As of 1:30AM (Central), Hyperion System 9.3.1 is now generally available from http://edelivery.oracle.com/. The Media Pack consists of 39 parts comprising a total of 9.6 Gb.
What's interesting about this "patch" is that it seems to contain a ton of new enhancements/features. Here are some of the amazing things I spotted immediately:
- Essbase ASO supports trickle feeds and simultaneous data loads. This enhancement allows for virtually real-time data marts in Essbase using ASO.
- Financial Reporting allows bundling in of external documents in FR Books. You can now include Excel sheets and Word documents in your financial books.
- EPM Architect has improved navigation. My hope is that this makes EPMA a usable product.
- Planning now allows direct setting of most every Essbase option including DTS (Dynamic Time Series), hierarchies in Scenario/Version dimensions, alternate Time hiarchies, and more.
- Interactive Reporting has a new speedier Essbase query section. Rumor has it that IR against Essbase is now as fast as FR (Financial Reporting) and WA (Web Analysis).
- Shared Services has improved performance. If this true, it's about time.
- HFM supports disconnected forms through SmartView.
- Planning and HFM now ship with sample applications.
- No more License Server. To quote: "Hyperion no longer ships or requires Oracle's Hyperion License Server (or standalone license files) for use with Hyperion products." Thank you, Jesus.
There seems to be more - a lot more - so why am I worried? 9.3.0 had a number of bugs that 9.3.1 was supposed to fix. Even if 9.3.1 fixed all the known issues, isn't it likely that all these new features have introduced bugs of their own?
Well, let's take a look at one of the ReadMe's: Hyperion Reporting & Analysis (basically, all of BI+ except Essbase, all of Shared Services, User Provisioning, etc.). This document is 60 pages long. Pages 43-58 highlight the defects fixed in 9.3.1. Pages 10-43 detail the known issues still in 9.3.1 when they issued it. Now to be fair, the defects fixed are usually listed on one or two lines while the known defects often take up a paragraph or more, but 33 pages of known defects in just BI+ and the supporting layers?
Oracle, while we thank you for 9.3.1, when will 9.3.2 be coming out?
