What Is Dodeca And Why Should You Care?

Everyone knows Tim

You know who I’m talking about, don’t you? 

Over the years, you could hardly have missed him at oh, Arbor Dimensions , Hyperion Solutions, Oracle OpenWorld, OAUG Collaborate, and ODTUG Kaleidoscope.  He’s omnipresent, and gives freely of his time, expertise, and knowledge.  He’s also one heck of a nice guy.  And kind of a rock star.

He’s been deeply involved with ODTUG's board and is currently on the ODTUG Hyperion SIG board.

Did I mention that he has this company called AppliedOLAP?

Did I also mention that when I met his mother, I (for real and for true) told her that I wanted to be just like Tim when I grew up?  (This was at the tender age of 38, I best get cracking).  I’ve never wanted to be like anybody else, ever.  Not in the real world, at least. 

Did I mention that Tim and his team have graciously, generously, and for free taken over maintenance of OlapUnderground’s Outline Extractor, Advanced Security Manager, and Substitution Variable Manager.

Lastly, he’s an Oracle Ace Director.  That honorific isn’t exactly handed out like popcorn at a movie.

So, have you guessed yet?  I hope so – if you haven’t, I wonder if you have a Hyperion pulse.

The drama ends, and for many of you, there wasn’t a bit of a guessing game – the Tim I’m talking about is none other than Tim Tow.

And he has this product that I’m going to spend the next few blog posts reviewing in some depth.  I’m going to do a John Goodwin on this – come back to the same product again and again from different angles.  I think it will be fun.

NB – This won’t be a marketing review of the product, but rather a practical guide to the product and how you can use to build your most awesome Oracle EPM/Hyperion system ever.  E-v-e-r. 

Dodeca – what is it?

Here’s AppliedOLAP’s official description of Dodeca:

Dodeca is software that supports interactive analysis, planning, and reporting activities performed by business users and decision makers at all levels within an organization.

And here’s how I see it:

1)   It is the best Excel that Essbase ever met.

2)   It isn’t Excel.

Simple, eh?  And of course that description doesn’t touch all of the frankly amazing work under the covers that makes it such an awesome tool.  It’s all cool stuff, but from the sharp end of the stick, while it’s important to understand how Dodeca works and why, the most important part is what it can do for you when you implement it.

I’m just wild about Excel

Excel is wonderful, great, powerful, flexible, extendible, and customizable.  It is arguably the most widely used part of Office bar Outlook and more value sits in Excel worksheets than in annoying emails.  I love Excel.  Everyone who works in Accounting/Finance loves it.  It is warm, and cuddly, and just all around great.

And the problem is?

Alas, the “powerful, extendible, customizable” attributes are what causes so much trouble when Excel is used as a reporting tool against Essbase.

I’ve seen (and written) three kinds of Essbase/Excel reporting systems:  templates, templates with a wee bit o’code, and a super-duper locked down environment.

There are problems, big problems, with all three of these approaches, and I’m probably guilty of perpetrating all of them.  Former clients – I’m sorry, I did my best, but all I had was Excel.

98 lb weaklings, or have you thought about protein shakes

These are just templates that users retrieve into, or lock and send from.  Can this be broken?  Oh yes, and how.

The basic kind of “system” is an Essbase database, however derived using Excel files with high level retrieves.

Somehow this workbook, or series of workbooks, is distributed to users.

In turn, they connect to Essbase, retrieve/send, and change the report to their needs.

The Good

• Simple to create.
• Simple (sort of, your users have to understand the add-in or SmartView) to use.  Simple for you, at least.
• No code, so quick to create.
• Er, that’s about it.

The Bad

• The templates can get out of date and need to be redistributed.
• There isn’t a tremendous value in simple reports that need to be manually and uniquely modified by the user.
• It’s easy to break the Excel report with a pivot (or the flip side of not being able to pivot at all) – that will generally blow up the entire report and may really get ugly if you have hidden retrieve ranges and nicely formatted presentation ranges.
• The reports also break (or worse, still retrieve, but give different information than you anticpate) if rows or columns are deleted or even a member in a POV is deleted and replaced with a top-of-dimension member.

Spends time at the gym,  but not enough

Templates again, but with some automation, like an automatic log on and retrieve.  These templates are still rickety and prone to user error.

The Good

• Connecting to an Essbase database is a controlled act – at least you can be sure your users are connecting to Sample.Basic instead of some other database.
• You get to exercise your coding skills.  Do more, and one day you’ll be the Mr. Universe of programming.  This attribute may actually fall under The Bad – one programmer’s dream is another’s maintenance nightmare.
• Did I mention that this stuff is custom code either in the workbook or in an add-in – it has to be distributed, somehow.
• Once you get past the crude automation, the actual creation of reports isn’t too bad.

The Bad

• These reports are still wide open, and are easy to break for all of the reasons listed in the 98 lb weakling section.
• The system is just barely one step above templates against Essbase – your users have to be proficient with retrieves, sends, report writing, etc.  Honestly, was it worth the candle?

