Essbase Studio Foibles

A few interesting notes about Essbase Studio v11.1.1.3.

A few interesting notes about Essbase Studio v11.1.1.3.

MAXL Deploy Documentation
It’s wrong. There is an important clause that is left out of the railroad diagrams. The proper syntax for an auto deployment goes a little something like this, the bolded part is left out of the 11.1.1.3 documentation:

deploy outline from model ‘Standard9Model’ with option
incremental_load update all
preserve no data
login ‘admin’ identified by ‘password’ on host ‘essServer’
to application ‘Demo’ database ‘DB’ using connection ‘EssDev’
keep 500 errors
on error write ‘d_S9.err’;

Messy Messages
There’s another interesting bug in the product. It’s hard to tell if it’s Smartview or Smartview with Studio. Either way, it’s very deceptive. The message reads ‘Internal Provider Server Error’ or ‘cannot perform cube view operation. null’. If you get either of these that’s Smartview’s idiot way of saying “Please turn of suppress missing, I can’t see anything.” I know. That one had me scratching my head for a while after I finally got the automation for deployment working.

Last but not least, there’s a little piece of documentation in Essbase studio that says MaxL formulas imported into the cube cannot exceed 255 characters. Your common sense would say to ignore that piece of documentation and your common sense would be right, even though it raises your hinky level. I have imported bigger formulas successfully. We’ll see if Studio intervenes somehow after the cube is built to say no go. I’ve seen crazier.

Next time I’ll attempt to explain how one can do some trickery to avoid Studio’s requirement of using Generational hierarchies instead of parent child hierarchies when you want to do drill-through reports.

Originally published at www.cubegeek.com on January 27, 2011.