Database stats and outline viewing with Vess
I had a little bit of time this weekend and dusted off Vess for some updates. I was able to greatly enhance the functionality and perhaps more important, widen the number of use cases that it could be used in.
I already wrote about a use case previously: using SQL to create a substitution variable. Vess supports fully symmetric substitution variable updates. That is to say, you can create, read, update, and delete substitution variables on your Essbase server just by changing the data in the proper table. So just to elaborate on my thoughts on the previous post, I think there are some nice use cases here. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with MaxL, but if you have an instance where you are dumping substitution variables via MaxL and scraping the ASCII art off of them in order to get to the real variable values, Vess offers a cleaner approach.
As of now, Vess also provides a window in to a whole slew of properties on various Essbase objects: server, application, and database. Here’s a view of some database properties (as shown in a generic JDBC GUI with Vess configured as a driver):
