction processing is a class of systems that facilitates and manages transaction-related applications and provide real time accesses to its data which is being updated by other transactions. It is also used to refer to a processing wherein the system can quickly respond to user requests/transactions.

OLAP which stands for Online Analytical Processing refers to an approach to quickly provide answers to analytical queries that are multi-dimensional in nature. Through the use of what they call Aggregations, some have claimed that for complex queries, OLAP cubes can produce an answer in around 0.1% of the time for the same query on OLTP relational data.

An Inside look on some of the New Features of Hyperion Planning Fusion Version 11.1.1.0.0 : The Enterprise Performance Management Architect

The EPMA(Enterprise Performace Management Architect):
- You can now organize your applications into folders
- With this, you can now organize your application library the way you organize your shell library. Also, it helps you easily find the application you're looking for.
- There have been improvements in the simplification of import process. Now you can directly import in the application. In the past, this has to be done on the Shell library first.
- Grid Editor. You can now make bulk updates to multiple members at the same time. This now also allows you to see, create, and delete multiple members of the same dimensions without having to go back in the dimension library.
- There is now an Application Creation Wizard which is a tool that walks you thru the creation of an application or planning application in the EPMA.
- New EPMA Batch Clients which allows running EPMA tasks in the batch log thru scripting or using a cover line interface.
- Planning Classic Parity Items now supports DTS(Dynamic Time Series)

Terminologies in EPMA
- Master View = Libraries of shared dimensions
- Application View = Application (Now made up of shared and local dimensions and not considered as a view on the main dimension catalog.)
- Shared Dimensions = Dimensions that can be used by multiple applications and that are stored in the Shared Library.
- Local Dimension = Detached, independent dimensions that exists only in one application.

An Inside look on some of the New Features of Hyperion Planning Fusion Version 11.1.1.0.0 : Calculation Manager

3.Calculation Manager
- This will be used for Hyperion Planning and Hyperion Financial Manager.
-Will ease the maintenance of business rules since it allows you to create and share complete rules which you can also organize using folders and rule sets. This has predesigned templates which you can use to build your own rules. This is categorized as one of the next generation of Hyperion Business Rule.

An Inside look on some of the New Features of Hyperion Planning Fussion Version 11.1.1.0.0: Smart View

2.Smart View for Planning
- On Adhoc Queries and Analysis
-You can now write data back to the database
-Provides a smooth integration between the Planning web and the Smart View - no need to relogin to excel.
-You can view attached docs on the cells

- Connection Manager is improved
- You get a tree view of each product and from each of these products you can browse to different servers and different applications
- You can also drill from the web form level

- Will allow you to perform modelization of cubed slices thru the use of Smart Slice.
- Report is now created using one or more Smart Slice/s that can come from different sources.
- Your Power Point presentations can now be dynamically linked to the data sources.
- There is a Function Grid that links a cell in Excel to a data from a data source that now makes it a more flexible formatting report.

Benifits of Smart View on Planning 11.1.1:
a. There is a tight integration in Planning web since you can now simply go back and forth from the Excel file to your web UI.
b. You can now dynamically link your office presentation such as Power Point or Word to your EPM sources withought doing other manual steps such as copying and pasting tables or graphs.
c. You can now create interactive reports from all your EPM sources

An Inside look on some of the New Features of Hyperion Planning: Core Planning

1. Core Planning
- With the enhancement, you will now be able to work with data forms and perform the following actions:
- Attachment of excel documents on data forms
- Select dates automatically using the calendar
- Show member formulas from data form
- Hide and show rows with no data on data form
- Launch SmartView from data form through a simple click w/o the need to reconnect.
- Drill through the Financial Data Quality Management (FDM)

On the user interface:
- You may now choose to display the aliases when using copy versions
- You will now be able to cleanup annotations using the clear data option

Others
- You can create folder securities. will this feature, all the forms under this folder will inherit the assigned security on the folder. And if a form under the folder still has a unique security other that the security created on the folder, you may still opt to override the folder security for this particular form.
- Job Status

8.04.2008

An Inside look on some of the New Features included on Hyperion Planning Fusion Version 11.1.1.0.0 : About Local and Shared Dimensions

This is still a continuation of post I started re: Oracle Hyperion's latest fusion version..

More about Local and Shared Dimensions:
Note that an application can now be made into local dimensions.

With Local Dimensions you can now do the following:
- copy dimensions to shared library or to an application
- synchronize between dimensions in the shared library and dimensions in the application.
- share dimensions so that you can change a local dimension to a shared dimension which can be used by other applications.

With Shared Dimensions, you can detach the dimension.

What you can do with Life Cycle Management(LCM)?
Below are some major features that you can do with LCM:
1. Move artifacts or entire applications between development, test, and production.
2. Export or import artifacts to the file system for the disconnected environments, or utilize direct migration for connected environments.
3. and Execute LCM functionality within Shared Services.
** The new version already has an available Shared Services Migration Wizard to help you easily set up and run migrations. With the wizard tool, you can:
a. Migrate individual or multiple applications,
b. Select one, many, or all artifacts,
c. Migrate logical applications (this includes User Provisioning, Planning, EPMA and Calculation Manager, Essbase, and Financial Report.),
d. and Migrate dependent artifact

Also,
- With LCM you can work with both the disconnected and connected environments. Disconnected Environment here means that the development, test, and production environments are completely isolated.

When you decide to install LCM you have to ensure that the following components are installed and properly configured:
1. Shared Services
2. Planning
3. EPMA (Enterprise Performance Management Architecture)
4. Calculation Manager
5. and Essbase