Essbase

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Essbase
Stable release 11.1.2.1.0 / Mar 2011
Microsoft Windows, Linux, AIX,
Operating system HP-UX (till 11.1.1.3.0 only),
Solaris
Type Multidimensional database
License Proprietary
Website www.oracle.com/bi

Essbase is a multidimensional database management system (MDBMS) that provides a

multidimensional database platform upon which to build analytic applications. Essbase,
whose name derives from "Extended Spread Sheet dataBASE", began as a product of
Arbor Software, which merged with Hyperion Software in 1998. Oracle Corporation
acquired Hyperion Solutions Corporation in 2007, as of 2009 it markets Essbase as
"Oracle Essbase". Until late 2005 IBM also marketed the product — as DB2 OLAP
Server.[1]

The database researcher E. F. Codd coined the term "on-line analytical processing"
(OLAP) in a whitepaper[2] that set out twelve rules for analytic systems (an allusion to his
earlier famous set of twelve rules defining the relational model). This whitepaper,
published by Computerworld, was somewhat explicit in its reference to Essbase features,
and when it was later discovered that Codd had been sponsored by Arbor Software,
Computerworld withdrew the paper.[3]

In contrast to "on-line transaction processing" (OLTP), OLAP defines a database

technology optimized for processing human queries rather than transactions. The results
of this orientation was that MDBMS oriented their performance requirements around a
different set of benchmarks (Analytic Performance Benchmark, APB-1) than that of
RDBMS (Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC)).

Hyperion renamed many of its products in 2005, giving Essbase an official name of
Hyperion System 9 BI+ Analytic Services, but the new name was largely ignored by
practitioners. The Essbase brand was later returned to the official product name for
marketing purposes, but the server software still carried the "Analytic Services" title until
it was incorporated into Oracle's Business Intelligence product suite. [1]

In August 2005, Information Age magazine named Essbase as one of the 10 most
influential technology innovations of the previous 10 years,[4] along with Netscape, the
BlackBerry, Google, virtualization, Voice Over IP (VOIP), Linux, XML, the Pentium
processor and ADSL. Editor Kenny MacIver said: "Hyperion Essbase was the multi-
dimensional database technology that put online analytical processing on the business
intelligence map. It has spurred the creation of scores of rival OLAP products – and
billions of OLAP cubes".

Contents
[hide]

• 1 History and motivation

o 1.1 Sparsity
o 1.2 Aggregation
• 2 Block storage (Essbase Analytics)
o 2.1 Calculation engine
• 3 Aggregate storage (Enterprise Analytics)
o 3.1 Calculation engine
• 4 User interface
• 5 Administrative interface
• 6 Competitors
• 7 Export and/or product migration of Essbase
• 8 See also
• 9 References

• 10 External links

[edit] History and motivation

Although Essbase has been categorised[by whom?] as a general-purpose multidimensional
database, it was originally developed to address the scalability issues associated with
spreadsheets such as Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Excel. Indeed, the patent covering
Essbase uses spreadsheets as a motivating example to illustrate the need for such a
system.[5]

In this context, "multi-dimensional" refers to the representation of financial data in

spreadsheet format. A typical spreadsheet may display time intervals along column
headings, and account names on row headings. For example:

Jan Feb Mar Total

Quantity 1000 2000 3000 6000
Sales $100 $200 $300 $600
Expenses $80 $160 $240 $480
Profit $20 $40 $60 $120
If a user wants to break down these values by region, for example, this typically involves
the duplication of this table on multiple spreadsheets:

North South Total Region

Ja Ma Tota Ja Fe Tota Tota
Feb Mar Jan Feb Mar
n r l n b l l
Quantit 189 Quantit 295 Quantit 100 200 300
240 50 2180 760 110 3820 6000
y 0 y 0 y 0 0 0
$18 $29 $10 $20 $30
Sales $24 $5 $218 Sales $76 $11 $382 Sales $600
9 5 0 0 0
Expense $15 Expense $23 Expense $16 $24
$20 $3 $173 $60 $10 $307 $80 $480
s 0 s 7 s 0 0
Profit $4 $39 $2 $45 Profit $16 $1 $58 $75 Profit $20 $40 $60 $120

An alternative representation of this structure would require a three-dimensional

spreadsheet grid, giving rise to the idea that "Time", "Account", and "Region" are
dimensions. As further dimensions are added to the system, it becomes very difficult to
maintain spreadsheets that correctly represent the multi-dimensional values.
Multidimensional databases such as Essbase provide a data store for values that exist, at
least conceptually, in a multi-dimensional "hypercube".

