To be an Oracle's Hyperion Infrastructure Consultant you have to have knowledge of several different disciplines. You have to know the Windows Server operating system. You have to have knowledge of routing and DNS and network related things. You have to know something about Network Load Balancing. It would help to also have knowledge of UNIX, SAN, and, in this day in age the knowledge of virtual machines.
I have personally installed several different versions of the Hyperion products in the past 3 years. Pre-system 9, all flavors of System 9, and now have installed several environments with the new nomenclature of 11.
With 11 they have added several features for the Infrastructure person. First, you download the Foundation files and the Installer file to get started. This is working off of the Oracle Universal Installer (OUI) system. You download the installer and then you add the different pieces to get what you want installed.
This seems innocent enough until you realize that the Foundation files (3 files in 11.1.1.1; 4 files in 11.1.1.2) are a couple of Gigs and the installer is measured in Gigs as well. You have somewhere in the 5-6 Gig range before you can install anything. If you want to install the Essbase Client on a machine, you have to download 5-6 Gigs, and then the file for the Client.
You are also given the option for everything to use the same database or schema (except for HSS, which always gets its own). This is something that I would never recommend. In fact, some of the documentation even suggests not doing it. It is problematic though that they allow you to make this mistake in the first place.
They have also added support for 64 Bit operating systems into 11. This worked really well in 11.1.1.1, as I was able to install a full Development Planning environment on to one Windows server. The only real 64 bit applications are Essbase and Essbase Client, but all the other products worked well in the 64 bit world. I even had the relational database on the same server.
Though I believe that the install testing for 11.1.1.1 in 64 bit land was a wonderful thing, I believe that when they went to 11.1.1.2 there was much to be desired. I've seen several components that didn't have the required registry settings or they couldn't find the jre folder or just didn't deploy. It's good that my colleagues and I have a VMware setup that allows for creating a lab where we can try and fix the issues that arise. But, should not Oracle have done this before releasing the product?
There are also new products that are available in the 11 series that they should have taken a little more care or time in development to get right. Essbase Studio for instance. If you install Essbase Studio in a Windows server using MS SQL server you are in for a treat! The installer itself does not create a Windows Service. To get it started without third party downloads, you have to log on to the server and run it in the foreground.
That is to say if you can get Essbase Studio to start at all. You see the programmers at Oracle that programmed this product only know Oracle relational databases. There is this issue where if you use the MS best practice for databases, where all the files that are created are owned by the dbo, you will not get Essbase Studio to even start. You have to go in and create a schema user, like you would automatically do with an Oracle database, and assign those rights to your database user so that the schema is owned by that user. Kind of confusing, but the tables are something like this for a MS best practice, database.dbo.table, and to use it with Essbase Studio it has to look like this, database.user.table. The rest of the software works with MS SQL, why couldn't they have gotten this right with Essbase Studio, a product that the sales forces are agog about right now?
All in all I still believe that this is the best product in the world at what it does when it is working. The problem is that it is just much harder to get working than what other versions of Hyperion software since the pre System 9 days. I thought that Oracle was supposed to make installation easier with the OUI, but I believe that they made it much easier to ruin an installation. I have seen a LOT more issues with 11.1.1.2 than with 11.1.1.1, but Oracle makes it hard to install older versions. I've also noted that some of the 11.1.1.2 files update or change periodically. This is a little disconcerting as I have downloaded one version one week just to come back and have a different download the next.
