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SoutheastSoutheastOracleUserOracleUserGroupGroup
-
Essbase in OBIEEPresented ByAnalytic Vision
November 3, 2011
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Todays Agenda
OBIEE Demonstration
Introduction to Essbase Functionality
Understand existing Essbase ad hoc reporting capabilities Learn the importance and impact of Essbase dimension capabilities
Discuss Essbase Reporting Issues in OBIEE and Resolutions
Com are creatin a P&L re ort in OBIEE vs Essbase Smartview
Steps to Integrate Essbase with Relational transaction data
throughoutthepresentation
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Analytic Vision Introduction
Analytic Vision is a Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence,Performance Management consulting firm
Data Warehouse design and development
Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE)
OBIEE pre-built applications over Oracle EBS, PeopleSoft, JDEdwards
Hyperion Essbase and related build and reporting products
Hyperion Planning and Financial Management (HFM) ,
Headquartered in Charlotte, NC; Serving Eastern United States
Retail, Financial Services, Manufacturing, Distribution, Health Sciences,Communications, and Healthcare
rac e a num ar ner
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Introduction to Essbaseunc ona y
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Essbase OLAP Server Highlights
OracleBIEE
Plus
PresentationOffice
Flexible business model definition(not tables and SQL)
Services
Essbase Server OptimizedMultidimensionalstorage
Over300analyticfunctions
p m ze or as a a re r eva
across all levels of aggregation
Advanced calculation and Financial,TimeandCalendar
intelligence
Tricklefeedloadprocesses
Read/Write/Writeback Enterprisescale
writeback support
Over 300 functions an es orecas a oca ons
Leading Excel user interface
Backbone for H erion PlanninNative
RDBMS
Oracle
SQLServer
DB2
Teradata
Multidimensional
OracleBIEE
OracleOLAP
MicrosoftSSAS
SAPBW
Other
XML
Excel
Text
For BI Developers, its an
aggregate act ta e on steroi s
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Essbase Data Modeling and Access are Very Flexible
, ,
Note how one formula Var LY% works for every measure
Excel add-in allows formattin based u on multi le dimensions
User has flexibility to manually key in Member names and refreshreport (e.g. Change May to Jun and retrieve data)
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A Dimension is Limited to One Area of a Report
This is a limitation of Essbase reporting
Many Essbase databases break Year out from Time in order to
provide easy trend reporting for end users yper on ann ng actua requ res t e o ow ng our mens ons:
Year, Periods, Scenario, Version
Understandin this is im ortant when inte ratin relational data
OBIEE reporting is more flexible on this point
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Modeling Essbasen e
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Import Essbase into OBIEE
Under File, Import metadata; select Essbase as your source
Select the desired Essbase Application and Database and click
the arrow to move it into the Repository View
Click the Import UDAs check box to include user defined
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RPD Design: Choosing the Measures
Rename the Essbase Server to match Application
Note that by default all Essbase dimensions come
in as dimensions and there is one fact measure
The Pro for this is all Essbase hierarchies are available
This creates a design quandary for some Essbase
databases, particularly financial databases like Hyperion Planning Users need the ability to drilldown the GL Account hierarchy
But GL dimension often includes statistic metrics like Profit % that needdifferent formatting than the financial accounts
The solution can be multiple versions in OBIEE One version may have Scenario as the Measures, which often has Var%
,
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RPD Design: Convert Measures and Alias
Change the desired dimension type to Measures in Properties
Right click on the Database name
Select Convert measure dimension to flat list to convert every membervalue of the dimension tagged as Measures into a flat list of your facts
Select Create Columns for Alias Table to create dimension columns fordimension member descriptions
This is highly recommended
An alias in Essbase holds the description, and the member name is the code There can be multiple alias tables as well (e.g. one per language)
Default is the alias table that most Essbase solutions use
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RPD Design: Alternate Hierarchies
Some Essbase dimensions hold Alternate Hierarchies
This Period dimension has the standard Year, Qtr,
Month hierarchy, as well as YTD and Month Variance
The developer must decide whether to model this as ,
Points of consideration:
Keeping them separate organizes the metadata much better for users
