I've been away from blogging for quite some time. ODI has taken a break and this time I am working on Hyperion Planning on Cloud a.k.a Planning Budgeting Cloud Services (PBCS).
Fortunately, Oracle has taken documentation seriously and there is absolutely no need to paste those 'how to do' pictures here again. You will also find videos of PBCS on youtube and they are pretty informative.
See the link below for documentation:
http://docs.oracle.com/cloud/latest/pbcs_common/docs.htm
And for Videos (its the same page but a different tab) :
http://docs.oracle.com/cloud/latest/pbcs_common/index.html
While I was mighty excited about the fact that Planning will be on cloud and soon we will have webforms which would be as fast as your facebook wall, I must say that its not a rosy picture at all.
Ofcourse, PBCS has some advantages over the usual on-premise application but since it is so new, issues are bound to arise and there is nothing wrong with it. I am listing a few good and bad experiences so far.
NOTE: The following issues listed have been faced by me and may or may not apply for other instances. This list of issues is not an attempt to undermine PBCS or its capabilities.
1. ADF Error : A Task list will abruptly throw an ADF error when trying to edit it. There is no defined pattern but a workaround is to go on clicking each task from start to the one you want to edit instead of directly jumping (clicking) on the task you want to edit.
2. Deployed Rules getting 'un-deployed' automatically : This came to me as a real embarrassment. We had a BR which was run-on-save of a webform. When a user saved his data nothing happened. When I checked the logs I found the rule was never executed, after checking the rule in BR list I found that rule and a couple of others had vanished. Had to deploy them again. On a strange note, if I click on 'deploy' on the application name in system view, many rules that were deployed and running before vanish without any reason.
3. Migrating Application and Calc Manager rules : While application migration from a local on-premise application to cloud is straightforward and easy, Calc manager rules is not, apparently all the rules of three plan types get imported (migrated) to one plan type in target. The workaround is to import it all plan types and then delete the unnecessary ones. Not sure if this is applicable to all cloud instances.
4. Performance : There is a notable difference in page upload times when using Firefox. IE 10 and FF versions 17 and 24 are supported. I upgraded FF to 32 but it started crashing after some time. Performance on IE is not that great, you will get a lot of error messages during general navigation.
5. Unavailability of Essbase Ad-hoc Analysis : This restricts the use of Attribute dimension in Ad-hoc analysis. Planning does not support Attribute ad-hoc analysis in SmartView, but it is the only option available in PBCS. So is the case with Financial Reporting, Attributes cannot be used here as well. This will be available in future. (Oracle does not reveal ETA of such upgrades)
6. Inbox folder of FDM : Cannot remove or Sort the files uploaded to it: File, once uploaded in the inbox cannot be deleted, nor can it be sorted according to the time of upload or any which way. Developers need to keep this point in mind.
7. General navigation issues on Firefox : For some users, clicking on the node of Application management (Shared Services), does not expand the node, instead, it re-orders the tree. This can be really irritating and many will be forced to use keyboard instead of mouse for traversing the tree. Oracle says that this issue is not present in version 24 of FF.
8. FF cannot upload Application Export but IE can : Planning application exports can be uploaded for importing into cloud application, but this functionality works with IE 9 only and not on FF version 21.
9. Java Errors : If any weird java errors are seen, log out, delete history, offline data, cache etc. close all the instances of FF browser and login again. Everything will be fine.
10. Essbase is completely off the table. No access to change cache, essbase.cfg etc.
11. Automation of tasks needs to be researched. I don't think we can automate much (I am reading stuff about it but this is what I feel so far)
12. Did anybody say they want to see the log files ? You can but its very limited. Essbase logging for rule optimization etc is not possible yet.
13. Smart View : XML DTD error : This is an error received when users are logged in to SV for a long time. When the session logs out automatically and user logs in again, he will get this error. Best approach is when a stale session needs to be reopened, close all Excel files and login again
I do feel that these small issues will get rectified soon.
On the positive side, here are my observations
1. Workspace window will feel slow initially, but work on it for sometime, let the cookies and offline data get saved and it will start performing blazing fast. If you delete history, the speed will reduce again for some time.
2. SmartView is faster compared to web browser. Use it as much as you can.
3. BRs execute pretty fast.
4. System never crashes, pretty robust.
5. With proper access restriction and user management, PBCS has a pretty good security structure in place.
6. File upload and download speeds are very good. Users will rarely have any issues uploading files on the server.
7. No fuss of server maintenance and backup, just one hour of downtime everyday when patches are applied and data is backed up.
I am not sure of the disk space sizing as of now, but will post it as soon as I get some information on it.
I will be updating this post as I get up-close and personal with PBCS, but so far it looks promising, considering the issues will get resolved as Oracle will patch it till they get it right.