Dude, lay off the steroids

A completely locked down Excel environment.  In fact your users wouldn’t even know you were in Excel, save for the grid.

The Good

• You are the Mr. Universe of programming.  Nice code, nice approach, nice functionality.  This is cool stuff.
• Excel is locked down tighter than a drum head.  No user errors are going to happen here.  I don’t even see the File menu.
• You have accounted for every bone-headed/honest mistake a user can make.  This system is solid.

The Bad

• You’ve got to be a really, really good VBA programmer, and spent a lot of time thinking about how retrieves and sends are going to work.
• Did I mention you wrote a lot of code.  A lot.  And it took time.  A lot.  Maybe way more than you anticipated.
• The cool code you wrote is probably a bit specific to the database.  Did you plan for portability to other applications?  Whoops, you forgot.  Yeah, me too.
• Uh-oh, your company just migrated from Excel 2003 to 2007.  Toolbars don’t really work any more, nor do custom menus (okay, they work, sort of, but not the way they used to).  What are your thoughts on the Ribbon UI?
• ·Whoa, you just got hit by a SEPTA bus.  You are hors de combat.  Does your company have a good succession plan?  Who’s going to maintain your ultra cool application?

If you think Excel is good, check this out

No, this is not one of those “Hold my beer and watch this” moments.  Instead I’m going to list the ways Dodeca fixes the above problems.  I’ll end this post with just a list of what Dodeca can do for you with this post – the next one will dive deep into specific features.

Oh, and lest anyone with a reddened neck takes offense to the above link, let me tell you about my time in 4-H.  And the unpasteurized milk (how oh how did we survive?) we used to get from the beefalo that tasted like onions when she ate onion grass.  And all about the tour of Hatfield Quality Meats to see where our 4-H pigs and cows ended up.  That was certainly an education.  Now I know why you never name the animals you eat.  :)  In short, I may look like a geek, but I am from Pennsyltucky, and proud of it.

Okay, so a Yankee redneck (really just pinkish nowadays, I don’t even have a garden) is telling you to forget the beer, hold my coffee, and see how Dodeca solves the problems I listed above:

Distribution

Dodeca pushes Excel templates across the web.  If you’ve got Internet Explorer, you can use Dodeca.

Bulletproof

We’re talking Level IV, baby.  These reports can be just as protected as you like.  Or not.  The power is in your hands.  Did I mention this product is awesome?

POVs, dimensions, subsets of dimensions – these are all customizable and the Dodeca user can have just as much or as little control as you want.

Automation 

Logins, disconnects, multiple databases, user types, sends, calcs, dimension selectors (Ever write one of these?  Somewhat painful, isn’t it?) – anything you can think of, it’s already been thought of by Tim, et al., and frankly, it’s better than what you could do.  A painful blow to the ego for this particular programmer, but I have to bow to superior intellect and effort.  (Be honest, even if you thought you could write a better mousetrap, would you?  Really?  You have nothing else to do with your time?  Yes?  If so, I envy/pity you.)

Code

Nope, Tim, Amy, and the rest of the talented crew at AppliedOLAP wrote lots, and lots, and lots of code so that you can create template reporting systems with no code, unless you want to. 

There is an code framework called workbook scripts that allow you to customize behavior, and the entire product is extensible, but I’ll bet you never have call to go that far.  Unless you want to.  Again, I mention the awesomeness of Dodeca.  It is an implementer’s dream.

Excel Versions

Nope.  Did you miss the bit where it uses Excel templates but doesn’t use Excel?  Magical, isn’t it?

Hard to believe?

Are you a little scared of the time commitment to do all of this?  You shouldn’t be.  It’s still the same Excel templates that you know and love.  Incredible, isn’t it, because you aren’t using Excel one little bit when you’re in Dodeca.

Coming next time

So I’ve made big promises about what Dodeca can do, and why it’s the best Excel you’ll ever tie to Essbase.  Talk is cheap. 

The next post is going to provide a basic view of what Dodeca looks like from a developer’s perspective, how to hook it up to Essbase, and what simple template reports look like.

In the following posts we’ll dive down, down, down into the product and show you how you can make it sing.

This product is the best, and I’m determined to make sure that every Essbase hacker out there knows it, covets it, and implements it.  Thank goodness I don’t set unrealistic goals.  :)

Deaths on the Tracks

A week ago, early on a Tuesday morning, a 63 year old woman walked from her home in Norwalk, approached the Metro-North grade crossing at Commerce Street, lay down on the tracks and was killed by the oncoming train. Service was disrupted for hours.

Months before that a well dressed businessman slipped from a boarding bridge-plate platform and was killed by the approaching train. In his pocket was a pink-slip. Was he a victim or a suicide?

For whatever reason there has been a growing number of deaths along Metro-North tracks and precious little that can be done to stop them.

In Stamford station’s waiting room sits a large display for “Operation Lifesaver”, a national program to educate us of the dangers of walking or driving over railroad tracks. The message isn’t getting through.

