I saw a live demo of Oracle EPB, the new suite going to replace OFA.
Well I was really impressed, BUT in a negative way.
Unfortunatly EPB is offering much less of actual OFA functionalities
with MUCH MUCH less friendly interaction.
They claim to be 100% web, yesssssssss that's true but it acts as an
old fashioned web application. Unbelievable, Oracle has really been a
negative surprise.
Have you ever seen it? What's your impression?

Daniele

I used to head up product managment and product marketing for Oracle's
OLAP products including OFA. Clearly the focus for Oracle has been on
integrating the products into the Oracle stack rather than enhancing
the functionality. It's taken nine years to get to this point.

You might consider Applix TM1 as an alternative. TM1 has many of the
best features of Oracle's OLAP products (multicube, read-write,
financial modeling) without much of the baggage. In The OLAP Survey 3
by Nigel Pendse TM1 is ranked by users as the best performing product,
the best in goal achievement, and had the fastest implementation
times.

Dave Menninger
VP Marketing
Applix

I can vouch for TM1's capabilities as a nimble MOLAP engine. Also, TM1's
ETL tool is amazingly fast and supports ODBO. I have used it for the last 8
years in a variety of applications including as a transactional / workflow
marketing system which fed SAP R/3. I also had the opportunity to use OFA
briefly and
the three key differences were that OFA had more robust built-in reporting
which provided richer formatting options. On the flip side, TM1
consolidates changes
to the data instantaneously which is a huge plus in planning. The last
major difference was the fact that similar to Essbase, OFA allowed you to
input a value at different levels in a hierarchy (including consolidations).
In TM1, the values must be entered at the leaf or lowest level. There are
ways around that by creating an interface that displays the desired level
but sending the data to a lowest level element behind the scenes.

"Dave Menninger" <dmenninger (AT) applix (DOT) com> wrote

KJ

A minor corrrection re TM1


It is no longer the case that you can only enter at leaf level in TM1.
As far as planning goes the most significant development in TM1 over
the last 2 years has been the introduction of data spreading. This
means that you can now enter data at any level, so for example if my
bottom up sales budget comes to 99,045,123 and I need it to say
100,000,000, then I can enter this and have it pro-rated using
proportional spreading. It is lightning fast as well.

Ther are other spread methods as well, including the ability to enter
data for a large section of the cube based on another section (relative
proportional spreading).

Regards

John

--
John Hobson
The Planning Factory Ltd
www.planfact.co.uk


KJ wrote:

Daniel

I would encourage you to look at Microsoft SQL Server & Analysis Services as
a solution. Below is also an interesting thread that you may want to
consider. Please read the whole thread and then make your deductions.

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=e...+for+Planni n
g%22&btnG=Search

Regards
Howard.Taylor@ domain below
www.o2olap.com


"Dave Menninger" <dmenninger (AT) applix (DOT) com> wrote

Daniel

Sorry, forgot to add but you can spread your data on input as well within
Analysis Services. There are actually quite a few ways to achieve this.

Howard.Taylor@ domain
www.o2olap.com



"Howard Taylor [o2olap]" <a (AT) aa (DOT) com> wrote

Hi Howard
But spreading in MSAS isn't exactly "out of the box" is it?
Here are some quotes from an excellent article about write back and
data spreading by Eugene Asahara that can be found at
http://sqlserveradvisor.com/doc/06882
"Before you get started, I must issue a warning regarding updates.
There's a problem with OLAP that can render the write-back capabilities
awkward and, under some circumstances, useless. The problem is that you
can only apply updating to purely unaggregated leaf member cells. You
can't, for example, simply change the value of the "All" cell for sales
on a salesman dimension and expect each salesman (child member) to
individually reflect the increase/decrease."
Now Eugene thinks its easy enough to write the code to do this but has
serious doubts about applying it using MS Olap:
"Microsoft OLAP doesn't possess internal value allocation
functionality, so you have to write your own code to allocate
proportionate changes to the children of an updated aggregated cell.
But the problem isn't that this allocation code is hard to write. It's
that there can be so many children to update that it can't be done
within a real-time timeframe. ...Essentially, you should avoid changes
to high-level cells -- if cells are really high-level, you should
forbid changes."
He goes on to show the seven steps required to complete the process (as
a programmer not an end user). Easy? Well everything is relative, I
suppose. Take a look and see what you think. His example is very
specific and would take a bit of work to make it generalised so that it
worked on any enterable value in a cube like TM1's spreading does.
So, how do you make TM1 spread a value?
Enter new value to be spread followed by the letter "P", or use the
handy right click or menu bar options.
Of course you have to pay money for TM1 ;-)
Regards
John


Howard Taylor [o2olap] wrote:



--
John Hobson
The Planning Factory Ltd
www.planfact.co.uk

John

Spreading is not in the MS box, but it is within o2olap. o2olap allows for
spreading through a multidimensional cell, but this again is not the only
way to crack this nut. There are quite a few different options to achieve
this for the user depending on their requirements and needs. The video on
our website showed this in January 2003, and is still on there. When was
TM1's implementation of this feature?

Regards
Howard

"John Hobson" <jhobson.nospam (AT) planfact (DOT) co.uk> wrote

"Howard Taylor [o2olap]" <a (AT) aa (DOT) com> wrote


Hi

I have just looked at your video.

In your "Allocation" video you show unit sales data being allocated
across the four members of Africa and also the member "all Africa
data".

If you are allocating sales units as shown and there are only four
country members of Africa I don't understand why you are allocating to
the system generated "Africa data" member as well.

Olaf

Olaf

Please look at the web site videos carefully as they show the allocation
works correctly now. As I mentioned on the website, those videos were very
old, but showed what was possible at the time (January 2003). We
specifically had not renewed the videos, or placed new ones on our web site
because of companies like the ones you represent. Our product has moved on
significantly since this time.

Howard.Taylor@ domain below
www.o2olap.com


"Olaf the Olapman" <olaptopman (AT) yahoo (DOT) co.uk> wrote