[edit] Sparsity

As the number and size of dimensions increases, developers of multidimensional

databases increasingly face technical problems in the physical representation of data. Say
the above example was extended to add a "Customer" and "Product" dimension:

Dimension Number of dimension values

Accounts 4
Time 4
Region 3
Customer 10,000
Product 5,000

If the multidimensional database reserved storage space for every possible value, it would
need to store 2,400,000,000 (4 × 4 × 3 × 10,000 × 5,000) cells. If the software maps each
cell as a 64-bit floating point value, this equates to a memory requirement of at least 17
gigabytes (exactly 19.2GB). In practice, of course, the number of combinations of
"Customer" and "Product" that contain meaningful values will be a tiny subset of the total
space. This property of multi-dimensional spaces is referred to as sparsity.

[edit] Aggregation

OLAP systems generally provide for multiple levels of detail within each dimension by
arranging the members of each dimension into one or more hierarchies. A time
dimension, for example, may be represented as a hierarchy starting with "Total Time",
and breaking down into multiple years, then quarters, then months. An Accounts
dimension may start with "Profit", which breaks down into "Sales" and "Expenses", and
so on.

In the example above, if "Product" represents individual product SKUs, analysts may also
want to report using aggregations such as "Product Group", "Product Family", "Product
Line", etc. Similarly, for "Customer", natural aggregations may arrange customers
according to geographic location or industry.

The number of aggregate values implied by a set of input data can become surprisingly
large. If the Customer and Product dimensions are each in fact six "generations" deep,
then 36 (6 × 6) aggregate values are affected by a single data point. It follows that if all
these aggregate values are to be stored, the amount of space required is proportional to
the product of the depth of all aggregating dimensions. For large databases, this can cause
the effective storage requirements to be many hundred times the size of the data being
aggregated.

[edit] Block storage (Essbase Analytics)

Since version 7, Essbase has supported two "storage options" which take advantage of
sparsity to minimize the amount of physical memory and disk space required to represent
large multidimensional spaces. The Essbase patent[5] describes the original method, which
aimed to reduce the amount of physical memory required without increasing the time
required to look up closely-related values. With the introduction of alternative storage
options, marketing materials called this the Block Storage Option (Essbase BSO), later
referred to as Essbase Analytics.

Put briefly, Essbase requires the developer to tag dimensions as "dense" or "sparse". The
system then arranges data to represent the hypercube into "blocks", where each block
comprises a multi-dimensional array made up of "dense" dimensions, and space is
allocated for every potential cell in that block. Sparsity is exploited because the system
only creates blocks when required. In the example above, say the developer has tagged
"Accounts" and "Time" as "dense", and "Region", "Customer", and "Product" as
"sparse". If there are, say, 12,000 combinations of Region, Customer and Product that
contain data, then only 12,000 blocks will be created, each block large enough to store
every possible combination of Accounts and Time. The number of cells stored is
therefore 192000 (4 × 4 × 12000), requiring under 2 gigabytes of memory (exact
1,536MB), plus the size of the index used to look up the appropriate blocks.

Because the database hides this implementation from front-end tools (i.e., a report that
attempts to retrieve data from non-existent cells merely sees "null" values), the full
hypercube can be navigated naturally, and it is possible to load values into any cell
interactively.

[edit] Calculation engine

Users can specify calculations in Essbase BSO as:

• the aggregation of values through dimensional hierarchies;

• stored calculations on dimension members;
• "dynamically calculated" dimension members; or
• procedural "calculation scripts" that act on values stored in the database.

The first method (dimension aggregation) takes place implicitly through addition, or by
selectively tagging branches of the hierarchy to be subtracted, multiplied, divided or
ignored. Also, the result of this aggregation can be stored in the database, or calculated
dynamically on demand—members must be tagged as "Stored" or "Dynamic Calc." to
specify which method is to be used.

The second method (stored calculations) uses a formula against each calculated
dimension member — when Essbase calculates that member, the result is stored against
that member just like a data value.

The third method (dynamic calculation) is specified in exactly the same format as stored
calculations, but calculates a result when a user accesses a value addressed by that
member; the system does not store such calculated values.

The fourth method (calculation scripts) uses a procedural programming language specific
to the Essbase calculation engine. This type of calculation may act upon any data value in
the hypercube, and can therefore perform calculations that cannot be expressed as a
simple formula.

A calculation script must also be executed to trigger the calculation of aggregated values
or stored calculations as described above—a built-in calculation script (called the "default
calculation") can be used to execute this type of calculation.

