Oracle DRM Blog

I have been busy on several projects and will be doing some catch up on blogging really soon. Having said that, the DRM tools section on this web site had been upgraded. I can’t tell you how many hours I have saved using this over the past few weeks. So just to let you know, it’s not there to look pretty. I actually use it.

Some interesting design questions I got over the past few weeks…
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After some hiccups (but nothing can’t be fixed with a phone call), my Metalink account has been setup. And so I browsed through the knowledgebase to see how much stuff is in here.
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Oracle has finally decided to move eSupport of Hyperion products to the new Metalink 3, looks pretty nice. From personal experience, Metalink appears to have a wealth of information, a established knowledgebase. What’s not easy at the moment is that rarely do resolution of issues published anywhere, and they’re definitely not in the existing knowledgebase. You ended up having to call support for anything. Thus, we have this website to discuss some of the challenges. Hopefully Metalink 3 will be a ton better.

For more info about the transition, you can visit: http://www.oracle.com/support/hyperion-support-transition.html

Thought I’ll just have a quick blog on some of the questions I got over the past few days… Hopefully I have answered your questions, keep them coming.

• Oh yes I know, how can anyone find anything called DRM on the web? Digital Rights Management, Digital Restrictions Management, Data Reference Model, Data Resources Manager, Data Relationship Management. I hear you, maybe marketing can come up with a better name.
• Master Data Management is much more than a silo technology solution, it requires an ecosystem of technologies and processes to make it work. For example, we used to have hierarchies stored in Oracle 11i ERP and another set sitting inside Essbase cubes, that won’t work very well. The key is to make the relevant systems work together.
• SOA is a good question. Everyone is talking about it but my take is that SOA is still a buzz word. The service piece is often undefined. It’s one thing to talk about making RSS feed out of XML through a database and calling it a web service. It’s another defining real business processes that interacts between human and technology. It involves workflow, SOA and other glues. Fortunately, the glues are slowly maturing though there’s still alot being done in the custom, than the pre-build world. A real example is also quite a few MDM solution preaches SOA, they rarely provide a ready-to-go solution to work with the target system. You ended up having more system integrators working for the problem.

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If you use Remote Desktop Connection on Windows, you’d probably encounter this once in a while. But this problem has plagued me several times and the usual quick fix “rebooting the server” or asking for DBA help seemed over-consuming and stupid in my opinion. Who’s want to reboot a server every time you get a blank login screen. But this is perhaps one of the most annoying thing. I want to find a fix and I want to do it without disrupting the server or your DBA. Here’s the fix:
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Oracle DRM / Hyperion DRM is a pretty good product. It’s mature, it’s flexible and it kicks ass. If you’ve worked with Essbase Outline Editor, it’s the smarter cousin it never had. If you’ve worked with Hyperion Business Performance Architect (BPA), it has much less issues or bugs. Let’s face it, every software product has bugs or opportunities to be better (I like that!). Last week though I managed to find a bug in DRM, reported it and got it confirmed that it’d be fixed. I have not been able to do this for a while and secretly I am rejoicing…yeah I found a real bug. Maybe I have not worked hard at it before or hadn’t the need for it. I’d rather have a bug-free product than sending bug reports everyday don’t you think? I have to praise their support and dev team here because they’re probably one of the most responsive team I have worked with (Thanks Michael for taking my call and my beatings tirelessly). Anyway, let’s get on with it.
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The MDM Institute has posted a page about Oracle Hyperion DRM 9.3. Here’s what they say about the strengths:

• Analytical MDM for sharing dimensions, hierarchies, & reporting
• Operational MDM (Ledger Hub) for cost centres, legal entities, etc.
• Mature product (due to Razza acquisition)
• Hierarchy management
• Robust business rules engine Intuitive change mgmt suitable for business users
• Strength in both financials & Financial Services industry
• Integration with Hyperion corporate performance management apps & others
• Potential registry-style offering in MDM family
• Potential strategic technology … potential to provide hierarchical unification across CDH & UCM (as well as IBM, SAP, & others)

Here’re 2 points about weakness I could not understand…
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One of the growing movement in Corporate or Home environment is the use of virtualization. Virtualization is a broad term that refers to the abstraction of computer resources. Virtualization hides the physical characteristics of computing resources from their users, be they applications, or end users. This includes making a single physical resource (such as a server, an operating systemorage device, an application, or st) appear to function as multiple virtual resources; it can also include making multiple physical resources (such as storage devices or servers) appear as a single virtual resource.

VMware is a company that produces virtualization products such as VMware Workstation. This software suite allows users to run multiple instances of x86 or x86-64 -compatible operating systems on a single physical PC.

The Oracle Hyperion DRM can also be run under a virtualized environment. See below for a screenshot.
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Heard from a colleague that on a project she’s on which the team has gone under tremendous stress that within the same week, she saw one lady was having a nose bleed while doing some data profiling work, one guy ran outside during a meeting because of chest pain, and another girl crying in the midst of a conversation.

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Trying to install the Oracle Hyperion Data Relationship Management Web Publisher (what a mouth full) today, and gosh, this definitely wasn’t the most straight forward install in the DRM suite. One of the step in the process requires setting up the MS IIS anonymous user and then defining this user to be able to access the server folder ‘mdm_web’ (under c:\Inetpub). The anonymous user is usually automatically setup when MS IIS is first installed. This user is usually named ‘IUSER_machinename’ and ‘IWAM_machinename’. And IIS would assign a random password to it. Now when you want to enable access for a new user to a folder, you will need to specify the username and password of this user. And that’s the problem! How do you know the password of something you didn’t create in the first place (the anonymous account), and that the password is generated randomly? Anyway, after some digging, here’s the solution.
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