Archive for the PBCS Category

How to use your existing ODI on premise to seamlessly integrate PBCS (Part 6: Database Design and EPM Automate)

Posted in PBCS with tags on March 29, 2021 by radk00

Hi all! Before jumping straight to ODI, let us take a moment to talk about how our database design will look like to be the “middle tier” between our sources and PBCS. We will split our design in 4 parts:

  • Sources: Can be any kind of source (Oracle, SQL Server, Teradata, File system, FTP…)
  • Stage Area: Where we’ll work the data
  • DW: Will have all the information in the right format that PBCS expects
  • File System: The data/metadata from the DW will be exported in the right format/layout and then zipped

While source and stage areas are common across several architectures out there, we need to take a moment to talk about the DW layer, where we have the DW table which will contain the data that we want to load to PBCS and a Metadata validation table. Before we can load data into PBCS we need to make sure that there is no invalid member on the file, and therefore we create a job to export metadata from PBCS in the first place. All existing metadata will be stored in a metadata table with the follow format:

Generally, we build this table to be partitioned by App_Name or Plan_Type, so we can retrieve its information in a faster manner, but it all depends on the size and the number of your applications. With this approach, we may validate all data in the DW tables against the Metadata table and remove/fix it before sending it to PBCS.

The “auxiliary” tool that we will use to send/extract data between our DW and PBCS is EPM Automate. The EPM Automate utility will act as a bridge between ODI and PBCS as it enables Service Administrators to automate many repeatable tasks including (but not limited to) the following:

  • Import and export metadata and data
  • Refresh the application
  • Run business rules
  • Upload files, list files and delete files from PBCS
  • Copy data from one database to another
  • Run a Data Management batch rule
  • Export and import application and artifact snapshots
  • Import pre-mapped balance data into Oracle Account Reconciliation Cloud
  • Import currency rates, pre-mapped transactions, and profiles into Oracle Account Reconciliation Cloud
  • Copy profiles to a period to initiate the reconciliation process
  • Deploy the calculation cube of an Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management Cloud application
  • Clear, copy, and delete Point of Views in Profitability and Cost Management applications
  • Export and import template in Profitability and Cost Management applications
  • Replay Oracle Smart View for Office load on a service instance to enable performance testing under heavy load

Next post we will show one example of how to Load Data using EPM Automate with ODI. Stay tunned!

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How to use your existing ODI on premise to seamlessly integrate PBCS (Part 3: Inbound Jobs)

Posted in Cloud, EPM Automate, ODI, PBCS, Uncategorized with tags , , on March 18, 2021 by RZGiampaoli

Hey guys, how are you? Continuing the how to integrate PBCS seamlessly using you existing ODI environment series (Part 2 Here), today we’ll talk about Inbound Jobs.

We already know that we’ll need 4 type of jobs for our integration then let’s see what we need to do to create an Inbound Job:

The first thing we need to do is to set the location as inbox (or outbox in case of an extract). This is what enables the button save as a job. If you choose Local, it enables you to run just for one time.

Second, source type. We have 2 choices there, Essbase and Planning. Essbase has the same format that we are used with Essbase exports, the problem is that if we select Essbase we’ll need to have one job per Plan type.

Planning in the other hand has a special format that is very handy for create dynamic objects in ODI as we can see in the table below:

As we can see, the planning format has a column for the account, then the periods, a POV column and the data load cube name (plan type).

The periods on the column is already a nice thing to have since will be way fester to load and way more optimized since we’ll have one how for the entire year.

Of course, this will only be true when we are talking about forecast because actuals normally, we load just one month per time… even so I prefer this format then have one column for the period and another for data.

The POV is also nice because doesn’t matter how many dimensions we have in one plan type, everything will be in the same column, then for integrate is simple since we just need to concatenate all columns but accounts in one column. I recommend using Regular expression and LISTAGG to do so (best function ever for dynamic components).

And to end we need to inform to each plan type that data will be loaded, very nice, you can load all your plan types at once. One job, one file and everything can be done by one generic component in ODI.

After that we need to choose the delimiter used in the file, in this case, I choose pipeline because it’s very hard to have this character in the middle of any metadata.

Finally, we just need to inform the name of the file. That’s all we need to create a job that we can call using EPMAutomate anytime we need it.

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KScope 18 Speaker Award

Posted in ACE, Career, DEVEPM, EPM, Kscope, Kscope 18, ODI, ODI Architecture, ODTUG, PBCS with tags , , , , , , on September 17, 2018 by RZGiampaoli

Hey guys how are you?

It has been awhile since last time I wrote anything here…. and surprise, surprise, it’s because I’m crazy working in a project that was sized small but turn out huge and the size didn’t change…. 🙂 never happened before heheheh 😉

This is just a small post to tell how grateful and happy we are for receiving the EPM Data Integration Speaker Award in Kscope 18 with the presentation: How to Use Your ODI On-Premise to Seamlessly Integrate PBCS.

We start this blog in 2012 and we have been presenting at Kscope since 2013 and it has been very rewarding, not only because we become Oracle ACEs because of this, but because every single post or presentation we learn a lot with it.

