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Monday, December 15, 2008

Essbase Interview Questions

Hi,

You may like to read my earlier post Hyperion Essbase Interview Questions.

Today I will be posting few more questions on Hyperion Essbase more from an Administrative perspective.
The questions and answers have been designed by me and are not copied from anywhere.

Que:1 What are LRO's( Linked Reporting Objects)?
Answer: They are specific objects like files, cell notes or URL's associated with specific data cells of Essbase database. You can link multiple objects to a single data cell. These linked objects are stored in the server. These LRO's can be exported or imported with the database for backup and migtarion activities.

Que:2 What are the specified roles other than Aministrator to view sessions, disconnect sessions or kill users requests for a particular application?
Answer: You should have the role of Application manager for the specified application.

Que:3 What are the three options specified in Username and Password management under security tab in Essbase server proprties.
Answer: 1. Login attempts allowed before username is disabled.
2. Number of inactive days before username is diabled.
3. Number of days before user must change password.

Que:4 Why do objects gets locked and when does this happens?
Answer: Objects gets locked to prevent users to make simultaneous and conflicting changes to Essbase database objects. By default whenever an object is accessed through Aministrative services console or Excel spreadsheet add-in, it gets locked.

Que: 5 I have created an application with one database in Essbase at test environment and now needs to copy the entire application with all security permissions to the production server which is not connected to the test server. How can I do that?
Answer: You can acheive this using migration wizard to migrate an application to a text file which you can take physically to the production server.
To know how you can do that, take a look at this post Essbase Application Migration.

Que:6 From the above question, When I migrated the application to the production server I do not see any data in the Essbase database. What has gone wrong and how to correct this?
Answer: Nothing has gone wrong. Migration utility does not migrate the actual data. If you want to copy the exact data from the test machine, get it exported using export utility and import it on production machine.

Que:7 Referring to the above question, Can I still do this if my production server and test server are two different operation systems. Explain.
Answer: While exporting the database, you can write the database data to an ASCII text file which enables you to load data on different platforms.

Que:8 How can we backup an aggregate storage database?
Answer: To back up an aggregate storage database, copy the application directory ARBORPATH/app/appname.

Que:9 How does Essbase recover from a database crash?
Answer: After a database crash or server interruption, Essbase automatically recovers a database after rolling back the transactions that were active at that time.

Que:10 How can you make a Max L script run at a specified time?
Answer: MaxL scripts can be called from a BAT file which is used for scheduling.

More questions will be coming soon...

Monday, November 10, 2008

Implementing Business Intelligence

Checklist for Implementing Business Intelligence-

If you are planning to implement a Business Intelligence solution there are a number of things to check before you decide on a solution.

1. Cost of the project: The cost of a project comprises of

(a) The cost of the product licenses.
(b) New hardware to be purchased for product installations.
(c) Any third party software to be purchased.
(d) Implementation cost including user’s trainings.
(e) Support and Maintenance cost.

It is very important to evaluate these costs before choosing a product. Certain tools may be cheap to buy but implementation and maintenance cost comes out very expensive.

2. Product’s Credibility: The product should be evaluated by considering the following-

(a) High Stability- The product should be matured enough being in the market for atleast 5 years. This is important as chances of bugs in the product are minimal, the product becomes stable. Couple of years back there were not many products in the market and the options were very less but now this is not the case.

(b) Completeness- The product should have a completeness considering all aspects of features. Some products may be very good in some aspects or features and in most of the sales demonstrations/POC’s they display those capabilities only and always try to avoid any discussion on weak points. Please ask questions as many as you can and also verify whether these capabilities/features are available out of the box functionality using wizards and drag and drop features or they just have workarounds using some code. The product should be a balanced mix of all the capabilities.

(c) Level of execution- Check whether the product can be executed for large number of users even if you have small numbers of users and how the product scales, handles high avalability, clustering environment etc.

(d) References- The product as well as the implementation partner should have good number of references where the product has been implemented sucessfully. Also check for the implementation partner's credibility, financial status and implementation capability.
---- more will follow

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Hyperion customer move to OBIEE

Hi,

I got this question from someone and I am really not getting any strong arguments for this.
The question is -
How would you convince a Hyperion customer so that he would get ready to move to OBIEE. What would be your key points?
Any suggestions?