Archive for Hacking

Oracle SQL for EPM Tips and Tricks S01EP13

Posted in ACE, Data Warehouse, Hacking, Hyperion Planning, ODI, Oracle, Oracle 11.2.0, Oracle Database, SQL with tags , , , , , on April 1, 2020 by RZGiampaoli

Hey guys how are you? Let’s take a look today in the opposite of S01EP12 situation, in fact we’ll use the same example again to show how can we convert a string in a list of values in a easy and dynamic way, starting with this query here:

I’ll transform this query in a with and I’ll use REGEXP to put this back into a list of values. This is very useful when we extract metadata from essbase for example, because essbase exports the UDA’s as a list of values. Of coarse this has many uses other than this but let’s keep this one in mind.

Now what we need to do is to split the strings by comma in this case, then the idea is to count the amount of commas we have in a row and split the strings by that amount.

The idea here is to use the REGEXP_COUNT to count how many words we have in between the commas and then use it to multiply the rows in the CONNECT BY LEVEL. For example, if we have 3 words, the connect by will create 3 rows of the same row, one with the LEVEL = 1 another with the LEVEL =2 and the last one with LEVEL=3.

With that we just need to use the REGEXP_SUBSTR to extract the words based in the LEVEL, this way we’ll have the REGEXP_SUBSTR(STR, ‘[^,]+’, 1, LEVEL (that will be 1 for the first row, 2 for the second and 3 for the third one).

I hope this can be useful and see you soon.

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Oracle SQL for EPM Tips and Tricks S01EP12

Posted in ACE, Data Extract, Hacking, Hyperion Planning, ODI, ODI 10g, ODI 11g, ODI 12c, Oracle, Oracle 11.2.0, Oracle 11.2.0.4, Oracle Database, SQL with tags , , , , , on March 31, 2020 by RZGiampaoli

Hey guys how are you keeping? I hope everybody is healthy and keep this way in this difficult times.

And to make our life less complicate, here’s another tip. Let’s talk about how to concatenate stuff in Oracle.

Imagine a simple case, we want to query the Planning repository to get the list of UDA’s a member have. We can easily do that by query the HSP_OBJECT, HSP_MEMBER_TO_UDA and HSP_UDA tables.

I’m filtering just 3 products to make it easier for us to see. The results shows that each project has a different number of UDA’s, and we never know how many it’ll be, then the easiest way to concatenate them is to use the command LISTAGG (or WM_CONCAT if you are in a DB version prior to 11.1).

The command is very simple LISTAGG(Column, Separator) WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY column). As we can see the command allow us to select the separator we want (can be comma or any string really) as well to order the results by another column). Let’s take a look in the example above.

As you can see, it easily create a list split my comma (as specified) for me, and the nice thing about it is that I don’t need to do any string treatment if return null or if I have just one string on it and things like that.

This is an extremely good Function and we heavily use it in ODI to generate dynamic code because its simplicity, for example, we can generate a SQL statement on the fly using the command on source and command on target:

With this results we can easily pass this info to the command on target to generate a dynamic query where ODI will replace the columns we got in the target as well the table name and will also loop for each row we have in the source. This is very handy.

And for the ones that are not in the ORACLE 11.2 and ahead, we can still do that using WM_CONCAT. Is not as powerful as LISTAGG, but works pretty well. Let’s try the first example again:

I cannot show you the results since WM_CONCAT was decommissioned in the 12c (my version), but it’ll work like this. We don’t have the option to choose the separator and to make the string unique and to order by it we need to add DISTINCT in the command WM_CONCAT(DISTINCT column).

I hope that is useful and have a great day.

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Oracle SQL for EPM Tips and Tricks S01EP11

Posted in ACE, Data Warehouse, Hacking, ODI, ODI 10g, ODI 11g, ODI 12c, Oracle, Oracle Database with tags , , , on March 25, 2020 by RZGiampaoli

Hey guys how are you?

Today I’ll post something that is very simple but very useful specially when working with ODI.

When we work with partitioned table we know that if we filter that table by the partitioned column Oracle will use that partition as source of data. But what if we are doing an Insert, Update or Merge?

There’s another way to explicit refer to a partition and make sure Oracle will be working inside that one and is by defining it in the From clause.

For example if I want to query the Partition “DELL_BALANCES_FY20_FEB” I can query:

As we can see, after the table name I specified the PARTITION (DELL_BALANCES_FY20_FEB) and put inside the parentheses the partition name (don’t specify as string) and that makes oracle distinct all the rows in that partition, and my Distinct of the PARTITION_KEY shows only one results as expected. (this command needs to come before the table alias).

If we are doing an Insert, Update or Merge the idea is the same:

This way we can, specially in the MERGE, make sure Oracle will be working in the right partition in the target table.

And it’s specially useful with ODI because we always know the partition we want to query or insert data when we use ODI, then we can always bind Oracle to a specific partition and make sure he’ll stay there.

