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Introduction to Oracle Essbase

Version 11.19.09

Copyright

©Copyright 2009, BI Consulting Group, LLC. All rights reserved. No part

of this material may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or

transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording

or otherwise, without written permission from the authors.

BICG training materials are intended for the use of students who have

paid for and have attended BICG training. Please contact BICG for

information on receiving additional training materials:

http://www.bicguniversity.com

© 2009 BICG University1.2

Course WelcomeCourse Welcome

BI Consulting Group’s comprehensive

training program reflects the best practices

developed after more than 200

implementations of Oracle BI Enterprise Edition

(formerly Siebel Analytics). Our curriculum is

designed to not only provide a functional

understanding of the variety of Oracle BI and

data warehousing tools, it also provides a

wealth of advice, tips, and tricks designed to

fully take advantage of all aspects of OBIEE

before, during and after a project.

Welcome to BI Consulting Group’s “Introduction to Oracle Essbase” class!

© 2009 BICG University

before, during and after a project.

Our classes operate in an “immersion” environment, designed to allow the

student to become fully engaged in all aspects of the class curriculum

through a series of real world exercises. Unlike other training

organizations that use trainers who have never actually implemented the

software or built a data warehouse, BI Consulting Group taps into our

wealth of experienced consultants to act as trainers and mentors. The

best practices, tips and tricks developed by our team will allow you to

push your data warehouse, Oracle BI Enterprise Edition and Oracle

Essbase implementations to the limit.

Mike Jelen

[Vice President of BICG University]

651.403.6524

[email protected]

1.3

The Introduction to Oracle Essbase course is intended to

provide an overview of Oracle Essbase architecture,

functionality and how it is used to solve business

problems.

Topics Covered:

• Business Intelligence Pyramid

• Essbase Concepts

• Data Architecture

• Sample Outlines

• Cube Dimensions

Introduction to Oracle EssbaseIntroduction to Oracle Essbase

© 2009 BICG University1.4

• Cube Dimensions

• BSO (block storage option) and

ASO (aggregate storage option)

• Oracle Essbase and OBIEE

• Oracle Essbase Top 10 List


Oracle Essbase sits at the center of a business

intelligence pyramid.

Companies are very good at collecting transaction level

data. The challenge is to unlock this transactional data

and turn it into useful information.

Data from on-line transaction systems is loaded into

Oracle Essbase so users can make sense of it for

management reporting and analysis.



Oracle Essbase is now a key component of the Oracle

Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition products.

• the industry-leading OLAP (online analytical

processing) server

• rapidly develop custom analytic and enterprise

performance management (EPM) applications

• quickly model complex business scenarios



For years, business managers and financial analysts have

been asking questions and thinking about the budgets, sales

data, and nearly every other piece of business information in

multidimensional terms. They might want to know how a

particular product sells in one market versus another. They

might want to know which customer actually nets them the

most profit. The multidimensional analysis capabilities of

Essbase makes it possible to do this kind of reporting.

Essbase is a multidimensional database application that lets

you continually analyze and compare aspects of your

business. An Essbase database:


• Works with multidimensional data

• Works with rollup hierarchies within dimensions

• Obtains data from other systems or can calculate new

data using formulas and calc scripts

• Deals with summarized data – not transactions

• Adapts to different reporting and analysis environments


With Essbase as your application development environment

you gain the following benefits:

• You can build multiple databases using the same tool

• Individual analytic applications are integrated

• Single environment for development, testing,

deployment, training


As shown above, Essbase users can “zoom in” and “zoom

out” to analyze data across all the potential combinations of

all available dimensions and attributes.


Most Essbase users interact with the tool using

Microsoft Excel. This accounts for it’s popularity

among the spreadsheet user community.


There is an Excel Add-In that sits within the menu bar

which provides the user selection and interactivity.

There is also an SmartView Add-in which provides

more advanced capabilities for Excel to talk with

various Oracle EPM products.


The database outline is the key to understanding Essbase.

The outline contains the database organization (structure),

hierarchies, the database members, attributes and other

items (load rules, calc scripts, member formulas), as

shown below.

Dimensions


Dimensions

Attributes

Attributes function in a similar way to dimensions

and describe characteristics of data (ie size, color)


Here are another outline example.

Dimension Details

This cube was designed for

global inventory analysis.



Here are yet another outline example. This cube was

designed for global sales analysis of a large consumer

products company.

