To bridge this, Simba Technologies came out with a MDX-ODBC bridge which can basically convert MDX to SQL. Oracle did endorse this as can be inferred from this press release here. This is really good as one can easily access Oracle OLAP metadata using MDX without rewriting any of the front-end applications that use MDX. At about the same time, when EPM 11 release came out, Oracle released a new technology called XOLAP which essentially did the same thing i.e exposing Essbase Cubes using the inherent outline structure but by leveraging the SQL at runtime for data. I am not sure whether there is any public XSD based mappings to convert MDX to SQL, but the XOLAP does the conversion extremely well. In fact, the same methodology that i will be showing below can be used for BI EE as well.

What i will be showcasing today is quite simple and can be understood by the high level architecture diagram below

I have used Oracle OLAP 11g R2 since a significant number of bugs have been fixed in this release. The hardest part is in actually locating the 11g version of the Analytic Workspace Manager. The link in OTN is broken and it took me a while in getting the latest version. The latest version of AWM compatible with 11gR2 of Oracle database can be downloaded here. I shall be using the GLOBAL schema for demonstrating this. I start with first building a simple cube from AWM as shown below

There are 2 main things to be aware of before actually starting to the build the XOLAP cube from this Oracle OLAP cube.

1. Each cube built using Oracle OLAP 11g, will have at-least one dimension view per dimension and one cube view. So, the joins between the dimension views and cube views will be similar to joins between a dimension table and fact table. A sample screenshot of a dimension and cube view is given below.

In 11g, there is no necessity for creating the views separately (unlike 10g). And in 11g, the joins across the views perform very efficiently (like a normal table join) whereas in 10g, it is not recommended to make joins between the dimension and cube views.

2. Oracle OLAP is similar to an ASO cube in some respects. The Oracle OLAP 11g SQL views exposed are similar to a write-back partitioned ASO cube. For example, lets consider a simple hierarchy shown below

When we load data and aggregate the cube, the hierarchy stored within Oracle OLAP will be as shown below

Similar to Essbase ASO cube(to enable write-back partitions), this structure for Oracle OLAP provides it a flexibility to store upper level values and also a flexibility to join with the main cube view to get at the data. For example, a normal SQL query on relational data to get the value of member E in the above hierarchy will look as shown below (Assuming each column for each level is named as LEVEL_N)

SELECT LEVEL_2, SUM(MEASURE) FROM DIMENSION
WHERE LEVEL_2 = 'E'
GROUP BY LEVEL_3

But in OLAP since the value of member E is already stored, we should not be doing a SUM aggregation at run-time. Rather we should fire a SQL query to get at the stored value itself. That is done using the SQL query shown below

SELECT LEVEL_2, MEASURE FROM OLAP_FACTDIMENSION_VIEW
 WHERE LEVEL_2 = 'E'

Understanding this is the key in knowing why we need a transparent partition even within Essbase. So, once the Oracle OLAP Cube is built, we log into Essbase Studio and then start building our XOLAP cube. The structure of the XOLAP cube will consist of all the dimensions but with a flat member list. All of these will be built using the OLAP 11g Views.

For example, lets take the Channel and Time Dimension for the XOLAP cube. Both these dimensions will have a flat hierarchy list as shown below

Once the hierarchies and measure hierarchies have been created within Essbase Studio, we need to build an Essbase Cube Schema and then deploy that as a XOLAP cube.

Open the XOLAP cube outline from within EAS. You should basically see a flat outline containing all dimension members.

It is not necessary that the XOLAP cube should have a flat structure. We just need a XOLAP cube where every dimension member in the Oracle OLAP 11g can be mapped to a level-0 member in the target XOLAP cube. In order to get the hierarchical structure for reporting, we again should build another Block Storage cube with no data but with just the hierarchical structure. I will build that here again using Essbase Studio as shown below

While building the cube we need to enable Duplicate member support as the XOLAP cube by default has that enabled. So for transparent partition to work the target Block Storage cube should also have this enabled. After enabling this deploy this block storage cube. This is the cube that will be used for reporting.

The final step in the process will be is to create the transparent partition between both the cubes. Since the member names match for all the dimensions, every time the cube is rebuilt, we can easily rebuild the partition using MaxL.

Now we can easily use the Hyperion Smart View or the classic Excel-add in to report on the OLAP data. Every time a report is run, Smart view will fire an MDX query against the Block Storage cube. Essbase will internally source it from the XOLAP cube through the transparent partition. XOLAP will then convert the MDX to SQL and generate the data. This will all be fast as direct reporting again Oracle OLAP, since Essbase will go only against pre-summarized OLAP intersections. No aggregations will be performed on Oracle OLAP unless necessary.

The same concept can be used using BI EE as well for reporting on Oracle OLAP data. Even in Oracle OLAP 11g, though the integration between BI EE and Oracle OLAP is much easier now, BI EE still does not fire the desired queries unless we model the repository using a complex multi-level assignment technique to go at the desired Oracle OLAP intersections. In the case of using XOLAP, that is not necessary.

