The Artifact Snapshot process in EPM Cloud uses what is called on the Cloud “Application Manager”. This is essentially the same as LCM (Lifecycle Management) for on premise Planning implementations. Artifact Snapshots can be used to:
- Create full or partial backups
- Perform full or partial restores (For example, restore just one business rule)
- Migrate from one environment to another (Test to Production or vice versa)
Oracle automatically creates an Artifact Snapshot each day during the Daily Maintenance window for the environment. The one Oracle creates is always named “Artifact Snapshot”. Note that only the last snapshot is kept. An easy way to keep more snapshots is just to rename them each day. An automated process using EPM Automate can also be developed to download the most recent backup from the Cloud to the EPM Automate server. With scripting you can create a rolling backup process where you keep, for example, backups for the last 10 days.
The steps below are related to metadata, but you would follow a similar process for other objects.
For migrating metadata from on premise, you would export using LCM and then edit the file as needed and then either upload as a snapshot to load it or upload in the Import Metadata Job format.
Navigate to “Application” > “Migration”.
Click on “Snapshots” and you will see last night’s backup that Oracle automatically takes during the application’s maintenance window, as well as any other Snapshots that were created.
Expand on the Artifact Snapshot and drill down on “HP-Vision” under “Global Artifacts” to see a list of the Standard Dimensions.
The Snapshot can be downloaded by clicking on the wheel and selecting “Download”. This will download the entire Snapshot including all artifacts (metadata, forms, Essbase data, etc.)
To create a download that is more manageable, I recommend that you create a new Snapshot of just the dimension(s) you wish to work with. You can do that by clicking on “Categories”, then drill down and select what you wish to export. Create the Snapshot (I chose just the Product dimension) and then download the file using “Save File” to save into the Downloads folder on your computer. The Snapshot is downloaded into a Zip file. If you go into the folder structure using Windows Explorer, you will see the .csv file for the dimension exported.
The top of the file has heading information and then rows like below.
You can then copy this file elsewhere and open it to make any necessary edits. The edited file could then be put into the same folder structure and zipped and up loaded to Snapshots by using the “Upload” button. After uploading it can then be loaded into PBCS by clicking the wheel and selecting “Import”.
When you are working with the metadata .csv files, note that the columns can be in any order and not all columns are required. For example, if you are building a Customer dimension and all the members add up the hierarchy so that all the aggregation operators are +, then it is not necessary to include the aggregation columns, as that is the default.