Oracle® Essbase

Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management System Installer, Fusion Edition and Oracle's Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management System Configurator streamline and simplify the process of installing, upgrading, and configuring Essbase. Oracle's Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management System Configurator uses the Oracle's Hyperion Shared Services Registry, which enables configuration information to be stored and reused.

Oracle's Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management System Diagnostics confirms that product components are successfully installed, configured, and running.

The installation and configuration documentation set includes a reduced number of installation guides and enables you to find information quickly and easily. Individual product installation guides are replaced by the following guides:

You may also need to use one or more of the following guides:

Lifecycle Management (LCM) provides a consistent way for Hyperion products to migrate applications, cubes, repositories, or artifacts across product environments and operating systems. LCM interface is integrated with Oracle's Hyperion® Shared Services Console.

LCM features:

See the Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management System Lifecycle Management Guide.

Typed measures extend the analytical capabilities of Essbase. In addition to numeric values, measures can also be associated with text- or date-typed values.

Text measures are tagged as “text” in whichever dimension measures are represented. They enable cell values to contain one of an enumerated list of text labels. These labels are defined, at the outline level, using a mapping artifact called a text list.

Date measures are tagged as “date” in the dimension where measures are represented. Date measures enable cell values in the form of a formatted date.

Using format strings, you can format the values (cell contents) of Essbase database members in numeric type measures so that they appear, for query purposes, as text, dates, or other types of predefined values. The resultant display value is the cell’s formatted value.

Format strings enable you to display more meaningful values in place of raw numeric values. For example, using a text based formatted value, you might display data cells as “High,” “Medium,” and “Low.”

Prior to this release, Essbase could store and calculate measures based on attributes. However, there are cases where attributes may change over a dimension such as time, or across multiple dimensions. For example, product packaging could vary over time as well as over geographical markets.

Varying attributes enable values in the base dimension to vary by one or more independent dimensions. With varying attributes, base members (such as products) can vary by size (an attribute) across time and scenario, or across markets.

Varying attributes add the capability of Essbase to store, and calculate measures for, attributes that vary over multiple dimensions. For example, a report showing the profit per package type can be calculated according to the changing attributes. A product that was packaged in 16 ounce containers in January, but in May changed to a package type of 20 ounces, may have its profits displayed separately according to the package group where it belonged at the time.

Essbase can also calculate varying attributes based on an "as was" scenario; for example, you can calculate the profit for the different package types as the assignments were at one given time. In this approach, you set the perspective, fixing on one time and ignoring the change in attributes over time. This can be useful for analysis of profits as if the changes to the attributes did not occur.

Additionally, Essbase can perform member selections based on a changing attribute. For example, you can query for all products that had a package type of 32_ounces in April.

Regular Essbase backups, which should be integrated into production server maintenance, are key to database maintenance. Backup frequency should be determined by the volatility of the database and server environment and the need for rapid database restoration (should a server interruption occur).

To back up and restore block storage databases, you can use either of the following methods:

To back up and restore aggregate storage applications, you must use manual procedures.

See the Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management System Backup and Recovery Guide.

Within an aggregate storage database, you can clear data from a specific region and retain the data located in other regions. This feature is useful when you want to delete volatile data (such as data corresponding to the last month) but retain historical data. You must have Database Manager or Administrator permission to clear data.

Methods for clearing data from a region:

To clear data from a specified region, you can use the alter database MaxL statement with the clear data in region grammar. The syntax for the statement is as follows:

alter database appname.dbname clear data in region {MDX set expression} [physical];

In block storage applications, in calculation scripts and outline member formulas, you can use system environment variables as placeholders for user-specific system settings. Because environment variables are defined at the operating system level, they are available to all calculation scripts and formulas on Essbase Server.

To optimize the replication of an aggregate storage database when the aggregate storage database is the target and a block storage database is the source and the two outlines are identical, use one of these methods:

Both optimization methods affect only the target aggregate storage application; the source block storage application is not affected. The methods do not apply to block storage replication.

The FORCEGRIDEXPANSION configuration setting in the essbase.cfg file forces the expansion of the grid when transparent partitions are queried. Use of the setting ensures that correct results are retrieved, even if most data values are displayed as #MISSING (whether or not the cells that display #MISSING contain data).

The FORCEGRIDEXPANSION setting is used with the GRIDEXPANSION configuration setting.

For requests sent from a data source to a transparent partition target (whether a block storage or aggregate storage database), you can log transaction response times using the ENABLE_DIAG_TRANSPARENT_PARTITION configuration setting in the essbase.cfg file. Logging these messages is helpful when troubleshooting response times that are too slow.

When the transparent partition target is an aggregate storage database, you can specify the maximum size of the request grid and the response grid, using the MAX_REQUEST_GRID_SIZE and MAX_RESPONSE_GRID_SIZE configuration settings.

The DATAEXPORTENABLEBATCHINSERT configuration setting in the essbase.cfg file specifies whether, when Essbase data is exported for direct insertion into a relational database, the batch-insert method, instead of the default row-insert method, is used. Rows of data can be inserted only if the relational database and the ODBC driver support the functionality.

Aggregate storage applications and databases can be Unicode-mode enabled.

Common logging enables users and administrators who are using multiple Hyperion products to find log messages in a common place, thus reducing time and effort for tracing the appropriate log file.

Accordingly, Essbase log files are located in HYPERION_HOME/logs/essbase.

Using Outline Editor in Administration Services Console, you can force implied share settings for aggregate storage and block storage outlines. For block storage databases, you can override the default Implied Share setting of active by using configuration file settings to control the Essbase Server default and application default settings. Two API functions are provided for programming convenience: EssOtlGetImpliedShare and EssOtlSetImpliedShare.

XOLAP (extended online analytic processing) is a variation on the role of OLAP in business intelligence. Specifically, XOLAP is an Essbase multidimensional database that stores only the outline metadata and retrieves data from a relational database at query time. XOLAP thus integrates a source relational database with an Essbase database, leveraging the scalability of the relational database with the more sophisticated analytic capabilities of a multidimensional database. Your business needs determine whether OLAP or XOLAP is best suited to your environment.

For information on how to designate models for XOLAP, see the Oracle Essbase Studio online help.

When loading SQL data into aggregate storage databases, you can use up to eight rules files to load data in parallel. Each rules file must use the same authentication information (SQL user name and password).

Essbase initializes multiple temporary aggregate storage data load buffers (one for each rules file), where data values are sorted and accumulated. When the data is fully loaded into the data load buffers, Essbase commits the contents of all buffers into the database in one operation, which is faster than committing buffers individually.

The following calculation functions are new:

The following MDX functions are new:

The WITH PERSPECTIVE MDX clause enables you to qualify queries based on varying attribute perspective.

The MdxFormat directive enables the creation of format strings to change the appearance of member values.

The following Report Writer commands are new:

The following essbase.cfg settings are new:

The following MaxL grammar was added:

The following MaxL and MaxL Shell statements were added:

The following functionality had been added to the Oracle Essbase API: