Quick Review Of HFM Patch Set Update 11.1.2.4.200

Oracle has released another big PSU to HFM 11.1.2.4. This one has been in the works for a long time so I was eager to test the update ASAP even though I'm still jet-lagged after returning from a two-week vacation in the Far East.

Version number reads "Oracle Hyperion Financial Management, Fusion Edition - 11.1.2.4.200.5149"

New Features

Let's start with the most interesting bits. The list of new features included in the readme file is long but slightly misleading... Most of the "new" functions have already been included in PSU .100 and just listed again as this is a cumulative patch. Read on to find out what actually is new in this Patch Set Update.


Charts
Data on HFM web forms, grids and Process Control views can now be viewed in chart form. This functionality is accessed by clicking a new button in the form/grid toolbar as shown below. A menu will appear with options for showing the default table view, a chart or both of them side by side.

Below you can see a web grid from the Comma application turned into a column chart.

Web grid and chart shown together using the "Both" option:

The chart options can be saved in web form scripts so that they are applied every time the form is opened. Without these options the forms will still default to the old table-style view.

Rules Profiling
HFM rules include new profiling functionality that helps application developers fine-tune their code.

Enabling rule profiling makes HFM collect statistics about the primary rule functions (calculate, translate, consolidate). Storing this data may affect application performance which is why it's not recommended to enable the feature in production use.

Each action such as calculation or consolidation is stored as a separate "session" that can be inspected later. Rules View can be used to display the time spent calculating, translating or consolidating each entity.

Entity View shows a diagram of the consolidated hierarchy with colored bars representing the calculation phases.

The data required for generating the profiling statistics is stored in four new tables in the HFM database:

• HFM_RULES_PROFILE_DETAILS
• HFM_RULES_PROFILE_SUMMARY
• HFM_RULES_PROFILE_RVIEW
• HFM_RULES_PROFILE_EVIEW

Duplicate Applications
The web-based Copy Application feature present in PSU .102+ has now been renamed to "Duplicate Application". The functionality is still identical which means that applications can only be copied inside the current HFM environment.

Update: Note that you still need to give the SYSADMIN role to the EPM database user in order to make application copies work on MS SQL. This is mentioned in the readme as known issue #21032270.

Import Application
It has been rumored that a new web-based tool would be introduced to replace the old Copy Application utility that is no more provided with release 11.1.2.4. This PSU adds a tool called Import Application with the following description in the readme file:

"You can import an application across databases or across EPM systems. Both EPM systems should use Oracle DB or SQL Server."

The Import Application panel can be found on the Consolidation Administration tab.

Update: For some reason the Source Application menu was not populated even when selecting the primary HFM database. I had to struggle with this for quite a while but I managed to get the feature working after manually adding some missing stored procedures that HFM was attempting to use. (see the script SQL_Server_Create_ImportApp_sprocs.sql that comes with the PSU). The Import Application process seems to rely on the Linked Server feature in SQL Server so I assume that remote servers can be added on the SQL Server's side (and possibly using database links in the case of an Oracle database).

To avoid the error "Server 'MYSERVER' is not configured for DATA ACCESS" you need to enable the data access option for the Source SQL database. Please note that this is something I came up with myself and the Official Oracle Way might be different. You might want to wait until Oracle comes up with proper documentation for the PSU before attempting to use the Import Application feature.

EXEC sp_serveroption 'MYSERVER', 'DATA ACCESS', TRUE

With the aforementioned tweaks I could copy HFM applications without issues. My colleague Abdelmajid Makrani also confirmed that he was able to connect to a remote SQL Server after adding it as a linked server in SQL Management Studio first.

HFM Insights
This feature has been advertised as being available on Oracle Exalytics only so I was surprised to see it popping up on my Windows-based sandbox installation. Insights is a dashboard view that provides statistics about HFM system status. The view can be customized to show desired metrics such as CPU and memory usage.

More details can be found by clicking each applications's icon. The page can be set to refresh automatically to display a continuously updated dashboard.

The Insights feature looks like a nice addition to HFM administrators' toolset but I hope that its availability for non-Exalytics deployments will be clarified soon.

Bugfixes

There is a huge number of fixes listed in the Defects Fixed section of the readme file (ca. 110 new fixes in total!). A lot of work seems to have been done to make this PSU fix the instability issues that some customers have encountered even after applying all the previous ones. But as usual, it's recommended to apply the patch in a lesser environment (DEV/Test) first and proceed to patch Production only after thorough testing.

Patch Information

Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) Patch Set Update 11.1.2.4.200 (patch nr. 21225611)

• Readme file (on Oracle Support - requires login)
• Full patch details & download page on Oracle Support
• Updated documentation on the Oracle Help Center website (scroll down to the separate section for Financial Management 11.1.2.4.200)

The prerequisites for PSU .200 are more or less the same compared to .100/101/etc. - that is, the same FMW and ADF patches. Make sure you run the SQL scripts that are required to create the tables used by the new features!