Thursday, August 28, 2008

Committed to Essbase 11.1.1

Sorry it has been so long since I posted but I have been working on some non-Essbase product development area of our product. Specifically, I have been working on FIPS-140 (“Federal Information Processing Standards”) compliant computing required for Federal government computing systems. So if anyone wants to know about SHA-1 hashing (FIPS compliant) vs MD5 hashing (not FIPS compliant) or TripleDES encryption algorithms, I may be able to help them.

I have had some other things going on as well. I was interviewed by my local newspaper for the front page of the business section. The topic was businesspeople who fly their own airplanes on business which I do nearly every trip east of the Rockies. In fact, I flew myself and my family to New Orleans for the ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference. If you are interested in reading about my '15 minutes of fame', here is a link to the story: http://www.al.com/huntsvilletimes/stories/index.ssf?/base/business/1218993308126870.xml&coll=1

Now, on to Essbase stuff..

I haven't been writing much about Essbase 11.1.1 as I haven't had it installed on my laptop. Instead, I had one of my assistants create a VM with Essbase 11.1.1 on it.. Well, despite the fact that I have a laptop with 4 Gb of RAM, of which only 3 Gb is usable as I have XP Professional for my OS, VMWare ran very sluggishly on my system. Perhaps it is because I also had the entire Essbase stack, Oracle 11g Enterprise and SQL Server 2005 all running in addition to VMWare that made it slow, but still it was painful to turn all of that stuff off before firing up the VMWare image. Thus, I tended not to run it much and, in fact, ran it just enough to make sure Dodeca ran on 11.1.1.

Have you ever heard the old story about commitment? It goes something like 'a chicken and a pig were discussing their importance to breakfast and the chicken claimed it was more important as it contributed eggs. The pig replied that it made more of a commitment to breakfast when it provided bacon..' Well, translating that to my Essbase situation, I have committed to working with Essbase 11.1.1. Last night, I completely removed Essbase 9.3.1 from my system and will install 11.1.1 today. How is that for commitment?