Restricted members and aliases in Oracle Planning Cloud

Recently, while implementing Oracle Planning Cloud for a new client, we experienced an issue where attribute dimensions were not being deployed successfully to the underlying Essbase cube – which was definitely not ideal!

As we had never experienced this issue before, we opened an SR with Oracle, and (long story short) the issue was occurring because we had unknowingly used a restricted word as a member name and also had trailing spaces in a couple of aliases. Once we removed the restricted member names/aliases, the attribute dimensions were successfully deployed during the refresh.

Unfortunately, these restricted members do not show as an error when refreshing the database, even if used in the outline, so hopefully this is something Oracle can add either as an error or as a warning on the Activity Report. In the meantime, it’s worth double checking the naming restrictions, especially if you seem to be experiencing some strange behaviour with Essbase.

Some of the main restrictions are as follows:

  • Member or alias names must be 80 characters or less 
  • Cannot use member property / metadata column headers as dimension names e.g. Data Type
  • Don’t have spaces as the start or end of member names/aliases – this was one of the issues we had and it won’t flag the error for trailing spaces
  • Don’t use calculation script commands, operators, and keywords e.g. FIX/ENDFIX
  • Don’t use function names and function arguments e.g. Descendants
  • If using attribute dimensions, you can’t use Sum, Count, Min, Max, and Avg – this was another one of our issues as we used “Count” as an Account name

The full list of restrictions can be found in the Oracle documentation here: https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/saas/planning-budgeting-cloud/pfusa/restrictions_for_dimensions_members_aliases_and_forms.html

Hopefully this will help someone avoid the same issues we encountered!

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