Control M newbie issues - date, sqoop and other stuff

Recently I moved automation from Oozie into BMC Control-M. Reason to that is Hadoop is just a small part in our company and maintaining many scheduling systems is a huge issue. 

Control-M offers the pretty good tool which helps with Oozie workflow/coordinator import but still there is a lot of work to do after that.
As I didn't have prior knowledge about Control-M I used F1 help a lot and I faced few beginner issues.

System variables and their format

I've configured a job that run reports with parameters set to yesterday's date. Control-M supports that by system variables like: %%ODATE which has a value of current order date. The problem is that this variable has yymmdd format. My task preferred yyyymmdd format. I've found out that there is %%$ODATE which has yyyymmdd format. Great!

Yesterday's date - whitespaces are important!

The second issue is to calculate a date. There is %%CALCDATE function which supports yymmdd format, and, of course, there is %%$CALCDATE for full year format.
There is the small catch, whitespaces. I wasn't aware why "%%$CALCDATE %%$ODATE - 1" returns "CTMERR 20150901 - 1". Searching and reading docs couldn't give any useful hint, but one thing was common - minus was very close to 1. Long story short - "%%$CALCDATE %%$ODATE -1" is the proper one.
Documentation specifies specifies format: result=%%CALCDATE date +|-quantity.

Sqoop

Sqoop configuration is a huge pain, especially when password and jdbc uri has special characters. It may happen that Control-m fail on testing configuration but will later work properly when importing data.