Passing 300

It all began one summer

It seems so long ago (2,770 days or 396 weeks or 91 months or 7.6 years – but who’s counting?) that I first put pen to paper – Yes, I did.  Really.  I’ve now moved on to word processors for drafts and am thus so 21st century. – and started this blog.  And why the (re)counting?  Because this little corner of EPM inanity has hit 300 posts.  That’s an average of 39 posts of Stupid Programming Tricks, Compleat Idiot, Stupid Shared Services Tricks, Stupid Planning Tricks, and other sundry bits of EPM frivolity per year.  I pity you for reading this dreck.  Come to think of it, I pity myself for writing it at such a pace but on balance I think I feel worse for you.  

But it is a landmark of sorts and an opportunity to reflect on why this blog continues when so many contemporaneously launched blogs are moribund or nearly so.

So yes, 300 posts and yet some of you are still here.  Why?

Don’t know much about Essbase/PBCS/Planning/FDMEE/etc.

I seem to be forever chasing Oracle’s EPM seemingly ever-expanding products – how do I do X, how did someone else do Y (and how can I “borrow” their approach), why doesn’t that !@#$ing Z work?  Some of my fellow EPM practitioners seem to glide from tool to tool and solution to solution with nary a show of effort (Glenn, Celvin, TimG, TimT, Dino, and Pete I’m looking at each and every one of you.  With envy.).  I assure you that yr. most hmbl. & obt. svt never, ever, ever gets from A to B without a fair amount of pain.  Solving the problem is always fun, staring at it (best of course when in front of other people, the more senior the better) in complete incomprehension not so much.

So are you this?

Or this?

Everything I've Got Belongs To You

There are the greats in this industry – any industry really – and then there are the rest of us.  Is that so bad?  We’re not the smartest guys in the room but at least we get to be in the room.  Yes, I think I just insulted every one of you, Gentle Readers, but my point being that this blog’s primary purpose to help you and me get from A to B.  Maybe the fact that you read work-related blogs (obv. not just this one), read EPM books, follow EPM geeks on Twitter, and read and post on messageboards means that in fact you’re amongst the smart set.  Surely the smart ones use resources to solve their problems; surely the dumb ones don’t.  See?  I just rescued myself from having exactly zero readers.  Hopefully.

All kidding aside, this blog as it exists today would be pointless without you.  Thank you for putting up with what has been described as an idiosyncratic (read:  long winded with detours into obscurity) approach.  I hope you take the time to click on all of my laboriously-gathered links.  Goal one of this blog:  make you better EPM geeks.  Goal two of this blog:  make you all wish it was 1967 aka peak American popular culture as it’s a giant wasteland after that.  Let’s turn the clock back.  At least you’ll appreciate what your parents or grandparents (or in some cases great-grandparents) grooved to.

I’ve got your number

Google (Blogger and Google Analytics) is funny and by funny I mean inconsistent.

Here’s Blogger’s numbers:

Huzzah!  I’m closing in on a million page hits.

And then there’s Google Analytics:

Not-huzzah because it’s telling me that I’m closing in on half a million page views.  

It’s a riddle

A couple of interesting notes about the above:

1. People don’t read this blog around Christmas.  Not a huge surprise there.
2. My readership is going – slowly – down.  Why?

For the first, it’s nice to know that people have lives.

As for the decline (and it is real, alas) is I think based on two things:  number of posts per year (I hit my high in 2014 of 52 posts and readers vs. 40 the year after – less new content = less readers) and competition from other posts as well as Twitter and other social media.  I haven’t tried to count the number of EPM-related blogs extant today but it surely has to be about 50.  When I started it out the number was more like 10 although as noted most of those are dead, dead, dead.  YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are yet more avenues for those who want to learn.

Or this blog sucks and is getting worse all the time.  You decide.

Why shouldn’t I

I like to think that actually the blog is getting better.  I’ve purposely hit on a combination of series posts such as the Compleat Idiot series on Planning in the cloud, Programming Stupid Tricks for unrelated Essbase, Planning, whatever-they-are tips and tricks, and community outreach posts such as live (sort of) blogging of Kscope, OpenWorld, and now meetups.  

You may have noticed that I’ve switched to a longer and more in depth approach in my Compleat Idiot cloud series.  There’s an awful lot to learn about Oracle’s cloud products.  Lots of innovation, yes, but also lots of work learning the tools and then keeping up with them.  I can’t think of how to do this except through this detailed way as so much innovation is coming out of the movement to the cloud.  Love the cloud or loathe it, money is being poured into the products in a way that simply hasn’t existed before.  That means the products change and expand constantly and that likely means the Compleat Idiot series won’t either.  That also means my life won’t get a lot better because some of these posts are over 50 pages when written in Word.  Ouch for both you in the reading and me in the writing.