Dimension Details



A typical Essbase production environment consists of

Outline

• Facilitates to organization of data into hierarchies

and dimension

• Easy to visualize

Load rules

• Facilitates loading and maintaining dimension

members

• Organizes data from multiple data sources


Calculation scripts

• Facilitates top-down calculation capabilities across

dimensions

• Requires little coding

Reporting

• Uses Excel spreadsheet add-in


Here is an example of how Essbase fits in to a corporate

data architecture.

• Data is typically sourced from a data warehouse but can

also come from Excel spreadsheets (via a “lock and send”

process).

• Data is loaded using load rules and stored in the cube

• Data is retrieved via Excel or report writing software.



There are two types of cubes that can be constructed:

1. Block Storage Option (BSO)

2. Aggregate Storage Option (AS0)

The key difference is that a BSO cube allows users to “lock

and send” data to the cube. This is useful for budgeting

and forecasting applications. Also, BSO cubes have more

functionality with complex calculation scripts. A downside of

BSO cubes is that they usually take longer to calculate than

ASO cubes.

ASO cubes load and aggregate data much faster than BSO


ASO cubes load and aggregate data much faster than BSO

cubes. They can also contain many more dimensions and

attributes without impacting performance. For this reason,

ASO cubes have grown in popularity among the Essbase

developer community.

A general guideline is that is your cube does not require

“lock and send” capabilities or complex calculations, then

use the ASO version.

In newer versions of Essbase (particularly 11.x), ASO cubes

the differences between ASO and BSO have been

narrowed.


Oracle Essbase and OBIEE

• Beginning with OBIEE 10.1.3.3.2, Essbase (9.3.1 or

later ) is supported as an Oracle Business

Intelligence (OBI) Server data source.

• Can now expose Essbase data to a broad user

audience via OBIEE Answers, OBIEE Interactive

Dashboards, and OBIEE Delivers.

• Using the OBI Server repository, developers can

build business models that unite Essbase data


sources with sources supported by OBI Server.

• There is a lot of development going on to enhance

capabilities in future release of OBIEE Answers

(called “OBIEE Answers Plus”)!


Oracle Business

OBIEE Answers


OBIEE Answers can sit on top of Oracle Essbase to

provide browser based reporting. You can also combine

relational and Essbase multidimensional data in reports.


Essbase cube (version

9.3.1 or higher)

Oracle Business

Intelligence

Administration Tool



Essbase cube can be imported

to Physical layer of OBIEE.

Oracle BI “flattens out” the

Essbase multidimensional view

into a relational view (star

schema of dimensions and

facts).

Can recreate a Measures

hierarchy similar to Essbase.


hierarchy similar to Essbase.


OBIEE creates MDX queries against Essbase


OBIEE “talks” to Essbase via MDX queries

• automatic for standard reports

• customize for enhanced reports (use the

“EVALUATE” function to call Essbase functions)


Essbase returns result set

OBIEE reformats the result set and presents

Thanks to http://oraclebizint.wordpress.com


Oracle Essbase “Top 10” List

• Use the “Scenarios” dimension to select the type of

data you want (ie Budget, Actual, Forecast).

• Understand the user options. The Options command

enables you to select options for the active sheet and

customize the behavior of the Essbase Spreadsheet

Add-in software.

• Read the fine Essbase user manual. This well-written

pdf file is available with the Essbase client software

and will help a great deal.


and will help a great deal.

• Automate Essbase. You can write Excel macros that

will automatically perform Essbase actions.

• Join others. Tap into the global Essbase community

at various Oracle Essbase discussion boards and

blogs.


Oracle Essbase “Top 10” List (continued)

6. For users, Excel is 90%, Essbase is 10% of usage.

Once you retrieve your data, you can update Excel

with graphs, formulas or reports.

7. Use specific dimensions or attributes if you need to

create a filter and focus on a specific intersection of

data.

8. Use the force, Luke. The Hyperion Essbase

Spreadsheet Add-In provides a convenient toolbar

that displays buttons for accessing most of the


that displays buttons for accessing most of the

common Essbase commands without having to open

the Essbase drop-down menu.

9. Suppress that data. You can suppress missing and

zero values from displaying in the worksheet.

10.Have fun. Essbase is your personal Rubik's cube of

global information on finance, sales, marketing, etc.


A copy of the Essbase Users Guide for Excel is

available on the BICG Knowledge Base. This is

a very well-written tutorial and expands on the

topics presented in this lesson.


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