given report
In this example, the user could not include both the current month and
current YTD in the same re ort, but can ut two re orts on same a e
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RPD Design: Handling Sort Order
By default, Essbase column sort orders are alphabetical
In 10g we used the Evaluate function to run an Essbase MDX Rank
function to create a logical column to use for sort Evaluate(Rank(%1.dimension.currentmember,%2.members),Basic.Months,Basic.Months)
11 now automaticall creates
Member Number Ranking
(Memnor) column for every
This column can now be used to
match the sort order dis la ed
in Essbase, and should be thenew sort default on import
se no sor or er n e a p a e ca or er
is desired13
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RPD Design: Hierarchy Columns Over Alias
Many Essbase databases use the code as the Membername and the description in the Alias
This makes it tough navigating hierarchy selections
Recommend creating Hierarchy Columns for Aliases
ss ase users can swap ese, so we prov e c o ce
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Typical Essbase OBIEE Issues andeso u on
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Drilldown Fails on a Deep Hierarchy
ISSUE: When drilling down a deep hierarchy column in Answers,instead of the next level showing up, the value you drilled downon sappears e.g. ssue may s ow up aroun en
SOLUTION:
hierarchy ancestor drill path
We need to increase the length of
the physical cube dimensionfrom 128 to 2048
Save chan es and this m ster error
is now corrected
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Whitespace Error in Answer Reports
ISSUE: When working with Essbase datain Answers, the following Whitespace
error may appear
SOLUTION:
interface can get confused with the use of some special characters
The best solution is to replace these characters in Essbase
CASE when "demodrive"."GL_Main".""."GL_Main"."Account - Default" = 'SG&A' THEN 'SG+A' else
"demodrive"."GL_Main".""."GL_Main"."Account - Default" END
Note that we havent seen this error in a while, so Oracle may have addressed it
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Ad Hoc Hierarchy Column Returns No Results
ISSUE: Some companies set Essbase to not summarize top level
Excel Essbase reporting allows user to drill with no data
nswers may ma e user n no a a s oa e or an error occurre
:
You can change the Essbase database to summarize to the top
Or train user to use Selection Steps and Filters to scope Essbase data to
return values
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Creating an Essbasea emen ompar son
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P&L Reporting Using Essbase Smart View
Essbase users are used to simple hierarchy account selection
Users can click the accounts in desired sequence across the hierarchy
Allowing them to select all accounts at one time
Performance is fast, as only one MDX retrieve is processed
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P&L Reporting Using OBIEE
The good news is that OBIEE can now create hierarchy reports
But it takes a number of steps to create
Edit Analysis Propertiesfor member placement
Add Account Selection Steps
for each hierarchy level inthe desired report order
This generates the P&L reportwith account drill down
Performs a se arate MDX retrieval for each selection ste
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Advanced Essbase Report Formatting
Essbase users often use Excel as a front end, which allowsformatting anywhere
OBIEE used to be limited to one format per column, but nowcan conditionally alter the format based upon row value
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Advanced Essbase Formatting Setup
Conditional formatting is setfor each column that displays
e mem er a a
Multiple members can beselected er format t e
The format is set separately
from the member selectionThe Style tab can be leveraged
to set the conditionalali nment
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Integrate Relational Data withss ase or eam ess r oug
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Seamlessly Combine Relational and Essbase Data
Federated model combines sources horizontally
Billed Qty comes from relational data
Net Costs comes form Essbase
Revenue could come from either depending on the context of the query
r roug mo e
combinesvertically Year, Quarter, and Month come
rom ss ase
Week and Day drill down intorelational data
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Process Starts with Dimensional Game Planning
Assess the Essbase dimensional organization and compare to thelow level relational transaction data
To best match Essbase, you will need a star schema based design
Compare the levels of Essbase dimensions to columns in relational schema
Note how Essbase uses prefixes in member names like Qtr 1
Either add Essbase matching columns to the physical data model
