Been a long time between posts

Wow, it has been a long time between posts. It's not that I haven't wanted to but it just seems things have been so busy lately. I am living the cliche "do more with less". Actually it's just do more with what you got and more and more and more. Oh well, not that I'm complaining. Anyway it seems like Kaleidoscope is coming around the corner soon and that usually gets me to dust off my blog as I get excited about attending. This year will be particularly important to me since I had to miss last year when I had to cancel at the last minute due to personal reasons. I'm sorry to anyone who was planning to see my presentation, I made a point of forwarding all of my content and I know my session wasn't canceled, a fill in speaker took the slot for me and presented my material, so hopefully that made up for my last minute drop out. This year will hopefully not see anything unexpected. I'm working on a very cool MDX presentation for administrators. Two years ago at Kaleidoscope I was co-presenting an MDX presentation with Mike Nader. IN the banter back and forth some questions came up about how much could we really use MDX as a query language. We get that we use it for member formulas but as a stand alone query language how much would we use it? Essbase users are spoiled with our rockin addin and the idea of actually having to code our queries seems like a step backwards to us. Still you can do some pretty cool things with MDX and one thing in particular that came up was when I mentioned that as an admin, MDX had some great functionality for querying the member outline and understanding things about your dimensions and members. It got me thinking that it would make a pretty cool session. So this year that is what people who attend my session will get. I'm going to explore the ways you can use MDX as an administrator to understand your outline. We'll start off simple by returning members of a dimension, then looking at how to pull children or descendants. We'll go through how to pull a list of members with a particular attribute or UDA. Maybe you want to find all members with a member formula or count how many level 0 members you have in a particular dimension. I plan to have a lot of sample code which attendees will be able to take back and use in their own shops. And since MDX can query both BSO and ASO cubes, I'm going to show people how to run an MDX query that will guide them towards optimizing their BSO outlines when ordering their sparse dimensions.
Beyond my presentation, which should be enough to make anyone want to attend :) there are looking to be some amazing presentations this year. Kaleidoscope has grown considerably, there will be more Oracle presence, a larger variety of vendors and partners, the hands on labs are going to be awesome and the usual fun and networking events will be included. I think we are also finally past those few awkward years of vying amongst the different user groups about whose conference is the best or who is going to be the "next solutions" (please, see my previous post) These days I think people have come to recognize that if you are a Hyperion professional and you want the best Hyperion training for the best value, along with a front row seat to all the new product features coming down the line, there is no conference better than Kaleidoscope. I have no doubt this year will live up to and surpass previous years. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone in June. If you haven't registered yet, you really should. http://www.kscope11.com/