Automating Oracle Essbase Tasks

In the previous posts, Star Finance Command Center (SFCC) was introduced as an alternative to scripting and manual processes. In this post we discuss the automation of Essbase Tasks.

Since the early 1990s, Essbase has been the market leading multidimensional database solution for planning, reporting, and analysis. Despite its popularity, and strategic importance in serving the needs of large user communities, the product relies heavily on scripting and custom coding to work in non-trivial customer environments. The lack of better tools to orchestrate, automate, and monitor the Essbase environment creates a significant cost for the initial implementation, and ongoing maintenance of the system.


A bit of history…Back in 1992, initial Essbase customers asked for some way to automate the loading and updating of Essbase cubes. At that time, the Essbase roadmap was full of more important features to improve usability, scalability, etc. However, lurking in a back-cubicle of Arbor Software, the Essbase QA Manager, Ron Cho, had built his own Essbase command line interface using the Essbase API; he called it ESSCMD. Despite the fact that it was built for internal QA use, the utility was put in a few customer’s hands, and it did the trick. As the early Essbase installed base quickly grew, more customers ended up with the utility in hand, so basic documentation was provided.

Fast forward to 1999, the Essbase install base was large, and despite its many shortcomings, ESSCMD had become part of the product family. As the demands for more enterprise class deployability continued to grow, it was clear that ESSCMD was not up to the challenge. MaxL was born to provide a more programmatic language based interface that could be more easily used with Perl, Python, or other scripting languages.

The basic idea however, was still to provide the rudimentary command line interface, and let the more technically oriented administrators fend for themselves with scripting languages and scheduling tools. While the Essbase command line interfaces make automation possible, they were never designed to or actually perform the automation of tasks. That is where SFCC comes into the picture. Over the past 18 months the product has been used by a number of long time, and not so long time, Essbase shops to automate and interconnect their ESSCMD and MaxL processes with a whole ecosystem of applications that surround Essbase.

Interestingly enough, one of the frequent requests that we receive from Essbase customers is for pre-defined Tasks in SFCC to perform all the update and maintenance operations on Essbase; without having to resort to ESSCMD or MaxL. Many of them would rather eliminate their scripts, and other code, altogether with out-of-the-box features that are provided by SFCC.

In response to our Essbase customer demand, a library of over 20 Essbase specific tasks is now available for SFCC. Samples of how this works are explored in this PDF file: http://staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/Automating_Essbase_Tasks_with_Star_Finance_Command_Center.pdf

Automating Oracle Hyperion FDM Tasks

Oracle's Financial Data Quality Management (FDM) is heavily relied upon as a preprocessor of data in advance of loading into Oracle's Hyperion Financial Management (HFM), Hyperion Planning and occasionally into Oracle Essbase. The product does an excellent job validating, parsing, merging data based upon rules that ensures the output data is correct for loading into the target system. This summary does not nearly give the product justice and more information can be found at: http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/ent-performance-bi/hyperion-data-quality-management-066557.html.

Despite all the benefits that FDM brings to enhancing data quality, it lacks significant ability to automate the various tasks that are necessary to keep the application running across an ecosystem of applications, servers and processes that typical finance administrators need to interact with. FDM does have a built-in “localized” scheduler but it is difficult to job chain FDM processes with other running processes outside of the control of FDM. As a result, clients who depend upon FDM often rely upon manual processes to do such tasks such as running custom file splitters, loading data to various applications via the “4 Fish Process” and generating and emailing reconciliation reports in PDF or XLS formats. In the typical environment, where there is a heterogenous mix of applications and computing environments, each step along a job chain typically requires human intervention which is time consuming, error prone and ultimately undermines SOX compliance.

In the previous post, Star Finance Command Center (SFCC) was introduced as an alternative to manual processes and how a current Command Center customer helped educate their team about the product's capabilities through a comparison of current processes and those under the control of SFCC. In this post, the following three main FDM tasks will be highlighed and how SFCC automates them:

• Running a FDM Custom Script
• Running the “4–Fish” Process (Import, Validate, Export & Load)
• Running the FDM report engine

Details of how Star Finance Command Center interacts with FDM will be explored in this PDF file: http://staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/Automating_FDM_Tasks_with_Star_Finance_Command_Center.pdf

A Client Justification for the Purchase of Star Finance Command Center

The Star Finance Command Center (SFCC) is a packaged finance automation software product. It is designed to overcome the challenges of the abundance of technology platforms within many of today's finance departments. SFCC provides business users with a highly accessible solution that allows them to manage the variety of complex processes across these different platforms. The product offers strong control and compliance management while allowing remote access to securely run and monitor all finance processes through web applications and smart phones.

SFCC automates the heterogeneous mix of software products that exists in today's corporations. Finance departments are tasked with maintaining, integrating, automating and ultimately orchestrating systems from Oracle Hyperion, SAP Business Objects, QlikView, Oracle RDBMS and Microsoft SQL Server as well as many home grown products. Any product with a command line interface can easily integrate with SFCC to orchestrate processes across servers, applications, and environments with a minimal amount or complete elimination of custom code. SFCC smoothes the rough edges across the thorny integration points within a cross-platform operating environment.

One of Star Analytics' clients recently allowed the posting of their purchase justification which clearly illustrates their challenges prior and desired state after SFCC is implemented. Any references to the client has been removed.  Please see this PDF: http://staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/Client_X_SFCC_Purchase_Justification.pdf