This came as a real surprise. I might have missed it, however a colleague of mine (JC) had a process around Level 0 extract and he informed me about this and now you all know.
I was wondering why my Snapshot archive processing time shot up exponentially in DEV environment and here is the reason.
This was how the Essbase Data folder under Artifact Snapshot looked like before 16.09
As you can it was all level 0 data files.
Fast forward to 16.09.42 release
This is how it looks like
Each Plan Type gets its own folder and hey what do you see!!!!!
It is the Essbase BSO app folder (you can even see the rule files PBCS jobs are creating)
Now what about ASO Plan Type
Yup all the ASO and BSO objects are now present in the Essbase.
On the bright side, it is way too easy now to replicate a Cloud App on On-Prem Essbase. You got the otl file. It can also help to check the formulas in Essbase and all fun stuff we could do on On-Prem.
On the other side you got a lot of data to download. the data files ones which were in Mbs are now gone and we are talking the full Essbase folder. Also it is not so easy to update the data files, if members were deleted and you were importing a backup file. Well one could argue that you can perform a “Import operation” which will not error out and then perform a Planning refresh and that will be taken care of.
It was kind of that surprise that this was a sudden change from “Why you need to see the outline file?” to “Here you go we can give you the app folder!!!” I kind of like it.
On to the second surprise.
I don’t whether you all know about this feature, if you are using it already or aware of it, hey a big thumbs up. If you are not here is a glimpse of that feature.
Column A and Column B are dimensions, they are not Smart Lists!!!
So I can create a webform and allow the user to pick and choose the intersections, instead of showing him/her all available intersections.
I can pick a member and submit data and form will keep it and will add more lines for data entry.
This is how you enable the segment feature in PBCS.
You can enable the drop down option in “Segment” properties. Keep in mind that to get there you need to click on the row number (click on 1) and you’ll get the segment.
Now the surprise (it is kind of a scary one) is what I’m going to show you.
If you look at the screenshot above, you’ll see that D2, D3 E2, E3 are showing aliases (*s) and let’s say that I perform a data entry.
Boom!!!! Smart View just changed my form property.
From alias, it got changed to Member name!!!
Now it is only happening to column dimensions, and also confirmed that only happening to the forms which has Segment Drop down enabled. If you are using this feature, word of caution when you migrate forms from DEV to Prod. Check whether the form columns are still showing “Aliases”.
Good news is Oracle was updated about the issue and they are looking at it.
as an FYI, If you want bring the cube on-prem, you have to hack the .ESM file as it points to the drive where the data should be. In the case of these file you will see something like /u03/essbase-instance0 on my windows box with Essbase installed to the c drive, I replaced it wiht ujust C and could retrieve data
Thanks for the info!