vlahos - hjw-to tips for integrating essbase into obiee - seoug 2011

8/12/2019 Vlahos - HJw-To Tips for Integrating Essbase Into OBIEE - SEOUG 2011

1/36

SoutheastSoutheastOracleUserOracleUserGroupGroup

-

Essbase in OBIEEPresented ByAnalytic Vision

November 3, 2011


2/36

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

2


3/36

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

3


4/36

Introduction to Essbaseunc ona y


5/36

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

5


6/36

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)

6


7/36

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

7


8/36

Modeling Essbasen e


9/36

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

9


10/36

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%

,

10


11/36

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

11


12/36

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

12


13/36

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


14/36

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

14


15/36

Typical Essbase OBIEE Issues andeso u on


16/36

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

16


17/36

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

17


18/36

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

18


19/36

Creating an Essbasea emen ompar son


20/36

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

20


21/36

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

21


22/36

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

22


23/36

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

23


24/36

Integrate Relational Data withss ase or eam ess r oug


25/36

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

25


26/36

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

26


27/36

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 ))

27


28/36

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

28


29/36

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

29


30/36

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

30


31/36

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

31


32/36

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

32


33/36

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,

33

.......


34/36

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 .

34


35/36

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

35


36/36

Questions?

Greg Vlahos

Analytic Vision -

[email protected]

vlahos - hjw-to tips for integrating essbase into obiee - seoug 2011

Documents