Oracle DRM Blog » Oracle Data Relationship Management

Tracking Changes – Revisited

Daniel — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:20:44 +0000

Having been writing for a little while and that’s because handling a new born takes up alot of time but hopefully in the near future this blog can be expanded to cover more diverse topics. We’ll see. Got an interesting email from S.Varshne below and we’re going to try to answer it. I do take our reader’s comments very seriously and a large percent of them gets replied. Oracle DRM continues to be one of the best Data Governance tool for Financial MDM out there in my opinion and no doubt tracking changes is important to the piece of the puzzle. There’re two different ways of tracking changes.

1. the native DRM log – this provides very detail for every action for every node
2. the less detailed DRM properties tracking the date/time of the most recent changes.

Let’s review the questions…

I tried what you suggested here in baby steps
- First enabled TrackChanges System preference
- Created a property called NodeChangedFlag (You mention in your article that I can pick and choose the preferences I want to use. So I leave out the rest)
- Updated the System preference NodeChangedProperty to point to NodeChangedFlag

Here are the error messages I see…
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© Daniel Poon for Oracle DRM Blog, 2009. | Permalink

New Features on Oracle® Hyperion Data Relationship Management, Fusion Edition 11.1.1

Daniel — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 21:16:49 +0000

Got a question today about the new features on Oracle Hyperion DRM v11. In terms of this new release to be honest, most of the features had been pretty much the same as version 9.3.2. So don’t expect anything dramatic. I was told by reps that the next release will evolve to something quite different. Time will tell.

On with the list of new features that I find useful:

Synchonize by Property – The Synchronize feature has been extended to enable easy searching across multiple hierarchies simultaneously based on any common property value. Relationships between nodes using a property value can be discovered and navigated without creation of a query resulting in higher productivity when browsing mapped nodes across multiple hierarchies. This feature is more a visual tool.

Migration Reports – Reports can now be generated from the Migration Utility to provide offline HTML documentation for metadata extract files that are used for migration or archival. These reports can provide users the ease of reference to information stored in the XML file and allow additional user notation to be included in the report to capture the intended purpose and usage of the file. In my previous blog entry, I have opted to use the XML export in conjunction with Excel to document DRM members and properties. No doubt this new feature could come in handy.

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Building Hierarchies with Automator

Daniel — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:19:36 +0000

Sorry folks I have not blogged for a while. And that’s because my lovely wife has given birth to our daughter and we had been quite busy and having lots of fun with her. Hopefully my schedule will also me to get back into some sort of cadence to update this. Also later on, I’ll look to expand the blog to a broader focus rather than MDM only.

While talking to many folks I came to realization that building hierarchies in DRM is still a mystery to some folks. And I apologize because I had previously attempted to address this with one of my invention which complements DRM to make hierarchy development even easier. But I probably should have gone back to the basics knowing not all our readers know how to create hierarchies using the native functionalities.

With today’s blog I just want to revisit the basic of creating a hierarchy using DRM Automator. I want to do that because I am assuming (do tell me if I am wrong) that you know how to add each parent or child member using the DRM GUI. But doing so will be extremely slow by hand. As a result, you’d want to be using the DRM Automator instead.

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Special Characters in Master Data Objects

Daniel — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 17:30:43 +0000

Data Relationship Management currently allows objects (e.g. DRM property name, Exports, Property Queries, etc.) to be created using special characters. Please be aware some of these characters can cause issues when using the system. Here’s some examples:

(comma) – Causes issues with comma-delimited lists. Besides objects, if you’re going to use Ancestor List, you will run into problems with the commas being the delimiter that will cause problems.

<>”‘=^ – Can cause issues with the Migration utility

(), – Can cause issues with the Formula parser

You should avoid creating object names that contain these characters where possible. As usual, just use something that’s simple such as alphanumeric plus hyphens perhaps, and you’ll be fine.

Special Characters in Master Data Objects is a post from: Oracle DRM Blog written by Daniel Poon. The use of this feed on websites other than danielpoon.com breaches copyright. Aggregator or re-blog prohibited unless you want to talk to our lawyers.

Automate a Parent-Child hierarchy build – Part 3

Daniel — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 05:42:44 +0000

In our quest to build a financial hierarchy, in the last blog entry, we taught you how to prepare a Parent-Child hierarchy and then using the Parent-Child Import Automator tool, we created the necessary DRM Automator script without even trying. This literally saves days of work. Imagine if you’re trying to develop 10 hierarchies (with 1,000 members each) in DRM as an example, you could literally accomplish all of it with the aid of this tool (end-to-end) in less than an hour (or two). If not, each hierarchy could take you a day to do. That’s a big difference.

Anyway, let’s move on and load the Automator script we created into Oracle Hyperion Data Relationship Management.
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Introduction to building a financial hierarchy in DRM – Part 2

Daniel — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 05:05:30 +0000

Apologize that I have been quite busy for the last few weeks. But thank you for all the support. I have getting pinged to provide some help in using the DRM Tools that I posted a while back. In addition, I am getting some great questions and solving them as soon as they come in. We’re on fire!!! Keep them coming, guys.

And with the latest ping from Ming, I decided to move on and continue this series of blogs aimed to demonstrate how you could be using Oracle Data Relationship Management in building out your hierarchies in minutes and not days — yes literally!

Back in August, I blogged about a tool that I have created on my own which helped me tremendously in developing hierarchies for a long time. The tool started out as a script that I used very often that I decided to make it web-based and generic enough for you to use. Once you start using it to build your 1st hierarchy, you’ll realize the power. Let’s start the tutorial…
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Documenting All Your Properties and DRM Formulas in Seconds

Daniel — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 21:40:23 +0000

One of the little known secret in the Oracle DRM 9.3.2 and after, as I have outlined in one of the previous post, is the migration utility. Sure you can understand from the name what this utility does, but today I am going to cover something it’s also good for – documenting what you did inside of DRM, especially with those several hundred properties that you’ve created.

After you bought Oracle Hyperion DRM, and used it to consolidate several of your silo hierarchies from a number of systems, you’re likely to have the need to start documenting them. One reason is for ease of administration. If you’re like me, created a lot of Properties inside of DRM for the purpose of storing information, and generating the necessary output, then these are good candidates for documentation for now and the future.

One of the biggest pet peeve I have before version 9.3.2, is that if I have these masses of Properties, I’d have no choice but to do cut and paste from the DRM Client into an Excel spreadsheet or Word. Besides the pain of going back and forth doing copy-n-paste with this method, you’re also likely to make mistakes. Of course, the biggest factor is that it’ll take alot of hours.
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Oracle® Hyperion Data Relationship Management, Fusion Edition Release 11.1.1

Daniel — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:54:55 +0000

The Hyperion Data Relationship Management, Fusion Edition Release 11.1.1 has now been released to the public, along with all the other Hyperion apps. One first glance, the name has gone even longer and the release version has gone up a bit more than a notch. Personally, I think it’s kind of funny that:

they skipped on version 10. Just like Hyperion skipped on System 8??? Maybe even numbers are not marketing friendly;
they release it under a dot release 11.1.1 as oppose to 11.0. Historically, some customers know not to touch a product when it’s on a “.0″ dot zero release, and wait for a later release. Maybe that’s why some of us can be really confused thinking the product is actually been patched a few times already; or stupid enough to think there were a “.0″ dot zero release. Of course I heard that Oracle wants to line up this release with the rest of the “11″ products but I am skeptical. OK…now here’s a run down…

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I found a bug!

Daniel — Mon, 19 May 2008 06:36:02 +0000

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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Virtualize MDM

Daniel — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 07:39:23 +0000

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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