Cheers,
NJ
Fortunately, Oracle has taken documentation seriously and there is absolutely no need to paste those 'how to do' pictures here again. You will also find videos of PBCS on youtube and they are pretty informative.
See the link below for documentation:
http://docs.oracle.com/cloud/latest/pbcs_common/docs.htm
And for Videos (its the same page but a different tab) :
http://docs.oracle.com/cloud/latest/pbcs_common/index.html
While I was mighty excited about the fact that Planning will be on cloud and soon we will have webforms which would be as fast as your facebook wall, I must say that its not a rosy picture at all.
Ofcourse, PBCS has some advantages over the usual on-premise application but since it is so new, issues are bound to arise and there is nothing wrong with it. I am listing a few good and bad experiences so far.
NOTE: The following issues listed have been faced by me and may or may not apply for other instances. This list of issues is not an attempt to undermine PBCS or its capabilities.
1. ADF Error : A Task list will abruptly throw an ADF error when trying to edit it. There is no defined pattern but a workaround is to go on clicking each task from start to the one you want to edit instead of directly jumping (clicking) on the task you want to edit.
2. Deployed Rules getting 'un-deployed' automatically : This came to me as a real embarrassment. We had a BR which was run-on-save of a webform. When a user saved his data nothing happened. When I checked the logs I found the rule was never executed, after checking the rule in BR list I found that rule and a couple of others had vanished. Had to deploy them again. On a strange note, if I click on 'deploy' on the application name in system view, many rules that were deployed and running before vanish without any reason.
3. Migrating Application and Calc Manager rules : While application migration from a local on-premise application to cloud is straightforward and easy, Calc manager rules is not, apparently all the rules of three plan types get imported (migrated) to one plan type in target. The workaround is to import it all plan types and then delete the unnecessary ones. Not sure if this is applicable to all cloud instances.
4. Performance : There is a notable difference in page upload times when using Firefox. IE 10 and FF versions 17 and 24 are supported. I upgraded FF to 32 but it started crashing after some time. Performance on IE is not that great, you will get a lot of error messages during general navigation.
5. Unavailability of Essbase Ad-hoc Analysis : This restricts the use of Attribute dimension in Ad-hoc analysis. Planning does not support Attribute ad-hoc analysis in SmartView, but it is the only option available in PBCS. So is the case with Financial Reporting, Attributes cannot be used here as well. This will be available in future. (Oracle does not reveal ETA of such upgrades)
6. Inbox folder of FDM : Cannot remove or Sort the files uploaded to it: File, once uploaded in the inbox cannot be deleted, nor can it be sorted according to the time of upload or any which way. Developers need to keep this point in mind.
7. General navigation issues on Firefox : For some users, clicking on the node of Application management (Shared Services), does not expand the node, instead, it re-orders the tree. This can be really irritating and many will be forced to use keyboard instead of mouse for traversing the tree. Oracle says that this issue is not present in version 24 of FF.
8. FF cannot upload Application Export but IE can : Planning application exports can be uploaded for importing into cloud application, but this functionality works with IE 9 only and not on FF version 21.
9. Java Errors : If any weird java errors are seen, log out, delete history, offline data, cache etc. close all the instances of FF browser and login again. Everything will be fine.
10. Essbase is completely off the table. No access to change cache, essbase.cfg etc.
11. Automation of tasks needs to be researched. I don't think we can automate much (I am reading stuff about it but this is what I feel so far)
12. Did anybody say they want to see the log files ? You can but its very limited. Essbase logging for rule optimization etc is not possible yet.
13. Smart View : XML DTD error : This is an error received when users are logged in to SV for a long time. When the session logs out automatically and user logs in again, he will get this error. Best approach is when a stale session needs to be reopened, close all Excel files and login again
I do feel that these small issues will get rectified soon.
On the positive side, here are my observations
1. Workspace window will feel slow initially, but work on it for sometime, let the cookies and offline data get saved and it will start performing blazing fast. If you delete history, the speed will reduce again for some time.
2. SmartView is faster compared to web browser. Use it as much as you can.
3. BRs execute pretty fast.
4. System never crashes, pretty robust.
5. With proper access restriction and user management, PBCS has a pretty good security structure in place.
6. File upload and download speeds are very good. Users will rarely have any issues uploading files on the server.
7. No fuss of server maintenance and backup, just one hour of downtime everyday when patches are applied and data is backed up.
I am not sure of the disk space sizing as of now, but will post it as soon as I get some information on it.
I will be updating this post as I get up-close and personal with PBCS, but so far it looks promising, considering the issues will get resolved as Oracle will patch it till they get it right.
Cheers,
NJ
