Oracle DRM Blog » Tips ‘n’ Tricks

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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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.

VMWare: How to Optimize for Performance

Daniel — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:10:45 +0000

VMWare is a great technology where your one single PC can be virtualize into many, or run multiple OS, and a mix and match of these. Imagine your XP machine running Vista, Windows 2003 Server, and other hybrids like XP Media Edition without re-installing your machine from scratch. Now imagine you can run any one of these whenever you feel like needing it. It’s very simple yet powerful concept. I’s the concept of virtualization…

I have been playing with VMWare for over a year and it has helped me tremendously testing various technology. With my Quad Core system, it’s blazingly fast. Still, over time, the systems get very big — like installing Oracle Hyperion EPM 11.1.1. How often do we hear about complain on VMWare Slow Disk, VMWare Optimization, VMWare boost performance? Alot!!!

One of the most important tip I learnt is ensuring the disk is in good shape. It maybe painful but defraging your virtual OS’s hard disk is important. But the catch is you must do this in a number of steps:

1. Defrag your virtual OS hard disk using the native Disk Defragmenter under Start | Accessories | System Tools

3. Finally you need to do it on the host’s machine (the real OS not virtual) Disk Defragmenter.

These can take a long time to do but if you don’t it’ll be slow and you can see it when the CPU is not doing anything and yet the machine is halting. Also do the defrag before you do a snapshot because un-defragged disk are carried forward to the next snapshot (in VMWare Workstation).

There’s a couple of good resources online and I just want to share them here with you:

Enjoy!!!

VMWare: How to Optimize for Performance 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.

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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Tools you’ll need when using Oracle DRM – Part 1

Daniel — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 07:15:43 +0000

Good news, I have something really cool for you Essbase lovers in building your existing hierarchy into Oracle DRM, almost seamlessly. Many of us look to Oracle DRM to provide a facility to load our parent-child text file and import a hierarchy. Well it just doesn’t work that way. Oracle DRM has it’s own flat file format that’s not very common…I mean HFM or BPMA maybe the closest but still if you are working on a project and you have a simple CSV file, you’re out of luck. Be prepare for hours of programming or manual tweaking the file before it can be imported into Oracle DRM. Well now, here is a cool solution.
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Designing User Interface

Daniel — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 03:12:48 +0000

Application development has now becoming more and more complex than ever. In the old days, it’s one person hacking away. After months of effort you get yourself a lovely app. Maybe it has something to do with music, TV, movies or maybe do your taxes. Now-a-days these developments are done by teams of people. So even if you want to do everything, it’s always better to have team to do it because they get it, they’re committed and they really want to go off and do their next generation Turbo Tax project. If you happen to be the GUI / User Interface design guy, then this tip is for you.

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Remote Desktop Gives Blank Screen – Fixed!

Daniel — Tue, 20 May 2008 09:56:22 +0000

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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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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MDM Web Publisher Installation Woes

Daniel — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 01:54:45 +0000

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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Change your ASP for Oracle Hyperion DRM 9.3.2 Install

Daniel — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 07:20:38 +0000

If you’re installing the latest version of Oracle Hyperion DRM, you’ll note a couple of additions in the installation package. One of the package is the new ASP 2.0 and this is usually installed automatically when you’re installing the server. Now when you finished, you may hit an error trying to login (i.e. you can’t even login to the main tool). You can almost tear your hair out on this one trying to solve this. But there’s an easy answer.

I don’t know why but as it turned out, the install associates the new install with the old ASP 1.x that’s usually been installed from the past even though the new ASP 2.0 is now installed. What we need to do really is to set it active. So here’re the steps:
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