tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-88935098116199001282024-03-12T18:11:42.178-07:00Essbase LabsOpinions expressed by the authors of this blog are entirely their own and do not reflect the position of Oracle or any other corporation. Any advice or recommendations discussed on these sites (or sites they link to) are not validated by Oracle.Mike Larimerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12929354990967513503noreply@blogger.comBlogger31125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893509811619900128.post-58231470216811408892019-09-13T11:30:00.000-07:002019-09-13T11:30:23.019-07:00Essbase calculation engine - Black magic demystified – Part 2
Introduction
I assume all of you read part 1 of this blog and found it to
be useful. Here is the link
https://www.essbaselabs.com/2019/08/essbase-calculation-engine-black-magic.html
When Calculation trace was
presented in KScope19, one of the questions we got was whether it can tell when
the block does not exist and when we need to use @CREATEBLOCK. In this post, I
want to just address thatUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893509811619900128.post-75554761202048067672019-08-08T14:21:00.000-07:002019-08-08T14:21:01.121-07:00Essbase calculation engine - Black magic demystified
Introduction
In Essbase user’s world how a
number is computed by the engine was a mystery all these years. In some simple
to moderate cases it was possible to understand how and why a number was
derived that way, but the more complicated the model the harder it was to
understand what it is doing. This is not so surprising considering the nature
of multi-dimensional modeling. Database designersUnknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893509811619900128.post-60993388590739433242019-03-03T23:13:00.001-08:002019-03-03T23:13:17.958-08:00Announcing Layouts, Reports and Impersonation in OAC - Essbase
In this post, I am going to explain what are the layouts, reports in the Essbase Analyze UI and how that will help the users to view and export the data in few clicks.
This feature is only introduced in the web UI but soon will be part of the SmartView as well.
Layouts
Layouts are nothing but the saved grids or bookmarked grids. SmartView is great and it allows to zoom in, zoom out and type toUnknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893509811619900128.post-74664103532097194712019-02-13T16:13:00.000-08:002019-02-13T16:13:26.297-08:00Sandbox and Scenario Workflow in Essbase for 1000's of users
In Essbase, one can always create a new dimension and clone the data and give to different users. This bloats the cube and doesnt scale to large number of users. One needs to introduce strict limits on number of members in that sandbox/version/scenarion dimension. Also, since it is a metadata, business users cannot create new sandbox members.
We introduced new sandboxing and scenario Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893509811619900128.post-70393387564565599792019-01-28T22:40:00.000-08:002019-01-28T22:40:24.199-08:00Announcing Multi-Cell, Multi-Region Drill through
As we have seen in earlier blog posts, how easy it is to create a drill through reports in OAC - Essbase. If you have not read the earlier post yet then read it here.
In this post I am just focusing on multi-cell/multi region drill-through reports. Don't worry, there is no change required on your earlier reports. They will just keep working with single as well as multi selections.
Requirement:Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893509811619900128.post-61545514335213680562019-01-28T02:51:00.003-08:002019-01-28T19:52:22.734-08:00Autonomous Database support in Essbase
Happy New Year 2019!
In my earlier post, we learnt to use existing CLI to connect to ADW and ATP. This was just a workaround and new OAC-Essbase CLI does not need it anymore.
However the workaround was only for CLI and there was no support through UI and REST.
From OAC 5.2, Essbase CLI, UI and REST support to create connection to autonomous database(Autonomous data warehouse and transaction Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893509811619900128.post-71624822921730817432018-12-10T15:32:00.002-08:002018-12-10T15:32:24.091-08:00
Why Essbase?
Recently I had a chance to meet Jim Dorian and Bob Earle, the original founders of Essbase. We met at the 25th birthday party for Essbase ... it has been 25 years since Arbor Soft went public. This motivated me to produce this video to re-enforce the great features of Essbase, which is going very strong in cloud and on-premise and has a strong following among Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893509811619900128.post-3598638179629069912018-11-20T20:32:00.001-08:002018-11-21T08:35:53.466-08:00Loading Data from ADW/ATP to Essbase using CLI
Autonomous data ware house and transaction processing cloud
provides a new way to connect and that will be adapted by many cloud vendors in
coming releases. The new approach is more secure and wallet based.
