Pigeons, Rats, Squirrels and Babies

Well it has been quite a while since I last posted anything on my blog, and with good reason. My family and I have made a monumental change by moving from South Africa to the UK. We are now residing in London, the city of pigeons, rats and squirrels.

I have taken up a position with one of the UK's leading Insurers as the Financial Systems Manager. So pretty much exactly what I was doing back in South Africa except instead of retail I now have insurance. I have to admit it is a very interesting sector to be in and in 2 months I will be writing my London Lloyds Introductory Exam.

So back to my blog heading, where does the baby come from. Well 6 weeks before we decided to move house, hemisphere, jobs etc my wife delivered a bouncing baby boy.

So as you can see the move with a 2 year old and a 6 week old was quite hectic and something had to give, hence the lack of blogs.

We are now settled in and hopefully I can put some together in the coming weeks.

- Paul Steynberg

Management Reporter/Frx Roadmap

The big question has finally been answered, what is the future of Management Reporter, FRx Reporter, FRx Forecaster and Enterprise Reporting? Well MS has released this roadmap.

2010 - MR to Replace FRx Reporter as the reporting tool of choice for Dynamics AX. This will coincide with the release of AX2010 (6.0) and it will be called MR V2.
2012 - MR to be released as V3 with AX2012 (7.0) and will now include Forecaster.
2014 - MR to be released as V4 with AX2014 (8.0) and will include functionality from Enterprise Reporting.

Personally I would not move from FRx Reporter until 2012 having learned a very hard lesson over the last year or so with the current version of MR.

Regards

Paul

Cannot Install Management Report Directly to SQL Server 2008

I found a bug some time back that did not allow one to install Management Reporter while linking directly to a SQL Server 2008 database. One had to install RTM and point to a database which was SQL Server 2005 and only once SP1 for MR (SP2 for PPS) was applied could you then change the database to SQL Server 2008.

Just had confirmation from Microsoft that this will be fixed in SP2 for Management Reporter.

SP1 for MR was actually packed with SP2 for PPS so we will get this in SP3 for PPS which will be released in the Summer.

- Paul Steynberg

AIF Updated Doc for AX 2009

The documentation surrounding the use of the Application Integration Framework (AIF) with BizTalk has been updated to now include AX 2009. Here is the link. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=edc62433-5b21-4f74-b065-b075ba6dc86d&displaylang=en&tm

- Paul Steynberg

PerformancePoint Server Management Reporter and SQL 2008

Does Management Reporter (MR) work with SQL Server 2008? Yes, if you apply SP2 which has been recently released by Microsoft. I have tested this with huge improvements in performance. But that is not the reason for this blog. Something a lot more sinister is afoot.

I started the MR rollout to the business after upgrading all our pre-sp2 installs. We migrated the ManagementReporter database from the SQL Server 2005 environment to the SQL 2008 environment with no problems.

Here is the BUT. When you install MR on a clean machine you MUST, during the install process give it a valid ManagementReporter database to connect to. Now in order to install SP2 you must firstly install RTM. SP2 is designed to work with 2008 but RTM does not and lets you know in no uncertain terms. So you sit with a chicken/egg story. You want to install SP2 to make it work with 2008 but because the DB is 2008 you cannot firstly install RTM.

Work around. DO NOT delete a copy of MR DB which you have anywhere on the network that is already on SQL 2000/2005. Or just install a DB from the RTM version on to any 2005 SQL box. During the client install you must point to this DB in order to get RTM complete. Apply SP2 and then create a new connection to the 2008 DB and delete the old connection. Simple but unfortunately necessary.

This has been raised as a bug and is in production.

- Paul Steynberg

PPS Planning - Current Period

Over the past 2 years one of the biggest mysteries to a lot of PPS Planning users is the storage of the current period which is set in the Business Planning Modeler. This has been discussed and a number of posts on the PPS forum have clearly demonstrated how one can get to it. However I have yet to see a full set of code to bring this setting into your environment for use. I use the current period for my hourly PPS updates from our ERP system so as to make sure that we do not reload old data and speed up the process. So part of my ETL process interrogates the XML blob in the table BizAppNodes and returns the current period ID and Label for each model. These records are inserted into a table that I keep up to date and then use this in my ETL process. Here is the code:

DECLARE @xmlblob xml

SELECT @xmlblob = CAST(CAST ( ba.xmlblob AS varbinary(MAX))
as xml)

FROM BizAppNodes ba

WHERE VersionEndDateTime = '9999-12-31
00:00:00.000'

AND BizAppNodeLabel = 'FinanceModel'

SELECT distinct ModelLabel

,CurrentPeriodId

,T.[MonthLabel]

FROM

(

SELECT DISTINCT

tab.col.value('../../@Label', 'varchar(30)') as ModelLabel,

tab.col.value('@CurrentPeriodId', 'varchar(30)') as
CurrentPeriodId,

tab.col.value('@EffectiveDate', 'varchar(30)') as EffectiveDate

FROM @xmlblob.nodes
('/BizModelSite/Models/ArrayOfBizModel/BizModel/EffectiveDatedCurrentPeriods/EffectiveDatedCurrentPeriod')
as tab(col)

) AS TABLE1

LEFT OUTER JOIN [dbo].[D_Time] T ON T.[Month] =
TABLE1.[CurrentPeriodId]

The output is the model name, period id and period label for each model in the application.

- Paul Steynberg

PPS Up Your Street

I have added a new link to another PPS blog by David Street. It makes for some good reading.

- Paul Steynberg

PerformancePoint Server SP2 - Feedback

Nick Barclay, Tim Kent and Sacha Tomey have all posted some detailed blogs on what you can expect from PerformancePoint Server SP2 so I will not labour the point. However here are some real live bits and bobs as I installed SP2(Beta) over a month ago under the following configuration:

• PPS Server, Windows 2008 Server and SQL Server 2008. X64, 4x6 core processors, 64 Gb Memory.
• SQL Server, Windows 2003 Server and SQL Server 2008. X64, 2x4 core processors, 64 Gb Memory.