While solutions to problems are what we’re all after, there is more to life and a career than code.  I’ve used this blog as a soapbox to encourage you in the strongest terms to get involved with our little community.  As an example, my involvement with ODTUG has utterly transformed my professional and personal life.  If it happened to me, it can happen to you.  Grasp the ring.  Reach.  Blow your horn.

Where I can, I’ve tried to also impart what little wisdom I’ve picked up in 20+ years of consulting in a 25+ year EPM so-called career.  Sometimes I shake my head at the folly of others when it comes to solutions (hubristically complex), code (ugly, hardcoded, slow, wrong – sometimes all four at once), and even social interactions (Is there anyone more awkward than a geek?  Thought not.) and then realize that I almost certainly did the same thing at one point or another.  Smart people learn from others’ mistakes.  Think of this as a plea to be smart and occasionally listen to me as I’ve made every mistake there is.  

The other bit of advice I’d give you is don’t be afraid to be a contrarian.  That of course doesn’t mean you’re always right, but reflect on why people say what they say.  Is a technical recommendation for the good of customer or is for the benefit of the speaker?  Is product X the solution that everyone follows because a vendor is pushing it or would some other simpler and cheaper approach work just as well?  

In a word:

 

Try to See It My Way

Have I fulfilled this blog’s mission?  Here’s what I wrote on 10 May 2009:

What about the “hacking” in the name of this blog? Hacking can mean all sorts of bad things and that’s what villains do. Good hackers are more interested in taking an ordinary tool (but so cool) and doing out of the ordinary things in a geek chic way.

To that end, I’m going to try to share with you some of the dumb things I’ve done and how you don’t have to do them, how to make Essbase do things it “can’t” do, and generally make Essbase dance.

Lastly and most importantly, I’ll also share code/techniques/approaches. I welcome your comments (constructive please, I have an average ego and it is bruised when pummeled) and most of all your suggestions for improvements. I’ve never written a piece of code that hasn’t been improved through examination by a fresh set of eyes and as a consultant if I can’t fix where I wrote it, I’ll make it better next time.

And, despite the title of this web site, I won’t limit the scope of my postings to Essbase. I’ll include anything else that touches Essbase, from Planning to Dodeca, to who knows what.

That, for good or ill, is pretty much what this blog is all about.  Through the passage of time I’ve forgotten about “geek chic” and shall henceforth casually drop it into conversation.

All kidding aside, I’ve tried very hard to live up to my vision of education and outreach and I think on balance I’ve managed to do it.

Watch what happens

So where does this blog go from here?  Will there be another 300?  Will I lose my ever-lovin’ mind and actually do this again?  Maybe.

So long as I’m involved in this little industry, I feel I have no choice but to keep learning.  Whether that’s through this blog, speaking at conferences, writing books, or in some other completely-monetarily-uncompensated form, I’ll keep on learning and sharing.  One day, hopefully not too (actually, yes, hopefully given what that entails) long from now, I’ll retire and this blog will come to an end.  I’m not dead yet and I’ve got a lot of livin’ to do so expect more of Cameron in one form or another.

Because of you

So yes, this blog exists because I use it as a mechanism to teach myself but making it public with a readership that rounds down to zero would be pointless.  Thank you for your support, your comments and corrections, and your continued readership.

Call me

Want to see a topic?  Have a question (hopefully) answered?  You can reach me care of this blog or via Twitter or via LinkedIn or reach out to me in person at meetups, Kscope, and Open World.

Be seeing you.

AppMan is dead, but should it live on?

Nostalgia or functionality?

If you’ve ever seen this:

Then you’ve certainly used this:

What is that?  This refugee from the 1990s is none other than Esbase Application Manager aka AppMan.  I am guessing that most extant EPM practitioners today came to Essbase post 7.x, but if you were around before that, this will be a tool you know, love, and probably miss quite a bit.

As I wrote before, my Ride or Die Girl, Kscope15 conference chairwoman, @EssbaseLady, also known as Natalie Delemar said, “What?  I want that!” when she saw a screen snapshot (literally, I held a camera up to the screen of Someone Else’s Laptop and took a picture) of Essbase Application Manager.