In current version, OAC - Essbase does not support direct
load from wallet based connections. This may come eventually in coming
releases, this article will show a hack till that time. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893509811619900128.post-59814335155135400752018-11-19T07:22:00.000-08:002018-11-28T06:15:08.901-08:00Tip: A fix for Excel process hanging in memory after exiting excelFrom time to time, the Excel process on my machine will remain in memory for a long time after I close Excel. This will cause Excel add-ins like Smart View and Cube Designer from loading properly.
The culprit is a corrupted Excel15.xlb file that has grown to be a large file size. On my machine, this file was ~10 MB. The normal file size is ~10 KB.
Simply go to this location onMike Larimerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12929354990967513503noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893509811619900128.post-19220253940555035442018-11-15T00:55:00.000-08:002018-11-15T05:32:40.908-08:00OAC - Essbase Drill-Through In Action
In this article, we will try to create a simple drill through report using a data source. Data source can be built from various sources so once you create a drill through report and want to switch from say spreadsheet to database, there will be no impact on the report definition and it will be hot deployed so I would recommend to start on the simple CSV and once all set, switch to data warehouseUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893509811619900128.post-32907233228547654212018-10-03T00:00:00.000-07:002018-10-03T08:20:31.379-07:00Connecting OAC DV & DVD to OAC Essbase
I have seen a lot of users asking about how to setup connectivity from Oracle Data Visualization Desktop with OAC Essbase. In this post we will see how users can setup that connection. Contrary to the belief that additional ports needs to be opened for connectivity from DVD client to OAC Essbase, is not true. OAC Essbase recently included ESSNet over HTTP(S), which does not require additional Ashish Jainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02872653743375330925noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893509811619900128.post-31305271018700062162018-09-19T08:06:00.003-07:002018-09-19T08:07:50.623-07:00Cube Designer - Tips and Tricks #1For me, the Cube Designer is a powerful and natural way to design an Essbase cube. I love the fact I can use the power of Excel to aid me in all aspects of dimension building. However, one of the drawbacks of the DBX paradigm is that it is fairly rigid in it's support for incrementally updating an existing cube. For example, by default you cannot move members from one parent to Mike Larimerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12929354990967513503noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893509811619900128.post-80207971908091231812018-09-07T03:03:00.004-07:002018-10-03T08:21:45.489-07:00OAC - Essbase Drill-Through Reports
Essbase drill through reports had various versions in the past years. There were studio drill-through reports, EIS drill through reports and GL drill through reports. All of them served well for viewing the supporting details but all had pros and cons.
OAC - Essbase has a new and easy way to maintain drill through reports and is entirely re-written to solve all the problems for supporting Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893509811619900128.post-7952314536531289672018-08-16T13:19:00.000-07:002018-10-03T08:22:45.578-07:00Loading data into OAC-Essbase from legacy systems using REST apis
As promised in my previous blog, we will try to load the data from a legacy on-premise system to OAC-Essbase.
As we already discussed, not all legacy systems generate data which can be directly imported into Essbase and not all support JDBC. We may need to write a connector which understands both systems. After moving to the OAC-Essbase this task will be even challenging as Essbase will Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893509811619900128.post-12113682180662907142018-07-26T12:23:00.000-07:002018-10-03T08:23:41.605-07:00Why to open ports when you can stream the data to Essbase (OAC) over HTTPS?
Migrating to cloud is sometimes hard when few things are on premise and few are moved to cloud. It becomes harder when cloud is connecting back to on premise systems. Say we have a large warehouse on premise and some application is on cloud and now cloud application wants to connect to this warehouse.
Some cloud providers came with *** Direct Connect, few came with **** Connect.
We may have to Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893509811619900128.post-30547748440915324142018-07-13T11:52:00.003-07:002018-10-03T08:24:12.703-07:00Playing with essbase ad hoc analysis using command line
If you are not familiar with cURL, JSON and REST, please read my earlier blog. Initial section of it has few links to quick start.
In this blog, we are going to play with a grid using command line. Wait! Is this even possible?
Let's try...
Create a Sample/Basic cube from Gallery.
