ERPI - Overview

What is ERPI?

Oracle provides a nice wrapper layer called ERPI (ERP Integrator) designed to allow easy access to low-level utilities such as ODI for the specific purpose of importing and exporting data into and out of Hyperion. It is predicated on having the low-level layer configured and, as such, does not replace the need for the utilities at that layer. But it does do a nice job of consolidating the functionality into one user interface.

Oracle's documentation for ERPI states the following as the intended use of the product -

• Integrate metadata and data from an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) source system into an Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) target application.
• Drill through from the EPM target application and view data in the ERP source system.
• Write-back budget data to the source system from any Oracle Hyperion Planning, Oracle Essbase ASO, or Essbase BSO application.

How Is It Accessed?

ERPI is part of the Hyperion Workspace and can be accessed by traversing the following menu path:

Navigate->Administer->ERP Integrator

More Reading

Full documentation on the ERPI product is available from Oracle here for version 11.1.2.1 and 11.1.2.2.

Clearing Blocks in a Reporting Application

One thing I'm learning about Hyperion is there seems to always be options on how to accomplish a task. But there is also usually a "best" choice that emerges. Sometimes, what appear to be options won't actually work given your setup. So, experimentation is the name of the game.

Since I am new to Hyperion, what you read in these posts may or may not be the best way to go about tackling a given problem. I will do my best to circle back and update posts if I find a better way of performing a given task. But the only way to get started is to pick a path and give it a whirl. So, here we go!

Our Development Train is Off the Tracks. Now What? (Part One)

About the Environment

Our organization is relatively new to the Hyperion world and we are still figuring out how all the dials and levers work. Our implementation consists of two environments -- one for development/experimentation and one for production. We are running version 11.1.2.1 of Hyperion on Windows 2008 servers as the Essbase hosts, accessing Oracle RDBMS on Linux servers for the relational components of Hyperion.

It All Goes Wrong

A while back I wanted to create a new application in our development environment to do some experimentation. I made a crucial mistake when establishing the data source that has caused our development environment to be broken ever since. I did not realize that each data source must have a unique schema in the Oracle repository. "Sharing" a schema (user) with another application will hopelessly confuse Hyperion and all sorts of erratic behavior will result!

And so, having clobbered the development repository, I have been trying several different actions to recover the environment. Being a non-production environment, we do not have regularly-scheduled backups for me to roll back to. Not knowing I was clobbering anything with this data source setup step, I also did not initiate a backup. And so, here I sit, with a broken-down environment. Woe is me.

Up Next

In part two of this saga, I'll delve a little into what has been done so far to try to recover from this mess.