When you do a presentation you need to stop to think in a solution for a specif project and start to thinking in a solution that can be used to all projects. This alone is a challenge, but the amount of thing we learn is a great deal. We can easily said that our code improved a lot since 2012 when we began with this blog and it’s in great part because of this blog and our presentations.

Then we thank you all of you that read our blog (even if we don’t post as much as we would like), to everybody that goes to KScope and decide to watch our presentations and to ODTUD that provide this bi-lateral learning platform.

Thank you all of you for supporting us and see you soon.

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KScope 18! It’s a wrap.

Posted in ACE, DEVEPM, EPM, Kscope, Kscope 18, PBCS, Uncategorized with tags , , on June 21, 2018 by RZGiampaoli

That’s it guys, one more year of KScope finished successfully.

This year was a big one for us since we had 3 sessions, one lunch and panel and one lip-sync battle…. that we lost… but was a lot of fun (way better than I thought it would be).

The sessions were great and we are very proud to receive the Top Speaker Awards for EPM Data Integration track with the session How to Use Your ODI On-Premise to Seamlessly Integrate PBCS.

This means a lot to us since we are always worried about our speeches because our marvelous English and our subtle accent (I sound like a famous robot from the future “Come with me if you want to live….”), then we always try to compensate with the content.

And this year I think we made it. We’ll try very hard to keep the content this interesting. We always try, but some times what is interesting for us is not for others. Would be very nice if you guys leave comments with thing you would like to see in our presentation or blogs.

Thank you very much for all people that attended our sessions and look forward to see you next year!

Thanks

 

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OTN Article: Building a 100% Cloud Solution with Oracle Data Integrator

Posted in ACE, ArchBeat, BICS, DBCS, DEVEPM, EPM, EPM Automate, InfraStructure, ODI, ODI 11g, ODI Architecture, Oracle, Oracle Database, OS Command, OTN, PBCS, Tips and Tricks with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 23, 2017 by RZGiampaoli

Hi guys how are you? Today I want to share our new OTN article Building a 100% Cloud Solution with Oracle Data Integrator.
The article will cover how to integrate BICS, PBCS, DBCS and ODI and will explain step by step how to create a 100% cloud solution using ODI (everything on the cloud including ODI :)).

This is a perfect article for companies that are thinking to go cloud and have some doubts or even are thinking how you can integrate/use your actual infrastructure with the cloud services.

I hope you guys enjoy and see you soon.

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PBCS, BICS, DBCS and ODI!!! Is that possible???

Posted in 11.1.1.9.0, 11.1.2.4, ACE, BICS, DBCS, EPM, EPM Automate, ODI, ODI 10g, ODI 11g, ODI 12c, ODI Architecture, ODI Architecture, Oracle, OS Command, PBCS, Performance, Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , on August 15, 2016 by RZGiampaoli

Hey guys, today I’ll talk a little bit about architecture, cloud architecture.

I just finished a very exciting project in Brazil and I would like to share how we put everything together for a 100% cloud solution that includes PBCS, BICS, DBCS and ODI. Yes ODI and still 100% cloud.

Now you would be thinking, how could be 100% cloud if ODI isn’t cloud yet? Well, it can be!

This client doesn’t have a big IT infrastructure, in fact, almost all client’ databases are supported and hosted by providers, but still, the client has the rights to have a good forecast and BI tool with a strong ETL process behind it right?

Thanks to the cloud solutions, we don’t need to worry about infrastructure anymore (or almost), the only problem is… ODI.

We still don’t have a KM for cloud services, or a cloud version of ODI, them basically we can’t use ODI to integrate could tools….

Or can we? Yes we can 🙂

The design is simple:

  1. PBCS: Basically we’ll work in the same way we would if it was just it.
  2. BICS: Same thing here, but instead of use the database that comes with BICS, we need to contract a DBCS as well and point the DW schema to it.
  3. DBCS: here’s the trick. Oracle’s DBCS is not else then a Linux machine hosted in a server. That means, we can install other things in the server, other things like ODI and VPN’s.
  4. ODI: we just need to install it in the same way we would do in an on premise environment, including the agent.
  5. VPN’s: the final touch, we just need to create VPN’s between the DBCS and the client DB’s, this way ODI will have access to everything it needs.

Yes you read it right, we can install ODI in the DBCS, and that makes ODI a “cloud” solution.

cloud solution

The solution looks like this:

BICS: It’ll read directly from his DW schema in the DBCS.

PBCS: There’re no direct integration between the PBCS and DBCS (where the ODI Agent is installed), but I found it a lot better and easy to integrate them using EPM Automate.

EPM Automate: With EPM Automate we can do anything we want, extract data and metadata, load data and metadata, execute BR and more. For now the easiest way to go is create a script and call it from ODI, passing anything you need to it.

VPN’s: For each server we need to integrate we’ll need one VPN created. With the VPN between the DBCS and the hosts working, use ODI is extremely strait forward, we just need to create the topology as always, revert anything we need and work in the interfaces.

And that’s it. With this design you can have everything in the cloud and still have your ODI behind scenes! By the way, you can exactly the same thing with ODI on premise and as a bonus you can get rid of all VPN’s.

In another post I’ll give more detail about the integration between ODI and PBCS using EPM Automate, but I can say, it works extremely well and as far I know is a lot easier than FDMEE (at least for me).

Thanks guys and see you soon.

 

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