This tip comes to you courtesy of a colleague’s question. How do you clear data out of a Cloud cube? Perhaps you loaded data to the wrong intersection or need to wipe everything before the next cycle. Note that this tip applies to the following EPM Cloud solutions:

• PBCS (Planning & Budgeting Cloud Service)
• EPBCS (Enterprise Planning & Budgeting Cloud Service)
• FCCS (Financial Consolidations & Close Cloud Service) – partially

Let’s start by talking about the different types of data you can clear out:

1. You can clear the numerical data out of the cube.
2. You can also clear extraneous data tied to individual data cells – like annotations, supporting detail, etc.

The first data clearing option is part of a new feature released in July called “clear cube”. Accessible from the Console card >> Actions menu, this feature is available both on-demand and through the job scheduler (once the job has been created).

Here are the options available to this feature when a BSO cube is selected. You can choose which specific cube to clear, in addition to the types of blocks to clear.

* Sadly, FCCS seems to be a bit behind the times on the “clear cube” option. The job scheduler option is there for “clear cube”, but there is no option to create the job nor run the action on-demand…which means that it is not available. Update 8/16/2016: I logged an SR on this and found out that, due to the unique design and requirements, clearing data out of an FCCS cube is not as simple as that. A feature like this impacts the calculation status. Oracle is working to add this feature in a future release. Update 7/2017: A flavor of clear data was added to this month’s release. From the July 2017 release notes: “You can also clear data for selected entities from a specific Scenario, Year and period or range of periods. See ‘Copying Data’ and ‘Clearing Data’ in the Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud Administrator’s Guide.“

And here are the options available to this feature when an ASO cube is selected – you can choose to clear all data, all aggregations, or partial data. When “Partial Data” is selected, MDX expressions are used to select the part of the cube to clear.

Update 8/17/2016 in response to Brian’s blog post: unfortunately, I do not see an entry in the updated EPM Automate documentation for running the new clear cube option. In the RCD for the July release, I don’t see a mention of EPM Automate support either – just job scheduler support. I have logged an SR on this and Oracle Support has called this a “bug” that will be enhanced in a future release. My Twitter buddy Mohammed Ahmed gives this advice: “as an interim solution either schedule the clear job in SUI or invoke a BR to clear cube.”

The second data clearing option is for cell details. This feature is accessible through the Navigator menu and is for on-demand only – you’re not able to create and schedule this as a job. This data clearing feature applies to all 3 Cloud solutions, although the Navigator menu is a bit different between Planning Cloud and FCCS.

Here are the options available in this feature. Note that you can choose which specific cube to clear, in addition to the types of cell details and dimension intersections to clear.