Understand Transparent and Replicated Partitions

A partition is a region of a cube that is shared with another cube. You can create a transparent or replicated partition between a target and a source cube, to share congruent cube regions between them. In the Essbase web interface, you create partition definitions in the target cube.

A transparent partition target region is virtual; it pulls data on-demand from a source cube region containing stored data. The source cube can be in the same or another application, or on another Essbase instance.

A replicated partition target region is a physical copy of stored data from the source cube region. Data stored in a replicated partition target must be synchronized when data changes in the source cube. Using the replicated partition, some users access the data in the target, while others access it in the source.

Changes made to the data in a replicated partition flow from the source to the target. If users are permitted to change the data in the target partition region, it is overwritten when the replicated partition is refreshed.

If all cubes involved in a transparent or replicated partition are hosted on the same instance of Essbase, no login credentials are needed as part of the partition setup. However, the user creating the partition must be provisioned on the target application and also the source application. Business users querying the target cube must also be provisioned on both cubes, typically with Read access.