AppMan is so loved there are copies of AppMan binaries floating around out there that people trade like samisdat books.  Does anyone pass around obsolete versions of EssCmd?  (Okay, it’s still there in the product, but does anyone actually even notice it?)  There’s something about AppMan that speaks to Essbase geeks.  What is it?

Getting under the skin

Does Oracle read this blog?  Google Analytics says, “Yes”.  I can’t tell who, but this gives me a hint:

I’m taking that as a request from product management (could be development, could be a consultant, could be someone completely-not-from-Oracle) to provide feedback.  

AppMan isn’t coming back, but Essbase as a Service (EaaS) is on its way, and we know that EAS isn’t going to be the interface.  It’s still early days for EaaS and its developer interface – this is our collective chance to let Oracle know what we need.

Let’s do some research

I have an (un)lucky group of fellow geeks that I reach out to when I either have an appallingly stupid thought fantastic idea/cannot for the life of me figure out the most basic of tasks have a question for the Best and Brightest.

Having seen the above comment to last Kscope15 blog post, I asked this question:

What should that interface have that EAS doesn't have?  What new features should it have?  How will developers love EaaS' interface?

 

Here are the responses:

• General use of and integration with Windows
• Copy and paste from and to Excel
• Opening an outline file without being logged in – great for disconnected times like on an airplane.
• Faster and reliable copy and paste within the outline
• Simple and easy to install
• Multi select members and change any/all attributes (UDAs, Unary Operators, Attribute assignment, etc.)

Here’s a particularly cogent comment:

I don’t have too much more to add here. I think others said it best in regard to general look and feel, and usability; and the use of standard windows features! Seems like anything web enabled in Oracle stack is cumbersome and takes a year to render/repaint (including EAS) – but I guess that can be/is environment specific? On a side note…. I am shocked that there are this many old-timers on your list that even remember AppMgr. I truly had forgotten it. Loved the tool. And loved the thread.

Aw shucks on the last bit, but the person who wrote that is particularly thoughtful.

Now it’s your turn

The past is another country but EaaS is the future; what comes to EaaS will come to on-premises.  What do you want to see in the EaaS console?  What do you need?  What do you think is likely?  Can we ever get back to the ease of integration of AppMan?

Microsoft is a direct competitor of Oracle in many ways – I am happy to relate that Oracle kicks MS’ butt in the EPM/BI world.  One thing they do right is focus on the developer experience.  Talk to a .NET developer and he’ll wax poetic about the IDE, the tools, and life in the MS universe in general.  

Why can’t Essbase be the same way?

Use the comments section of this blog, please, to voice your opinion.  If Oracle reads this blog for something more than the amusement factor (although that may in fact be the only reason), your comments have a direct line to the people that decide what EaaS will look like from a developer perspective.  

Comment, won’t you?

Be seeing you.

Kscope 15 days 4 and 5

The day after the night before

I’m going to try to do this in sequential order with some description of the many pictures.  It’s not that I’m lazy, it’s just that I’m so tired it’s not (actually it is) funny.

And with that…

Day 5, Wednesday, June 24 June

AppMan lives!

Proof that a tight integration with Windows cannot be beat.  I don’t think given Oracle’s announcement of Essbase as a Service (Eaas) we’re going to see a return to the Windows development world, but a man can hope.

Really, I miss this thing, and so do many others.  My Ride or Die Girl, Kscope15 conference chairwoman, @EssbaseLady, also known as Natalie Delemar said, “What?  I want that!”  It’s like the Soviet samisdat only for software.

Women In Technology luncheon

Also put together by Natalie as part of her commitment to ODTUG.  (Question:  How does she get by with being a mother, an E&Y Senior Manager, and ODTUG superstar all at the same time?  Discuss.) it was a lot of fun and I didn’t feel the least bit intimidated in being one of the few men.  I never quite understand why my fellow male geeks tread so carefully around subjects like this.  It wasn’t a hanging party for men, it was a chance to discuss what it’s like for women to work and lead in technology.  The reason men were invited to this session was for both to hear a woman’s perspective on work and life and to return the favor with our thoughts.  I think it was a smashing success.

Dudes, time to man up and come next year, it’ll add so much more to  your machismo(and we know of course no one can hear you over your present level of awesomeness; imagine the heights you will achive next year through this meeting alone), grow hair on your chest, and make you even more of a manly man with massive rippling muscles.  And yes, that was a pretty awful attempt at humor, but my fellow X and Y chromosone humans ought to sign up for this at Kscope16 .  The world is composed of both men and women, we both have perspectives to share, and I found it instructive; you would too.

