Start with aggregation

The simplest calculations in an Essbase cube often come directly from its hierarchies.

For example, a Time hierarchy might contain:

Year → Q1 → Jan, Feb, Mar

and a Market hierarchy might contain:

Total Market → North America → United States → California

Essbase can use these relationships to derive higher-level values from lower-level data. For example, monthly sales can contribute to quarterly and yearly totals, while state-level sales can contribute to country and market totals.

This process of combining lower-level values into higher-level values is called aggregation or consolidation.

If your application primarily needs to summarize large amounts of detailed data across many dimensions and hierarchies for reporting and analysis, ASO is designed for this type of workload.

BSO also supports hierarchical aggregation, but provides additional calculation capabilities that can become important as your business logic becomes more complex.