Common Essbase Admin Tasks

Good evenning Folks.

Today we discuss about common admin tasks we encounter during typical work day of an essbase administrator.

• Every morning I check status of my Nightly cycle. Nighty cycle is an automation process which builds my hierarchy, clears data, loads data and runs all aggregation and different business logic calc scripts and completes backup.
• Nigthly cycle is my full load. However I also do incremental data load and check the status of the incremental load and check to see if there are any errors or rejects.
• Database Health: Check to see the fragmentation ratio and if it is more than 50 % framented and calc scripts were taking awfull lot of time, then I will initiate dense restructure (which removes fragmentation) that night. Generally dense restructures were not done during week days. Only exceptional cases are entertained.
• As part of nightly cycle my main cube also feeds data to reporting cube. I use dataexport command to export and outline extractor combined with HAL (Hyperion Application Link) to export and format metadata.
• We schedule all the jobs using windows scheduler and automation was done using windows batch files.
• If the calcs are running slow, we check how much database was fragmented, size data cache, outline order etc.
• If Data cache is full, we need to increase the size of data cache. After increasing the size, database needs to be started for it to take effect.
• Stopping and starting database in the nightly cycle is also good practice. It removes cache build up.
• If the database is corrupt or atleast we have a suspicion that database is corrupt we use VALIDATE command in ESSCMD.
• If the database is corrupt we can restore database from backup (discussed in backup post).
• Sometimes essbase service won't start eventhough we start it manually. This is because of any idle process running before essbase went down. Those orphanned (Idle) process won't allow essbase service to start. I use windows process explorer (tool from Microsoft, just like task manager) to kill those idle processes and restart essbase.