FDMEE 11.1.2.4.210 (PSU210), at first glance

Hi folks,

Oracle just released FDMEE 11.1.2.4.210, PSU210 for friends. Lot of people have been waiting impatiently for this patch, and as usually, Oracle already gave us our Xmas present :-)
I haven't tested it yet but I wanted to give you a first overview of what you will get.

If you are already familiar with Data Management for Cloud (so FDMEE in the Cloud), you won't be so surprised as most of them (if not all) were already released in latest Cloud Services updates (at least in Test)

Patch number is 23041471 and you can download it from Oracle Support.

Get ready to Patch
Is your EPM system updated with latest patches?
There are couple of pre-requisites patches before your apply PSU210:

• HFM 11.1.2.4.200+ (I have installed 11.1.2.4.203)
• Hyperion Planning 11.1.2.4.003+ (I have installed 11.1.2.4.005)

If you are using FDMEE to integrate with DRM, you need to install DRM 11.1.2.4.340 patch.

New Features
You may consider some fixes as new features but according to the Readme, these are the new features coming with PSU210:

More options and flexibility to Import Data

• We can now load text data, dates, and smart lists to Planning (On-prem and Cloud). As feature described in next bullet point, you can load a file with multiple balance columns. So finally available in FDMEE! What about extracting them? I would be surprise if we could do it, probably in future PSU
• Load numeric data for multiple dimension members of selected dimension in a single row of data. Forget about unpivoting your data :-) You might be familiar with this feature if you used ODI Planning KMs before.
• Load data with period and years in rows so we can now import a file having data for multiple years/periods (do not confuse with Multi-Period files as we were used to. They have period/year in columns). Basically, imagine that you have a file with multiple period/years in rows and you want to filter them when importing data. TBH, after some analysis of this new feature, I'm not 100% happy of how it performs. I was expecting being able to process all periods through a single POV. This new feature imports data for each period in its own POV period. However, I need to test if we can now create source period mappings having File as a source.
• Support Skip rows for Delimited Files. This is not actually a "new feature" as it was already possible in FDM Classic.
• Use ~ as file delimiter. Was this in FDM Classic? Yes, it was.

If you want to see more details, my colleague John already posted great entries about some of them:

• Loading non-numeric data to Planning using FDMEE
• Data Management - loading data by multiple period and years

More Hybrid Integrations

• We can use FDMEE on-premise to integrate our on-premise or cloud systems with FCCS (Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud Service) and Fusion GL Cloud. These two new systems can be either source or target in our integrations. However, I can't confirm if we can write-back data to Fusion GL Cloud yet.

Mappings

• We can now select the delimiter for mapping export files (available as a setting). IMHO, I can think in some nice enhancements for mappings rather than this one.

Universal Data Adapter (UDA)

• SAP HANA Based DW (SAP  BW Powered by SAP or simply SAP BW on HANA) is now supported in the UDA. I guess this is using the SAP JDBC driver to connect to the SAP HANA Database (In Memory Database of SAP). So now you know that if your source is HANA DB, you can forget about SAP Adapter headaches :-)
• As you may know, SAP S/4HANA Finance (formerly SAP Simple Finance) is the next generation of SAP ERP (ECC and R/3) and it sits on top of HANA DB. We don't have Simple Finance adapter yet (as a pre-built integration) but with this new data source we can access data in HANA DB which is a very good feature. 
• Just in case you read about it, SAP recently announced a new product called SAP BW/4HANA. This is the next generation of SAP Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA.
• So to me, it does not really make sense that they say SAP HANA Based DW is supported in the UDA. Maybe is more correct to say SAP HANA DB instead. I say that because if it's using JDBC driver for HANA DB, then you can access database layer regardless the application layer (S/4HANA, BW/4HANA, etc.) Maybe I'm wrong but it makes more sense to me.

Other Features

• Limit the number of parallel processes submitted by a batch. So you can now avoid your FDMEE server exploding :-)
• Execute Custom Scripts from Command Line... uhuuuu!
• New setting to allow unlock by location. By enabling it, the user will be allowed to unlock a POV by location on the POV selection screen

Hopefully we get rid of refreshing and filtering issues in Data Load Workbench. That would be highly appreciated. I can't confirm at the moment but will keep you posted.

BTW, new admin guide is not available yet. Hopefully next week.

That's all for today. I will post what I find interesting once I start playing with the new features.

Download, install, and enjoy!