Listening to the presentation and reading the slides, it’s clear that this is a work in progress and there’s the usual disclaimers about not being able to make purchasing decisions based on what they say. As this session was a preview and it’s at such an early stage, I won’t be too specific about what they said, though you can listen to the session in full and download the slides on Open World on Demand, session S308151, if you’re interested in the full details. Anyway, here’s what was talked about:

The product is called the “Oracle BI Applications Essbase Integrator” and aims to deliver in three areas:

1. A seamless user experience between the OBIA dashboard and SmartView
2. Metadata sychronization between the BI Apps RPD and the Essbase Outline
3. An Extension to BI Apps Financial Analytics and Supply Chain/Order Analytics

Looking at the demo screenshots, the way that this would be delivered would be through additional narrative views on the BI Apps dashboard (the platform targeted is Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4+, BI Apps 7.9.6 and Essbase 11.1.1) that would provide drop-down menus linking to SmartView analyses. When the menu item is selected, SmartView would be contacted (via the OracleSV protocol that Venkat blogged about here) with context being passed from OBI Apps to Essbase. Dimensions would be on the correct axes, security would be honoured and the user should not have to do anything to maintain their train of thought.

The way that data and metadata would work, is that the BI Apps RPD would be used as the initial data definition for the Essbase cube. The BI Apps RPD would be read and parsed, with data being extracted via UDML and then loaded into a Fusion Middleware MDS repository that stores an abstracted data model for the two systems. This would then be used to generate an Essbase outline along with the neccessary SQL scripts to extract data via the BI Apps RPD. Then, a similar process would work over time to keep the Essbase cube in sync with the BI Apps RPD, but preserving user changes to the Essbase cube so that models and other Essbase-specific analyses are preserved during updates. There is quite a sophisticated process at work here with bi-directional synchronization between the two products, from what I can see it doesn’t use Essbase Studio but instead relies on custom data and metadata loaders.

An area that appears to have had significant thought is how to apply OBI data filters, aggregations and calculations to the Essbase cube. OBI filters are essentially predicate based – filter products on “electrical”, for example – whereas Essbase ones are hierarchical, whilst OBI calculations are in SQL whilst Essbase ones are in MDX. OBI aggregations are also transferred 100% to Essbase, and the whole thing is aimed at the current set of BI Apps and Essbase products together with EBS rather than being reliant on the Fusion (11g) generation of products.

So, I won’t say any more as this session was the first public unveiling of the product, but as I said if you have Oracle Open World on Demand access you can listen to the presentation and see the slides for more details. I’ll be trying to get Alaric across to ODTUG Kaleidoscope later in 2010 to see if he can demo this later in the year, but if like us you’re a user of both the BI Apps and Essbase, this sounds like an interesting development.

In a prior blog entry  here, i had covered the integration to Smart View through a new smart view protocol that was introduced in the EPM 11 release. The smart view protocol basically provides ability to setup integration from BI EE to Smart-view (one can make BI EE to open up excel automatically along with the smart-view add-in and also passing parameters). The relational drill through opens up the reverse integration methodology wherein one can click on an Essbase cell which will in turn open with a BI EE URL along with the parameters.

To set the drills, the pre-requisite is the fact that the Essbase outline would have to be maintained completely only by Essbase Studio. What this means is, if you have a cube that you have created directly using Essbase Administration Services it is not possible to set up drill-through on them. Though this is somewhat limiting but there is a way around it which i shall be covering in a future blog entry.

Lets start with building a SH cube from Essbase Studio. The idea is to build an ASO cube using the hierarchies shown below

Once the hierarchies have been built in the Essbase studio, create an Essbase Model and then deploy the model as an Essbase database.

Once the cube is deployed, create a drill through report from Essbase studio as shown below. Include all the hierarchies whose dimension attributes you would like to pass as values to your BI EE report. In my case, i would like to just pass down time dimension value as a filter to my report

In the report contents tab, instead of SQL, use a drill through link. One very good feature is Essbase Studio can create a BI EE template URL which will pass the cell’s time attribute value through the URL as a URL parameter automatically

Change the above url to a Go URL (if you want to pass the value to a dashboard use the PortalPages url parameter which is the default for Essbase studio)

obi:http://localhost:9704/analytics/saw.dll?Go&
Path=/shared/Sample%20Sales/SmartviewReport&Options=rmf&
Action=Navigate&P0=1&P1=eq&P2=Times.FISCAL_YEAR&P3=$$Times-VALUE$$

Now, go to the associations tab and then associate the drill through report to the model. That is all needed to enable the drill through from smart view. This should now navigate automatically from smart-view to BIEE.

One excellent thing about this integration is the fact that nothing is done to the Essbase server. So, drill through reports can always be setup externally by reporting users rather than Essbase admin users. In addition, this provides a lot of analysis options directly within smart-view.

So what is OracleSV protocol. It is a protocol which is similar to the mailto protocol. For example, in most cases we might have a requirement to open up a local email client with a given email address. In such cases, we would be using mailto: venkat@rittmanmead.com in the url bar of the browser(or in any html code).

This will automatically open up the local email client. Along similar lines, one can use the oraclesv protocol to open the Smartview excel client directly from the browser. The syntax for using this is

oraclesv: <parameter list>

This protocol implementation has been done at the EPM layer. One can find the code for this implementation in the {HYPERION_HOME}\products\Essbase\SmartView\Bin\chrome\content directory.

One of the important points to note is the fact that the same approach can be used to implement custom integration between EPM 11 products, BI EE etc with any desktop gadgets. In the older releases of various browsers like IE and Firefox, this was considered a security risk. But now with the latest releases, i believe this is no more an issue. Also, one has to be aware that this protocol is browser specific. In my case, it worked only for IE and Firefox. For firefox one would have to enable it from about:config screen. And also, one would have to ensure that the smartview client add-on is installed for firefox.

The other aspect of this protocol is the fact that it provides a SSO from Hyperion Planning to Smartview.

In the coming blog entries i would cover what parameters this protocol can take and how one can call this directly from BI EE.