To assist Oracle Hyperion Smart View for Office connection management, Provider Services dynamically detects and retrieves Essbase data sources using the registry.

Web services are self-contained, modular applications that one can describe, publish, locate, and invoke over a network. Web services allow access to regular applications using a Web browser. Web services use XML to code and decode data, and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) to transport it.

Essbase Web Services will expose Essbase user and administrative functionality in a services-oriented (SOA) environment via Provider Services, and allow Essbase to be easily integrated with both Oracle and third-party applications.

Users can now provide the logical name of an active Essbase server or cluster to log in. Previously, they were required to provide either the physical name of the Essbase host or the Provider Services URL. To enable use of the logical name, you must configure the new essbase.properties property, aps.resolver.urls to resolve the logical name to the physical name or URL.

In previous releases, Provider Services did not optimally detect and reject Smart View, Java API, or XMLA client concurrent requests in the same session. In this release, when Provider Services is processing a request from a client, it rejects subsequent requests in the same session until it finishes processing the first request.

Provider Services has been enhanced to provide significant improvement in the performance of the Smart View function HsGetValue. HsGetValue retrieves data points from the data source to the Smart View worksheet, and in previous versions could be slow, depending on the number of data points to be retrieved.

In Oracle Hyperion Smart View for Office installations connected to Essbase through Provider Services, the submission of data has been optimized to improve the performance of the Submit Data operation.

In previous releases, communication between Provider Services Java API and Essbase was not secure. In this release, you can choose to specify secure communication between Java API and Essbase using Secure Socket Layer (SSL).

The new Allocations and Custom Calculation API enables users to execute custom calculations on aggregate storage cubes.

Provider Services supports 32 alias tables for block storage and aggregate storage databases.

Using the Essbase API, you can specify multiple language codes for an alias table. When you create an alias table, a language code is not specified. You can get the set of language codes and clear the language codes associated with an alias table. When clearing aliases from an alias table, language codes are removed from the alias table. When copying an alias table, language codes are removed from the copied alias table. When renaming an alias table, language codes are preserved in the renamed alias table.

Provider Services supports the IPv6 internet protocol.

In this release, when users of Provider Services client products move from one client to another or from one instance to another instance of the same client, the language of the original client is retained, including UI, error messages, and alias tables. For example, if you are logged into a client with Japanese as the preferred language, then Japanese will remain the language of client you change to. Previously, the language reverted to English when you changed clients.

New Java APIs are included in Provider Services to provide the following functionality: