In Oracle Essbase Integration Services, you can use text files (flat files) as data sources, but note these conditions:
Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) drivers cannot extract month names from date fields in text files, for example, “January” cannot be extracted from “01/30/04.” During a member load, you can apply a transformation so that the numerical value is converted into the name of the month.
If the data source consists of several text files that resemble or consist of tables, the importing of data will be much like that of importing relational data. If the data source is one large, contiguous text file with several different columns, it is likely that you will need to “cleanse” your data beforehand (see Cleansing Data). Or you may drop some tables multiple times to represent dimensions. You may also need to define your joins explicitly for optimal performance (see Joining Tables.