Essbase within/without OBIEE, BI Forum 2014

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Essbase within/without OBIEE
Not just an aggregation engine
Gianni Ceresa, Rittman Mead

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Who Am I?
• Gianni Ceresa
– About 6 years working with Oracle BI & EPM
– Principal Consultant, Rittman Mead (EMEA)
• linkedin.com/in/gceresa
• @G_Ceresa

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Agenda
• Essbase within OBIEE
– what, when, where, how
– Aggregate Persistence wizard
– Essbase Studio
• Essbase without OBIEE: more than “just” an aggregation engine
– Storage model: ASO – BSO
– BSO
• Sparse – Dense, blocks
• Calc scripts
• Essbase within OBIEE (frontend)
– Run scripts, writeback

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(Short) History of Essbase
• Essbase
– Extended Spread Sheet dataBASE
– originally developed to address the scalability issues
associated with spreadsheets
• multidimensional database
• History
– developed by Arbor Software Corporation
• it’s why in Windows an environment variable is still called
ARBORPATH
– v3.2 in 1995 is what really made Essbase as one of the
standard OLAP software
– Arbor > Hyperion (1998) > Oracle (2007) = Oracle Essbase

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Within OBIEE – what, when, where, how
• Essbase has always been part of the Hyperion EPM suite
• OBIEE 11.1.1.6.2 BP1
– available as an option during OBIEE install (hidden)
• OBIEE 11.1.1.7.0
– officially visible as option during install
• Features
– security included in Weblogic (doesn’t require Shared Services)
– managed as a OPMN component
– additional tools like EAS and Studio included as well
– not possible (for now) to upgrade or patch Essbase to the last
official release (last patch 11.1.2.3.500 adding the BSO/ASO
Hybrid Aggregation Mode announced at OOW2013 and
released few weeks ago can’t be installed on Essbase
embedded in OBIEE)

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Within OBIEE – Aggregate Persistence
• The Aggregate Persistence wizard support Essbase as a target
• Started with 11.1.1.6.2 BP1
– Mark covered it in a blog post in September 2012
• Same process as with a database
– Generate the code
– Execute via NQCMD
• Cube (ASO) is built
• Data is loaded
• RPD is updated
• Essbase Studio does the job
1) Outline first
2) Data after

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• Why I (personally) don’t like the wizard?
– Doesn’t allow to set a single Essbase option
– Avoid including logical columns with derived formulas
• Wrong figures because of pre/post aggregation rules
– OBIEE does all the work to produce figures loaded in Essbase
– Essbase is “only” a storage support (not a lot more)
• Essbase Studio
– It’s possible to do the same as the wizard (except updating the
RPD)
– Using OBIEE or another source (Oracle DB, SQL Server etc.)
– Customizing the Essbase cube with access to all the options
– Easy to refresh the outline and/or data
– GUI is simple to use

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• The “pros”
– RPD updated with the required federation
– Nothing to do when everything works fine (not always a “pros”)
– Leverage the business model designed in OBIEE (merging
multiple sources or adding business rules)
• The “cons”
– A new tool to manage and maintain
– Not using the real power of Essbase
– More complex to update (not only new data, the outline need to
be updated as well)

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Without OBIEE – Some theory
• ASO
– storage model designed to support large-scale data
– only level0 and selected aggregate values are stored
– calculate on demand
– optimized for sparsely distributed data with many and large
dimensions
• BSO
– the «original» storage
– categorize and store data based on sparsity of data values
– storage in blocks (dense dimensions)
– index file to retrieve blocks
– complex calculation and business rules available

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Without OBIEE – Sparse – dense, blocks
• BSO: sparse vs dense
– dense dimensions define blocks
– sparse dimensions are used in the index file to retrieve blocks
• Data blocks
– contains a cell for every combination of members of dense
dimensions (Cartesian product)
– is supposed to have few (no) empty cells
– can be compressed
• Index file
– contains a reference to a data block for each unique
combination of non empty members of sparse dimensions

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Without OBIEE – Calc script
• BSO: support calc scripts
– Complex business rules
– Not “just” sum-aggregations
– A series of calculations commands, equations and formulas
– Can apply to only few members, one or many dimensions or
the whole cube
• Transforms Essbase from a storage engine into an application
– Financial consolidation
– Workforce planning
– Hyperion Planning uses Essbase BSO (till some time ago the
only one supported)

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Without OBIEE – BSO calc script demo
• Financial crisis
• Market Supervisory Authorities
• Stress tests
– analysis to determine the ability of a given financial institution to
deal with an economic crisis
• Not only banks, insurances have a risk of failure as well
• Scenario
– standardise the financial figures of institutions to compare them
and apply standard analysis on the risk of failure
– map the internal Balance Sheet of every single company to the
one defined by the Market Supervisory Authority
– Be able to reproduce and explain the allocation rules used
– Must work at a regional unit level, legal entity and group level

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Within OBIEE frontend – Run calc scripts
• SampleApp contains many examples
• A NQS function exist to run a calc script
– call NQSExecCalcScript(<database name>, <cube>,
<database>, <script name>);
• Asynchronous execution
– While a script is running and a cube aggregating it’s not
available for queries
– The user need to manually refresh the page to update analysis
when the script is over
– When the script is over? Good question …
• Try, if you have errors, try again
• There is maybe a way via a MaxL script to get the status of
a cube

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Within OBIEE frontend – Essbase writeback
• SampleApp contains many examples
• Using a Logical SQL statement
– UPDATE <table> SET <column> = <value> WHERE
<conditions>;
• Require security and “writable” setting in RPD
– For security reasons it’s better to use an independent Database
and connection pool allowing to write data to the source
– OSSM uses this mechanism to provide input of actual and
target values for KPIs
• If using a User script (javascript) to execute the query via a GET
HTTP call, pay attention to URL encoding of the LSQL statement
– % will not work as it represent the hexadecimal representation
of special characters
• replace it with “%25”

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Thank you

Essbase within/without OBIEE, BI Forum 2014

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Essbase within/without OBIEE, BI Forum 2014