Or create Business Model logical columns to match the format
To enable drill to detail from any level, the relational
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Create and Test the Relational Model First
This example combines snow flaked dimensions in the Logicallayer to better match the Essbase dimensionality
PhysicalModel LogicalModel
Create logical columns to match Essbase formats
Essbase dimension values cannot be numeric, so convert year to text" " "" " " " " " ". . . . _
Many members have prefixes for readability and uniqueness, convert Qtr'Qtr' || CAST ("BevPlus".""."BEVPLUS"."TIME"."CALENDAR_QUARTER_NUMBER"AS CHARACTER ( 1 ))
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Create Dimension Hierarchies to Match Essbase
These hierarchies leverage the columnsthat have been created to match
ss ase ormats
Note that we leave Year in Time eventhou h Essbase does not store it this wa
There are pros and cons on combining time
Matching the Essbase model works best : agge ierarc ies i e an
Account dimension need to be modeled
to -down, bottom re eat to best match
the corresponding Essbase hierarchyBalanceSheet Asset CurrentAsset Cash Acct12345 Acct12345 Acct12345BalanceSheet Asset CurrentAsset Cash Acct12365 Acct12365 Acct12365BalanceSheet Asset CurrentAsset Inventory RawMaterials Acct12450 Acct12450
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Create a Simple Report to Test the Relational Model
This solution will integrate Essbase from the month up with the goalof drilling into Week and Transaction Date
We create a simple Year level report and test our drill down
After the next step of integrating Essbase, we will run this same
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Integrate Essbase into the Relational Model
Drag corresponding EssbaseGenerations on top of
re ate re at ona co umns
The Essbase database (Basic)now shows u as a Source
Essbase generation names can
be changed in Essbase, as doneere in erio s; ut you
usually see default names
from a different dimension; thiswill impact report usage a bit; if a user selects Month, without
er ng on a ear, ey ge a years o a a or a mon
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Integrate Essbase into the Relational Model
Drag corresponding EssbaseMeasures on top of relatedre at ona acts
Essbase only calculated metrics,like Allocations et dro eddirectly on Sales Metrics
These are not integrated ey w on y wor or ont up
The use of relational only facts,
like Invoice ID, will cause the BI
Server to pull results from therelational data source
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Map the Data Source Content Level
After all Essbase dimensions have been mapped, we need to mapthe Content level
DESIGN TIP: Check that you have mapped Essbase into relational columns
used in the Logical dimension hierarchies
The Relational Source (SALES_F) ismapped at the lowest level
Date SKU State
The Essbase Source (Basic) matches the
owest eve or an tate, ut on ymaps to Month in the Time dimension
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Test the Essbase Integration
Run our simple test report and drill down and check the logs
The log for the drill on Qtr 3 clearly shows an MDX statementselect
{[Measures].[Payroll],
[Measures].[Marketing],
While the log for the drill on Weeks shows a SQL Statement
easures . a es ,
[Measures].[COGS]
}oncolumns,
NONEMPTY{crossjoin({[_Periods3]},{[_Years3]})}propertiesANCESTOR_NAMES,GEN_NUMBERonrowsfrom[BevPlus.Basic]
select
distinct
0
as
c1,D1.c5asc2,
D1.c6asc3,
.......
from
(selectsum(case whenT113101.MEASURESID=7.0thenT113101.AMOUNTend)asc1,
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.......
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What if we start with Essbase in OBIEE First?
Scenario: We have a Planning Essbase database and want toincorporate some FTE related metrics from Payroll.
Challenge: The Essbase database will have several dimensions
that do not exist in the Payroll schema.
The basic integration tips are similar to those we just reviewed, only we are
dragging relational columns into an Essbase business model in the RPD. s scenar o s a goo reason to ave a vers on o ss ase w t ccounts as
the Measures; to enable the Essbase and relational metrics to be combined.
After mapping the common dimension elements; we need to undo somepre u t ss ase us ness o e wor .
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Mapping Relational into Essbase (continued)
For OBI to pick between Essbase and Relational as a source for adimension in common, the overlapping data elements must becomp ete y set up n ot sources.
Need to remove select Essbase elements that cant be mapped
Sort value (or combine with arelational equivalent; e.g., Period)
value in dimension hierarchies
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Questions?
Greg Vlahos
Analytic Vision -
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