Essbase and OBIEE Article Now Up On OTN
May 17th, 2008 by Mark Rittman
My new article on Essbase and Oracle BI EE has just gone up on OTN. It covers the steps you’d need to go through to build a simple Essbase database based on the SH Sample Schema that comes with Oracle 9i, 10g and 11g, and how you’d then plug that database into Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, so that you could report on it using Oracle BI Answers and Oracle BI Dashboards.
All the software it uses is available for download on OTN, and now Essbase is on version 9.3.1 it’s an easy install without any of the license management stuff you used to have to do on earlier releases. Take a look if you’re interested, add comments here if you’ve got any questions after working through the article.
June 1st, 2008 at 7:45 am
Hi, Mark.
I read your great article “Integrating Oracle’s Hyperion Essbase - System 9 with Oracle Business Intelligence”. Your piece is so informative. But it also left me puzzled about something.
I use Oracle Warehouse Builder (10g) and have built cubes using it as well as Analytic Workspace Manager. Your article paints a cube that is so similar to what one may build using OWB or AWM. And so, I’m wondering what an Hyperion cube offers that an Oracle cube does not.
I know your article mentions that Essbase allows clients to access a cube that spans multiple heterogenious sources of data. But can’t an Oracle cube do this as well, especially if I build an OWB ETL process to first load my star with these non-Oracle sources.
OWB/AWM provides a really intuitive interface to build and load an Oracle cube, complete with hierarchies, just like the Hyperion cube. I can then point something like Oracle Discoverer at the cube and get the same type of reporting as your article shows.
I suppose what I’m looking for is a compelling reason to build a Hyperion cube instead of an OWB/AWM Oracle cube.
Thanks very much.
Elie
June 1st, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Hi Elie,
I think the key reason why you’d use Essbase rather than Oracle OLAP is because you want to use a query tool that either (a) is Essbase-native, like Hyperion Planning, and therefore requires Essbase, or (b) understands MDX and XML/A, two standards for accessing OLAP data.
The problem as I see it with Oracle OLAP is that whilst SQL access is handy for relational reporting tools (Discoverer, Business Objects etc) it doesn’t provide access to the full range of OLAP expressions and constructs that dedicated OLAP tools make use of. Most OLAP query tools (Hyperion Web Analysis, all the tools that work with MS AS etc) work with the dedicated OLAP language MDX and you really need Essbase for this.
So, it’s not really an architectural difference between the two - as you noted, you load the two cubes in similar ways and under the cover they store their data in multi-dimensional ways, but Oracle OLAP expects you to query the cube relationally, through SQL, whilst Essbase expects you to query it multi-dimensionally, using MDX (the language) and XML/A (the web-based access protocol).
regards
Mark