We put a new server in for PPS but used an existing one for SQL. This will be upgraded within the next 3 months.

The install did not give any surprises. You must firstly install PPS RTM and then apply SP2 as was expected. Something that did bite us was the fact that you could use the PBM on the server but NOT from your desktop. My guys in networks are convinced that it is something to do with the way credentials are double hopped from the desktop to the PPS Server to the SQL Server. (They mumbled a whole bunch of stuff about Kerberos and AD and it would take days to figure out the problem.) To fix this we just changed the PPSPlanningWebService “ASP.NET impersonation” from Enabled to Disabled. Here is the error message you will find in your event viewer:

Date 14/11/2008 15:38

Log SQL Server (Current - 14/11/2008 15:38)

Source Logon

Message

Login failed for user 'NT AUTHORITY\ANONYMOUS LOGON'. Reason: Token-based server access validation failed with an infrastructure error. Check for previous errors. [CLIENT: [Ip address here]]

Date 14/11/2008 15:38

Log SQL Server (Current - 14/11/2008 15:38)

Source Logon

Message

Error: 18456, Severity: 14, State: 11.

Considerations when Installing on Windows 2008.

You need to make sure that Web Server (IIS) is installed. If not open Server Manager, click on “Add Roles” and Install Web Server(IIS).

Once installed open up Server Manager and click on Roles.

Click on “Add Role Services”.

Install the following services:

Application Development, all except “Server Side Includes”.

Under Management Tools, “IIS Management Console” and “IIS 6.0 Management Capability”.

Under Security “Basic Authentication” and “Windows Authentication”.

Now install the PPS RTM 64 bits. DO NOT run the Configuration Manager.

Install the PPS SP2 64 bits.

Now you can run the Configuration Manager for the PPS Planning. You must have SQL Server Cumulative Update 7 installed. We needed to install these files to ensure that we met the requirements:

• SQLServer2005-KB949095-x64-ENU.exe
• sqlncli_x64.exe
• SQLServer2005_ADOMD_x64.exe
• SQLServer2005_XMO_x64.exe

To register ASP.NET 2.0 Web Service Extensions in IIS:

• Open cmd : Start -> Run -> cmd
• Navigate to the correct folder and run:
• C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\V2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis –ir

You can then start the Configuration Manager again and from here on it is stock standard as per normal.

We needed to update to SP2 so that we could get the benefits on the Management Reporter in terms of performance. The improvements in performance are massive HOWEVER they are just not good enough. It still takes way too long to produce our reports. So back to the drawing board for Microsoft. They are now performing a full evaluation of the product and are working out how to improve it.

- Paul Steynberg

PerformancePoint Server - An ETL Tip

Anyone running a Financial Model within PPS Planning in all likelihood updates the actuals from an ERP System within the business. Under normal circumstances this will entail (amongst a myriad of other things) the following:

• Synchronize MG Tables to the Stage Area.
• By way of some ETL tool (Normally SSIS) bring in your actuals.
• All Deletes, Inserts and Updates are then written into the MG Table with the appropriate BizSystemFlag. 200 for Inserts, 300 for updates and 400 for deletes.
• The data is then loaded from staging to the RefDB.
• The model is processed.

Now one of the biggest problems in this entire process is the time it takes to Synchronize the MG tables to the Staging database and then if you have an enormous number of records, the inserting of these to the RefDB. (We have 22 million records in our MG table).

So we have decided to shortcut the process. We created our own ETL SSIS packages to move the data into the MG tables in the Stage database. This method completely negates the effort of synchronizing the MG table to the staging database as we join across the 2 databases in order to detect any updates or inserts. As the data always comes from a LOB system we never do any deletes. For new records we just insert them into the Stage database with the BizSystemFlag of 200. For updates we fetch the existing record from the RefDB into the StageDB and insert an additional record with the BizSystemFlag of 300. You cannot insert a record of type 300 or 400 without the accompanying 100 record. If you do the load will fail and you will get errors on those records.

By adopting this methodology we have reduced our update of PPS to under 5 minutes and it is run every half hour so that our reporting will be up to date. Another advantage of not synchronizing is that your indexes on the MG table in the staging DB are not dropped. Saves a lot of time.

- Paul Steynberg

PerformancePoint Server - Balancing Your Actuals

If like me, you are loading your actuals from your ERP system in PerformancePoint Server Planning, it helps to check your figures to make sure that they always balance. Now every good accountant will tell you that your trial balance must always balance to zero. This goes for each period and off course year to date. I have written some reports that self balance our system but in general here is the manual leg work behind it.

Remember that when loading from your ERP system all Balance Sheet Items are loaded as “CLO” for closing balance and all your Income Statement items are loaded as “NONE”. Your rules will calculate the Opening Balance “OPE” records and the Movement “MVT” records prior to you processing the model. In order to balance you then just bring the data into a pivot table (Standard connection to analysis services) and then check that your totals come to zero. But it can get a bit confusing if you do not get your combinations of Flow and TimeDataView correct. So to check you Year to Date figure you select TimeDataView as “YTD” and multi-select “NONE” and “CLO” for the flows. To check the period movement only change the TimeDataView to “Periodic” but then set flow to “NONE” and “MVT”. Voila, it should all balance as per the example below. In this example the 1 and 2 series are Balance Sheet and 3-9 series Income Statement. Also note that if you just add up the numbers you will not get to zero but the Pivot Table understands that some of them are signed and that they should be subtracted. Take a look here and here for a quick overview on this subject.

- Paul Steynberg