I hope this is help full and see you soon.

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DEVEPM in Kscope20!

Posted in Essbase, Hacking, Kscope 20, ODI 12c, ODI Architecture, Tips and Tricks with tags , , , , on March 2, 2020 by RZGiampaoli

We are delighted to tell everybody that we’ll be at KScope 20 in Boston.

We’ll be presenting the session Essbase Statistics DW: How automatically administrate Essbase using ODI on room 304, Level 3 => Wed, Jul 01, 2020 (02:15 PM – 03:15 PM). In this session we’ll talk about how to keep Essbase configuration up to date using ODI. We also will review

To have a fast Essbase cube, we must keep vigilance and follow its growth and its data movements, so we can distribute caches and adjust the database parameters accordingly. But this is a very difficult task to achieve since Essbase statistics are not temporal and only tell you the cube statistics are in that specific time frame.
This session will present how ODI can be used to create a historical DW containing Essbase cube’s information and how to identify trends and patterns, giving us the ability to programmatically tune our Essbase databases automatically.

We hope to see you all there.

Thank you and see you soon!

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Oracle SQL for EPM Tips and Tricks S01EP10

Posted in ACE, Hacking, Oracle, Oracle Database, Performance, SQL, Tips and Tricks with tags , , , , , , on February 26, 2020 by RZGiampaoli

Hey guys how are you?

Today a quick tip that I think is very useful. From time to time the business ask us to validate if a table has data or not before we load it. It’s fare, specially if you use a truncate and insert approach.

The problem is, sometimes, the table/view they are asking for has millions of rows, and there’s no other safe way to validate if a table has data or not than querying it.

I just fixed a case where an interface had a validation that basically counts 3 different tables that together had 40 million rows per period. This validations were taking around 1000 sec to happens.

The data load that happens before that took 1200 sec. Then, basically the validation process were taking as much time as the load process.

After some changes, the query now is validating the 3 tables in 0.3 seconds. Way better than before. Basically I just used 3 things:

The hint /*+ FIRST_ROWS(1) */ that makes oracle prepare the best plan to query just one row (in my case since I used 1 as parameter.

The filter ROWNUM = 1 to make sure oracle just return 1 row, if we don’t use that, the hint can make everything very slow because oracle will be planning for just one row, but without filtering it’ll bring more (using the best plan possible for 1 row).

And UNION ALL instead of UNION, because there’s a huge difference between them. when you use UNION, oracle matches the sets of data to make sure you have unique rows after that. UNION ALL in other case, just bring everything each set return without any extra process to validate anything. UNION ALL is always faster than UNION.

In the end I have an query like this:

As you can see, the query is very simple and for this example I just had the name of the table there, then we know the table is not empty for that period. We can do other approach like summing then all together and validate if the results is = 3 for example or any other logic we need can be implemented on top of this query.

I hope this is helpful for you guys and see you in the next post.

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Automating Essbase Copy Outline Operation using Java API

Posted in ACE, BSO, Cubes, Essbase, Hacking, Hyperion Essbase, Java, Migration, Oracle with tags , , , , , , on August 9, 2017 by RZGiampaoli

Hi guys how are you? Did you guys ever tried to automate the process of coping a cube outline from one application to another?

Well, there’s an easy way to do that. Basically you copy the .otl from the server file system over the other cube. The problem is that if the cube is not empty, the database becomes corrupted since we just replaced an .otl file for another strange .otl file (no restructure happened).

Then if you want to copy the outline to an existing cube (that has data) this is not a solution.

The thing is, the only two possible ways to do what we want is the EAS “Save as” operation and the migration wizard. These both operations work because they copy the .otl file as .otn and then run a restructure in the database. The restructure “synchronize” the cube with the new outline, making the process safe for a cube that has data on it.

The problem is, none of these can be automated and there’re no way to do this operation using Maxl or EssCmd.

In fact, even using the Java API, it’s hard to figure out how to do that because all the copy methods seem to copy all kind of objects but the outline.

The good news is, we figured out a way to replicate the “Save as” operation using the Java API after hours of frustration and tears…

Here we go:

Save As Java code

The code is really simple. We need to connect in the essbase server, lock the target outline (the one we’ll overwrite) and then copy the outline from one application to another. To do that we are going to use the functions “lockOlapFileObject” and “copyOlapFileObjectToServer”.

This process that we just described will create an .otn file in the target cube. Now comes the great catch of this code (that is not documented anywhere):

If we open the target outline in EAS we will still see the old metadata. To commit the changes, we need to perform a restructure to merge the new outline (.otn) with the old one (.otl) updating the metadata.

To do that we are going to use the functions in the class “IEssCubeOutline” to “open”, “restructureCube” and “close” the target outline.

That is it. This process will do exactly what the “Save As” in EAS does, which means that you can copy outlines from one application to another even when the target database contains data.

I hope you guys enjoy and see you soon.

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