Let's get a default grid first.
curl -X GET -u <user>:<password> "https://host/essbase/rest/v1/Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893509811619900128.post-41059377471140281572018-07-09T14:13:00.000-07:002018-07-09T14:13:12.220-07:00Introduction to Cube Designer - Files
OAC-Essbase has introduced a new platform concept called a catalog. The catalog is an area of storage within the cloud for both Essbase artifacts and end user artifacts. The catalog uses the OAC-Essbase security to restrict access.Using the Cube Designer ribbon, under the Files category there are two buttons: Cloud and Local. The Cloud button provides access to the catalog. The Local buttonMike Larimerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12929354990967513503noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893509811619900128.post-4704411162835656972018-07-09T08:32:00.003-07:002018-07-09T08:32:54.489-07:00Can Python digest a cube?
Then, I drew the inside of the boa constrictor,
so that the grown-ups could see it clearly. They always need to have things
explained.
But let's put elephants and boa constrictors aside. The more important question would be -- Can Python digest a cube? Nowadays even kids in elementary schools do python, so I
thought it would be useful to show how Python code can call OAC Essbase REST
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893509811619900128.post-50763584850456807192018-07-08T04:38:00.002-07:002018-10-03T08:25:42.520-07:00Introduction to outline editing using JSON and REST apis
In this blog, we will cover how we can automate the outline editing using simple JSON file and REST apis.
Read more about JSON here: https://www.json.org/
and REST apis here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer
We will use cURL for executing the outline REST. cURL is a command line library to execute HTTP requests.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CURL
cURL is Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893509811619900128.post-71996110796451348822018-06-28T16:54:00.001-07:002018-06-28T16:59:15.442-07:00Can we visualize zigzag?
Yes, you can
Remember the zigzag calculation that I introduced in one of my previous posts? If not, you should read it and build the cube as described in that post. Let's try to visualize it using DV.
I assume you already have an OAC instance and know how to log in. First we will need to define connection to OAC Essbase. Click on "Create" button and the click Connection, then pick Oracle Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893509811619900128.post-60041023497112545202018-06-23T04:36:00.000-07:002018-06-24T22:46:24.628-07:00What are the index based rules and why they are used by cube designer?
In the previous blog, we discussed how to create a dimension build rules file and how it creates a dimension with few clicks from raw data.
In this blog, we will cover the basics of index based rules and the difference between them.
Good news is they are the similar except the way column operations(join, create columns, ...) are handled. Another difference is index based rules are supported Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893509811619900128.post-31508640012945947612018-06-20T22:30:00.000-07:002018-06-24T22:47:25.374-07:00(Re)Introducing load rules in OAC
Rules define operations that Essbase performs on data values or on
dimensions and members when it processes a data source. Use rules to map
data values to an Essbase database or to map dimensions and members to
an Essbase outline.
In other words, rules file is the small out of the box ETL utility to extract, transform and load the data into Essbase. You can either build/edit Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893509811619900128.post-27375709892946111412018-06-19T15:08:00.000-07:002018-08-08T14:00:05.266-07:00How to perform allocation with MDX INSERT
What if I told you MDX INSERT can be used for allocations
Unfortunately, no one can be told what the MDX INSERT is. You have to try it for yourself. You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and
do allocations with calc scripts. You take the red pill, you stay in
MDX Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Let's build Sample.Basic cube. ClickUnknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893509811619900128.post-7811724199171971422018-06-14T11:16:00.002-07:002018-06-14T11:17:16.887-07:00MDX Export
How to export dynamically calculated values to a file
In
my previous post I talked about MDX Insert which allows you to store
dynamically calculated values in the cube, but what if you want to
export it into a file? There are a lot of different reasons to do so,
but the most common one would be moving this data into a different
application. Back in 2016 Gary Crisci explained how it can beUnknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8893509811619900128.post-44228744759121886052018-05-31T22:17:00.000-07:002018-06-04T10:19:36.868-07:00Introducing MDX INSERT
How to copy dynamically calculated values to a stored location
In my previous post we discussed how one can build a dynamic zigzag calculation in Essbase. In this post I will show how dynamically calculated values can be used in stored member calculations.
If you recall, our cube had two dynamically calculated formulas:
“Closing Inventory” = "Opening Inventory" - "Shipped" + "Received"Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2