UltraEdit with Essbase: Part 1 – Running MaxL

I’ve been using UltraEdit (actually, UltraEdit Studio but this technique works fine with ‘regular’ UltraEdit too) as a text editor / SSH client / FTP browser for a couple of years now, although I’ve barely scratched the surface of its capabilities. In this series of posts, I’m going to show some simple but helpful features that I use when working with UltraEdit and Essbase. First up will be turning UltraEdit into a bare-bones MaxL environment.

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Use an Essbase Substitution Variable in a Shell Script

A couple of weeks back I was writing some automation scripts on a *nix system (using KornShell, in this case) and needed to do something I haven’t previously tried – grabbing the value of a couple of Essbase substitution variables to use elsewhere in the shell script. I’m sharing a generic version since (as a relatively inexperienced programmer on Unix-like systems) I was pleasantly surprised by how simple the toolset made meeting this requirement, and more generally, the solution I came up with demonstrates several useful techniques from which other *nix neophytes may benefit:

  • Command substitution
  • Inline redirection
  • Filtering multiple lines with grep
  • Extracting tokens from a single line with AWK

Constructive criticism and comments are most welcome!

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Deleting Essbase Applications that Won’t Start

A very quick post on a perennial Essbase problem: the application that refuses to be deleted. Generally this happens when an application has been corrupted, due either to a bug, a crash or some clown’s1 too-smart-for-own-good file system monkey business.  The application then can’t be started, and deleting an application requires that it be started first.  I ran into this today with an application that had somehow been created as BSO before an ASO backup was restored into its folder structure.

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