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Cris Dunn

Cris Dunn is the manager of Perficient's EPM SupportNet practice which provides direct support for applications and infrastructure surrounding many organizations' EPM software implementations. He is also an Oracle University certified instructor and teaches everything around Essbase as well as the EPM installation and configuration classes. When he is not working, you will find Cris engaged in His church serving as the treasurer, musician, nursery worker, and, when necessary, toilet scrubber.

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Blogs from this Author

Build a Home Server Lab on a Budget

For years, I have used either Oracle Virtual Box or VMWare Workstation for creating test servers so I could spend quality time with new versions of the Oracle EPM software.  This has required me to maintain a rather expensive and bulky workstation class laptop.  A high-end laptop capable of running a virtual machine with 4 […]

Oracle Hyperion Planning 11.1.2 Installation & Configuration

At the end of this month, I’ll be teaching the Planning 11.1.2 Install and Configuration Oracle University course in the near future. In this course, you learn about the processes involved in installing, configuring, testing, and maintaining Planning. You learn about the layers in the Enterprise Performance Management System infrastructure. Discussions include planning the installation, […]

Oracle Hyperion Installation and Configuration Class

In spite of the push by vendors to move to cloud based applications, many organizations are still installing software in their own data centers. Oracle University offers a couple great classes on the Oracle Hyperion infrastructure, specifically for installation and configuration of Oracle Hyperion Financial Management and Oracle Hyperion Planning.  Both of these classes provide […]

Surgical Essbase Recovery: How To Back Up Your Essbase Data

Recovery of data in Essbase is sometimes confusing and time consuming depending on the type and frequency of backups previously taken. In this article, I’ll give you an idea of how you can back up your Essbase data for the purpose of restoring a slice of the database. Scenario: I am running a daily export […]

A Solution to Essbase Security File Backups

Essbase does its best to be friendly to us system admin types, but sometimes I just want to scratch my head in bewilderment. In 11.1.2.3 and later, Essbase performs a backup of the Essbase.sec file every 300 seconds and retains a default of two backups. This means that at any given time, you have two […]

Why Smart View Users are Receiving Invalid Session Error

At some point in working in Smart View, you might have received an “invalid session” error. This is a generic error, and it may occur due to any of the following reasons: Timeout issues with Internet Explorer EXCEL incompatibility with smart view versions.  This is becoming increasingly more common for organizations upgrading Office to 2013. […]

How To Speed Up Your Essbase Database Restructure

In Essbase 11.1.2.2, Oracle added a configuration option to improve the performance of Essbase Block Storage database restructures. RESTRUCTURETHREADS is a setting you can add to your Essbase.cfg file to enable parallel restructure of BSO databases. The proper syntax taken from the Essbase Technical Reference is: RESTRUCTURETHREADS [ appname [ dbname] ] n Application and […]

Hyperion Planning – Essbase Exception – Cannot Restructure

Occasionally, I see a friendly error when attempting to refresh or deploy a Planning application that indicates there are active users on the Essbase application. This error is often adjacent to the error, “Date &Time]Starting Cube Create/Refresh…[Date &time]: Cannot restructure. There are other active users on database [%s] [Date&tim]: An Exception occurred during Application deployment.: […]

3 Must-See Gems of Information on Oracle Hyperion EPM

While poking around the infoverse early this AM, I came across several little gems of information for Oracle EPM folks that you may be interested in. The Oracle Learning Library is pretty vast. One recent addition is a video titled, “Exporting Financial Management Data into Essbase Using Data Management.” Here’s a URL that “shortcuts” to […]

Surgical Essbase Data Recovery

Recovery of data in Essbase is sometimes confusing and time consuming depending on the type and frequency of backups previously taken. In this short article, I’ll give you an idea of how you can restore a slice of data based on the most famous Essbase backup, THE DATA EXPORT.  I’m assuming that you know how […]

Essbase Calc Syntax to SQL Comparison

Many folks have a bit of trouble getting their arms around the Essbase Block Storage Calculation Script syntax – especially if they have spent time previously working in relational databases. Essbase BSO calculation syntax looks nothing like structured query language. In the Essbase Bootcamp and the Essbase Calculations for Block Storage Databases classes, I will […]

What are the HFM services and which ones should be running?

I am often asked which HFM services should be running in a given Oracle EPM environment.  Below are descriptions taken from the Oracle installation documentation for each of the four HFM services.  The last column depicts when these services should be running. Service Name Service Display Name Description Requirement Hyperion S9 Financial Management Service Hyperion […]

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