On average, one American dies every two hours after being hit by a train. Two thirds of such victims are aged 18 – 34. And half of all car-train collisions occur at crossings with flashing lights or gates.

Fortunately, Connecticut has very few places where cars and trains cross paths. On the mainline, there are none. But on the New Canaan, Waterbury and Danbury branches there are many such crossings. Local neighbors know it because they hear engineers lean on their horns warning motorists, as if the flashing lights and gates were not enough.

In New Canaan, folks complained about the train horns and tried to get them silenced… a move about as stupid as those living near a firehouse complaining about the sirens.

But most recent deaths in Connecticut have not involved impatient motorists driving around gates, but pedestrians on the tracks.

Part of the problem is with recent immigrants in whose homelands walking alongside railroads is an accepted practice. Lacking good roads, track-walking is often the fastest way from point A to point B. There the trains are slow and noisy, affording plenty of time to get out of the way. But on Metro-North, our electric trains operate at 75 – 90 mph and are almost silent. These people never knew what hit them.

In another recent case, two people at a station realized they were on the wrong platform and jumped down to the tracks to get across, rather than use the pedestrian bridge. One of them made it but was unable to lift his girlfriend to safety before she was hit.

Once, waiting for a train in Darien, I saw a teen sit on the platform, his legs dangling over the edge. He figured he had 10 minutes before his train would arrive, little realizing that in just seconds an Amtrak express would come barreling thru at high speed. As the startled engineerleaned on his horn, the kid pulled his legs out of the way with seconds to spare.

My cynical side says this is Darwin in action: that these idiots need to be taken out of the gene pool. But then I think of the other victims in these incidents… not just the person who loses a limb or their life, but the railroad engineer who must watch it happen.

If you want to commit suicide, please do so by yourself and don’t inflict your pain on others. Suicide by rail is messy and not always quick.

Railroad engineers who see a person on the track can do almost nothing to avoid hitting them. A multi-ton train traveling at high speed has such momentum that it requires a mile to come to a full stop. So imagine how the engineer must feel just before the impact of their train on an errant car or pedestrian. Imagine the trauma they experience… the mental anguish for months or years, reliving that crash in their dreams.

We have warning stripes on platforms, flashing lights and gates at crossings for a reason. And yes, New Canaan, engineers sound their horns at such grade-crossings for reasons beyond just annoying you.

As they say in “Operation Lifesaver”, any time is train time. So please… stay off the tracks.

High Speed Rail... Really?

There’s been a lot of media hype and political hoopla of late about Connecticut receiving $40 million from the Feds for “high speed rail”. While any money spent on rail is great, let’s take a reality check.

That federal money (combined with $26 million from the state) is merely a small down-payment on an $880 million, five-year plan to bring just commuter rail service to the New Haven – Springfield corridor, a project on the CDOT planning board for more than a decade.. That first money will be spent adding a second track on a 10 mile stretch of existing rail between New Britain and Newington. That’s a good start, but the rest of the project is far from a sure thing. And it sure ain’t “high speed rail”.

Media reports that we’ll soon have 110 mph rail service to our capitol are folly because they assume our cash-strapped state will continue funding the other 90+% of the project.

Sure, commuter rail service along the I-91 corridor will be welcome. And it will undoubtedly have economic and development benefits. But will politicians please stop teasing us with images of bullet-trains and a one-hour, one-seat ride from Hartford to New York (115 miles)?

In recent years any number of would-be office-holders (federal and state) have called on me for briefings on how to fix our transportation mess. I’ve gladly talked with them all, Republican and Democrat, and given them a frank assessment of our situation. But when they start asking… “Why can’t we build a mag-lev down the middle of our interstates?” I start wondering if they’ve been smoking more than cigars.

We can’t adequately fund our existing Metro-North service, and our pols have questions about Disney-style monorails? Let’s look at the facts:

In 2003 Maryland looked at building a mag-lev system 39 miles from Baltimore to Washington and figured it would cost $4.9 billion to build and $53 million a year to operate. You can buy a heckuva lot of conventional rail equipment for that kind of money for such a short run.

Mag-lev may make sense running across the desert from LA to Vegas, but in dense, built up corridors like the Northeast, it’s a fantasy. We’re stuck with the tracks we have with a little straightening and maybe electrification.

What passes for “high speed rail” in the US is a joke by international standards. I love riding Acela, but its purported 150 mph speed is achieved only on a few miles of track in NJ and RI. In Connecticut, Acela maxes out at 90 mph, no faster than Metro-North. And the tilting mechanism on the train (designed to enhance speed) is disabled due to lack of clearance. Over its entire Washington to Boston run, Acela’s average speed just is 72 mph, slower than most cars.

Compare that with Japan’s Shinkansen which runs 185 mph, France’s TGV or the London – Paris Eurostar which do 200 mph. Now that’s high speed rail!

Hey, if we can actually build commuter rail north from New Haven running at 70 mph, I’ll be thrilled. But the project won’t be cheap and I doubt it can happen in this economy. And whatever does get built sure won’t be a bullet-train.