11.1.2.2 is here, with a twist

With very little thanks to me

Anyone who has read this blog knows I am infrastructure challenged.  Thankfully, there are at least a few others who are better/smarter/more determined than I.  In this case, the glory (is that damning with faint praise given the previous sentence?  Nope, what he’s done is pretty glorious.) is John Booth’s as he did all the hard work making everything in 11.1.2.2 function on Amazon Web Services – I was merely his test monkey.  Go check out John’s excellent blog here to get his take on it.


Yup, that’s right, first he gave us 11.1.2.1 and now 11.1.2.2.  Pretty awesome, eh?  I will note that there are many infrastructure consultants out there and no one, and I mean no one with the exception of the two Johns (Booth and Goodwin) give anything, be that AMIs, knowledge, tips, suggestions, or whatever, away.  Think about it – there are lots of blogs and posts from application developers but those two are the only infrastructure-related contributors to the EPM community.  Given how difficult the EPM installs are (John and I went around and around on a few niggling issues with his AMI so yes, even he gets a little challenged by the install process) we owe them both, but in this case particularly John Booth, a big round of thanks.

Beyond a new version, what’s on offer?

Oh, a few things such as:

• Essbase
• Essbase Studio
• Planning
• HFM
• FDM
• ODI (my favorite)
• ERPi
• Financial Reports

In other words, just about everything that is commonly known as the Oracle EPM core.  Like I wrote above, pretty awesome, eh?  This is an expansion of what was there in his 11.1.2.1 AMI.



The only thing that isn’t there is Smart View, and that’s because it requires a copy of Excel.  I’ve already posted how to use your local copy of Excel to go against Essbase – I will be installing Excel itself on the server as it is easier but note that you need a license to do that.

One big difference

Whereas the 11.1.2.1 AMI ran as a normal set of services, this AMI uses the compact deployment option.  That means that EPM takes up way less memory than before and in turn that leads to some interesting options.  See the last section of this post for a teaser.

So where do you go?

Back to business – the AMI is ami-ef933886.  Read the 11.1.2.1 AWS tutorial post on how to launch it – everything is the same as before except of course the AMI id.

What’s the twist?

Merely this:

Take a good hard look at that.  What do you see?  Intrigued?  :)  I will be posting about my experiences with this in a little bit.