Altius Tech Blog

Are Essbase and Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) a match made in heaven?

At first glance it appears to come pretty close, especially if you already have Essbase. As part of their Corporate Performance Management strategy, Oracle highlight the need to cope with increased M&A and consolidation as a reason to leverage the power of usiness !ntelligence in a collaborative way, and for many companies this will mean bringing together data from disparate sources and combining into one version of the truth. "o that#s the gap filled by O !EE then, well $nown for it#s multiplatform capabilities and vendor agnostic data source connections, in reality of course you will probably want to consolidate the data from those sources into an efficient hub, warehouse or data mart %delete as applicable&. One thing you may well decide to $eep are any e'isting Essbase cubes already in use, Essbase#s speed and capability are well $nown especially in finance circles, so to paraphrase an old saying, (!f it ain#t bro$e, re)use it#. *he following e'ample shows how to import an Essbase cube into the O !EE repository, using version +,.+.-... Open the repository with the admin tool, and go to /ile0!mport from Multi)dimensional, enter your credentials and clic$ O1, select your cube and import. Once imported e'pand the nodes and you will see something similar to this2

As you can see, the measures become detached from the Accounts dimension as O ! has to flatten out the hierarchy, drag the cube ob3ect to the MM layer and e'pand the nodes again2

O ! creates logical representation of a star schema based on the cube, the measures are attached to a /act table, the name of which defaults to that of the cube. A hierarchy for each dimension has also been created automatically. "o that#s all well and good, but what about that other data we want to include4 5hilst the cube itself will provide all the answers it used to via the Essbase E'cel client, users, especially at board level, who are $een to see some return on their investment are bound to want more, so should you redesign your cube, possibly compromising its optimi6ed design or is there another way4 *he (other way# is a great demonstration of the multi source capability of O !, pic$ up the detail you want to add, from the original data source and 3oin it to the cube data. !n this instance we will use an M" "78 "erver table that holds additional attributes for our Events. !mport the table in the usual manner, and 3oin it to the relevant dimension in the Physical layer using a comple' 3oin, Essbase obviously has no concept of a foreign $ey2

!n the Physical layer, e'pand your db table so you can select the columns, now e'pand the target dimension in the 8ogical layer, in this case Events. 9ow select all the columns from the attributes table you need to add to the Events dimension, drag them to the middle layer, and drop them onto the table source for the dimension you are e'tending2

*o verify the 3oin, double clic$ the logical table source ob3ect for the dimension table, and loo$ at the :eneral tab.

*he ne't step is to add the e'tra attributes to the lowest level of the dimension hierarchy, e'pand the hierarchy and select all the columns you 3ust added to the dimension, drag them up and drop them onto the lowest level of the dimension hierarchy.

9ow either drag the cube to the Presentation layer, or 3ust those elements you want e'posed to the users. As a result of this change the 3oin to the attributes table will cause an error when measures are included in the ;uery, one solution to this is to set the aggregation rule for each column to "<M rather than Aggr=E'ternal, this needs to be done in the Physical and 8ogical instances of each fact column. /inally run a consistency chec$ and save the repository. 8aunch the client and open the sub3ect area in Answers, the attribute columns appear as an e'tension of the dimension2

! hope this has been of interest, ! will endeavour to add more O ! EE content as when ! find worthy topics *echnorati *ags2 O !EE,Essbase,Oracle usiness !ntelligence

. Published Oct >. >,,?, ,.2.@ PM by edhiggins /iled under2 Essbase, O !EE, Oracle, usiness !ntelligence "hare A

Comments
sreenathd said: Bow to Coin the Cube table with Delational table in Physical layer4 oth are coming from different data sources and can we 3oin both in Physical layer4 E!mport the table in the usual manner, and 3oin it to the relevant dimension in the Physical layer using a comple' 3oin, Essbase obviously has no concept of a foreign $ey2E March +>, >,,F +>2.? PM BAS said: Gou can use the Byperion tools li$e /D to report against Essbase. *hat way, yHuIre not forced into limitations of a tool li$e O !EE that doesnIt understand essbase. Gou can then lin$ to O !EE reports %and bac$ if you li$e& while maintaining the conte't of the reports in both directions. *his way, Essbase can do what itIs good at %aggregate views and lightning fast analysis& while O !EE can offer the more detailed views of the business. 8et me $now if you want more info ) ernard.AshA*:mail.com