 

Here’s Natalie in her element kicking the event off:

William Hodges presenting on Groovy

Fellow Developing Essbase Applications:  Hybrid Techniques and Practices William Hodges is on stage, Tim German is watching with rapt attention which is more than I can say he did when I was copresenting with him, cf. my last blog post.  TimG, I kid, I kid; you were merely waiting for the awfulness that was my part of the prsentation to finish.

The Wednesday night entertainment

The madness, the madness.  It really was pretty good.

Waiting to greet Kscope attendees to the White Party

The madness begins with fellow board members Dave Schliess, Tim Tow, and Monty Latiolais.

Mia Urman, my Thought Leader and her husband

Mia and I seemingly disagreed with just about everything (well, not everything, but an awful lot of subjects) in her first year on the board.  I have seen the light and now (mostly) agree with her.  I think I just had to catch up to her Awesomeness.  Really, she is pretty awesome and is full of fantastic ideas.  

Did I mention that she really knows how to party?  Oh yes she does.

He lives, he lives, he really lives

Can you guess That Man?  No, not the idiot on the right, the one on the left.  He turns out to not be an army of autonomous robots.  More’s the pity as now my OTN humiliation is complete.

The party is about to begin

OMG, it’s so cool.

Can geeks party?  Oh yes they can

Wait, wait, who is that I see?

Amazingly, it’s my friend and fellow presenter, Tim German.  Tim, we never thought we’d live to see the day.

Was there an after party?  Yup

On the way to South Beach’s Mansion.  We owned that club.  Yes, we ODTUGers did just that.  I’m not sure the club staff will ever get over it.

Opal Alapat dancing on top of a couch

Opal is like Spock’s human counterpart:  so serious, so logical, so smart.  If she could do the Vulcan neck pinch, I’d know she did come from a planet with two suns.  And then you get her dancing and she loses all control.  Awesome, but that preculdes her Vulcanness.

Somewhere on the Twitterverse there is a picture of yr. obt. svt. dancing on top of a table.  Yes, really.  And with only three drinks in me I’m not sure there’s any excuse.

Did someone order drinks?

Or a fire?

Are we not awesome?

It is just possible.

Jessica Cordova getting down

Does that term date me?  Quite likely.
  

Update -- I just had a text conversation with Jessica and the comment on my part is completely incomprehensible to her.  Unfortunately, this means it isn't a joke at all so for those of you who did not have older siblings in the 1970s, the definition is here and it means to dance.  The inimitable James Brown said it best.

Thursday, 25 June

Does anyone look like they are a wee bit tired?  Thursday was the first day I could eat breakfast.  No, not because of a Technicolor Yawn on yr. obt. svt.’s part but because this was the first day I wasn’t 100% booked.  I like Mojo Bars best both for insanely-stupid levels of busyness as well as hiking.  Peanut protein and lots of sugar – what’s not to like?

I cannot exactly remember what I ate as I was a little tired having gone to bed at 3 am and up at 6:30.

Essbase Deep Dive

Here’s 2/3 of the room filling up.  I guesstimate we had about 150 people.

And the distinguished panel

In order from left to right: Steve Liebermensch, Gabby Rubin, and MMIC aka Glenn Schwartzberg.  These Thursday events are an unprecedented opportunity to ask anything, I mean anything, of the product managers that drive the tools we love.

They didn’t make too much fun of me when I called this the Eeeeeessssssbaaaassssseeee Deep Dive session.  Lack of sleep/profound stupidity made me do it.  All sort of kidding aside, I had a pretty difficult time speaking and definitely a large dollop of difficulty in thinking coherent thoughts, let alone moderating the session.

The closing session

A full house; I believe that is the back of Joe Aultman’s head.

Natalie and ODTUG President and Monty Latiolais winding up the conference

Unfortunately this is the end of what is really the best conference I have ever been to, bar none.

Some thougts on Kscope15

Kscope is the yearly highlight of my professinoal life as it is for many others.  I agonize over content from the selection process through my own sessions; hopefully some of what I and many others do helps make that happen for all of the attendees.

Kscope has no counterpart in the Oracle world.  The passion, the knowledge, the people all make Kscope a unique event and one that I love.

ODTUG is responsible in many ways for what I am today professionally and even a large component of who I am as a person.  The spirit of generosity in sharing knowledge, the passion in our work, the people who I call friends who I would never have met otherwise, the investment in and giving back to the community that ODTUG fosters; all of it has profoundly touched many others and me.

I’m really and for true getting misty eyed over writing the above.

Be seeing you.