New 11.1.2 Information

I was talking with one of my contacts this week and learned some things that would be of interest to those of you working with 11.1.2. Keep in mind that, in regards to products/service packs that have not shipped, Oracle makes no guarantees of what will ship until it has actually shipped, so plan your actions accordingly. The things I learned include:

• There are known issues with the install but many of them are documented in either the epm_1112000_readme.pdf or in the readmes for the individual products.
• Release 11.1.2 really is for new installs only and there are no provisions for upgrade or migration from any previous version. Upgrade and migration capabilities are planned for a point release later in the year.
• Essbase 11.1.2 is not compatible with any other version. While it will be tempting to use the new separate installer for the Excel Add-In with previous versions of Essbase, there's no guarantee it will work. The contact continued to say it should as there haven't been any new features in the Add-In for a while now, but it would definitely create an officially unsupported environment.
• There are service packs in the works for the 9.3.1.x and 11.1.1.3.x codelines to add a stand-alone Add-In installers.
• As widely reported in other Hyperion blogs, Release 11.1.2 introduces support for Internet Explorer 8.
• Not all the products shipped with EPM 11.1.2. There is no 11.1.2 version of Essbase Analytics Link for HFM (formerly HyperRoll), and Data Integration Management 11.1.1.1 is certified to run with EPM 11.1.2.

I have some people on my tech support team currently working on installations of both the 32-bit and 64-bit Essbase stack on Windows 2008 and Windows 7. We should be starting our Dodeca QA tests on 11.1.2 either tomorrow or the next day. We already have customers asking for our Dodeca-Essbase services for 11.1.2; we promise shipment within 2 weeks of 11.1.2 shipment.

Of course, as I learn more that I can share with you, I will post it here.

Oracle EPM System 11.1.2 has shipped!

My team is already downloading EPM 11.1.2 from http://edelivery.oracle.com and we will have some VMs up and running by this afternoon with the Essbase stack. I have a few initial observations from looking at the contents of eDelivery.

Download packages are currently available for HP-UX Itanium (but not HP-UX PA-RISC 64-bit), IBM AIX on POWER Systems (64-bit), Linux x86, Linux x86-64, Windows 32-bit, Windows x64 64-bit (but not Windows Itanium 64-bit), Solaris on SPARC 64-bit (but not Solaris on x86 (64-bit).

There is also a separate part number labeled "Oracle Essbase Spreadsheet Add-in Release 11.1.2.0.0 for Microsoft Windows" under 32-bit Windows. This part number appears to be a standalone Excel add-in that weighs in a 145 Mb. This is a significant decrease for installing the Excel add-in but still is about 4x the size of the Dodeca footprint. The Smart View standalone download is 79 Mb.

It looks like all of the products shipped together. This is something that Hyperion was working to do before the merger and I don't remember if it actually worked out that way. Additionally, back in the Hyperion days, Windows 32-bit shipped first and the remainder of the OS support shipped later.

I will report more once we start the installs.

Smart View Private Connection Issue - Resolved!

I had managed to go for the past 5 months, since I moved to Windows 7 64-bit on my laptop with Essbase 11.1.2, without the need to connect to Smart View.  This week, I decided I wanted to test something in Smart View and compare it with Dodeca but, low and behold, I could not create a private connection with Smart View to save my life.   After some investigation, I found some nasty messages in my apsserver.log (or, more specifically, in C:\Oracle\Middleware\user_projects\domains\EPMSystem\servers\AnalyticProviderServices0\logs\apsserver.log):

[2011-05-16T20:34:42.184-05:00] [AnalyticProviderServices0] [ERROR] [] [oracle.EPMOHPS] [tid: 18] [userId: ] [ecid: 0000IxX6708EgKWzLwyGOA1De^CQ000001,0] [APP: APS#11.1.2.0] [[
java.lang.NullPointerException
 at com.hyperion.dsf.server.framework.BaseLogger.writeException(Unknown Source)
 at com.essbase.smartview.util.EssLogger.writeException(Unknown Source)
 at com.essbase.smartview.xml.XmlHandler.invoke(Unknown Source)
 at com.essbase.smartview.xml.XmlHandler.invoke(Unknown Source)
 at com.essbase.smartview.xml.XmlHandler.invoke(Unknown Source)
 at com.essbase.smartview.xml.EssbaseSmartView.doPost(Unknown Source)
 at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:727)
 at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:821)
...  blah, blah, blah!

I did a quick search of the web and found nothing relevant, so I turned to my friend and fellow ACE Cameron Lackpour..   Cameron had just finished working his way through the Oracle Knowledgebase notes on Smart View on Oracle support.  He came up with this nugget:

https://support.oracle.com/CSP/main/article?cmd=show&type=NOT&id=1098634.1

It told me the cause of my ills was an incomplete configuration and gave me a couple of different methods to complete the configuration.  I chose to export and edit the datasources.xml file.

In the xml, I simply had to add my Essbase server name:

Once that was complete, I was able to create a private connection:

EPM 11.1.2.1 on the cloud

11.1.2.1 has now been out a week and thus should not be news to anyone here.  One interesting thing different about this release, however, is the cloud instance that has popped up so that anyone can easily take advantage of giving 11.1.2.1 a test drive.

Emerging Solutions' John Booth has put an Amazon cloud instance online.  John has also worked hard on the cloud instance that will be used for hands-on labs at KScope 11.  For the latest details, see John's blog at http://www.metavero.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=51:epm-test-drive&catid=1:latest-news&Itemid=50.

If you have never used the Amazon cloud, Cameron Lackpour has posted a blog on how to get started with John's image.  See Cameron's blog post at http://camerons-blog-for-essbase-hackers.blogspot.com/2011/05/yeah-yeah-11121-is-here-so-what_12.html.

As for me, I am getting busy providing Dodeca support for 11.1.2.1.  It should be available either late this week or early next week.

Essbase Windows 7 Installation Issue - Resolution

One of my sons worked with a partner last week who was having problems installing 64-bit Essbase on 64-bit Windows 7.  It took a little bit to get the issues ironed out, but here is a summary of what happened.  Hopefully this post will prevent similar problems for you.

On the initial installation, the partner tried to install Oracle EPM System without using UAC (a/k/a right click, Run as Administrator) to run the installtool.bat.  This caused the installation to be incomplete and the subsequent configuration thus failed.

To try to fix the installation, the first thing that was attempted was an uninstall.   The uninstallation appears to complete successfully, but on the subsequent reinstall, not all of the components, specifically the http server, were not enabled for selection.  Of course, this did not look right, so upon further investigation, it was found that the uninstaller did not remove the dirty folder C:\Oracle\Middleware.   We manually removed the C:\Oracle\Middleware directory, which was improperly installed in the first place, and then installation/configuration completed without a problem.