[edit] Aggregate storage (Enterprise Analytics)

Although block storage effectively minimizes storage requirements without impacting
retrieval time, it has limitations in its treatment of aggregate data in large applications,
motivating the introduction of a second storage engine, named Aggregate Storage
Option (Essbase ASO) or more recently, Enterprise Analytics. This storage option
makes the database behave much more similarly to OLAP databases like SQL Server
Analysis Services.

Following a data load, Essbase ASO does not store any aggregate values, but instead
calculates them on demand. For large databases, where the time required to generate
these values may become inconvenient, the database can materialize one or more
aggregate "views", made up of one aggregate level from each dimension (for example,
the database may calculate all combinations of the fifth generation of Product with the
third generation of Customer), and these views are then used to generate other aggregate
values where possible. This process can be partially automated, where the administrator
specifies the amount of disk space that may be used, and the database generates views
according to actual usage.

This approach has a major drawback in that the cube cannot be treated for calculation
purposes as a single large hypercube, because aggregate values cannot be directly
controlled, so write-back from front-end tools is limited, and complex calculations that
cannot be expressed as MDX expressions are not possible.

[edit] Calculation engine

Essbase ASO can specify calculations as:

• the aggregation of values through dimensional hierarchies; or

• dynamically calculated dimension members.

The first method (dimension aggregation) basically duplicates the algorithm used by
Essbase BSO.

The second method (dynamic calculations) evaluates MDX expressions against

dimension members.

[edit] User interface

Many users work with Essbase data using as their interface an add-in for Microsoft Excel
(previously also Lotus 1-2-3). The add-in adds a menu to the spreadsheet application that
can be used to connect to Essbase databases, retrieve data, and navigate the cube's
dimensions ("Zoom in", "Pivot", etc.).[6]

With the release of System 9, Hyperion provided a new user interface add-in for Essbase
called "SmartView for Microsoft Office". SmartView provides access to Essbase and
other System 9 content for Microsoft Powerpoint, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Outlook as
well as supplanting the previous add-in for Microsoft Excel.

In 2005, Hyperion began to offer a visualization tool called Tableau under the name
"Hyperion Visual Explorer" [2] (2005). Tableau originated at Stanford University as a
government-sponsored research project to investigate new ways for users to interact with
relational and OLAP databases.

Other user-facing applications with support for Essbase databases include:

• Hyperion Analyzer (aka Hyperion System 9 BI+ Web Analysis)

• Hyperion Reports (aka Hyperion System 9 BI+ Financial Reporting)
• Hyperion Enterprise Reporting
• Hyperion Intelligence (aka Hyperion System 9 BI+ Interactive Reporting)
• Hyperion SQR (aka Hyperion System 9 BI+ Production Reporting)
• Alphablox
 • Arcplan dynaSight (aka Arcplan Enterprise)
• Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition (aka OBIEE, Siebel
Analytics)
• Applied OLAP Dodeca
• CXO-Cockpit Reporting Suite

The previous offerings from Hyperion acquired new names as given below:

Hyperion's previous offerings Hyperion System 9 BI+ offerings

Hyperion Essbase ASO Enterprise Analytics
Hyperion Essbase BSO Essbase Analytics
Hyperion Analyzer Web Analysis
Hyperion Reports Financial Reporting
Hyperion Intelligence Interactive Reporting
Hyperion SQR Production Reporting
Hyperion Metrics Builder Enterprise Metrics

APIs are available for C, Visual Basic and Java, and embedded scripting support is
available for Perl. The standardised XML for Analysis protocol can query Essbase data
sources using the MDX language.

In 2007, Oracle Corporation began bundling Hyperion BI tools into Oracle Business
Intelligence Enterprise Edition Plus.

[edit] Administrative interface

A number of standard interfaces can administer of Essbase applications:

• ESSCMD, the original command line interface for administration commands;

• MaxL, a "multi-dimensional database access language" which provides both a
superset of ESSCMD commands, but with a syntax more akin to SQL, as well as
support for MDX queries;
• Essbase Application Manager, the original Microsoft Windows GUI
administration client, compatible with versions of Essbase before 7.0;
• Essbase Administration Services, later renamed Analytic Administration Services,
and then back to 'Essbase Administration Services' in v. 9.3.1, the currently-
supported GUI administration client; and
• Essbase Integration Server for maintaining the structure and content of Essbase
databases based on data models derived from relational or file-based data sources.

[edit] Competitors
There are several significant competitors among the OLAP, analytics products to that of
Essbase (HOLAP/MOLAP) on the market, among them Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft
Analysis Services, (MOLAP, HOLAP, ROLAP), IBM Cognos (ROLAP),
IBM/Cognos/Applix TM1 (MOLAP), Oracle OLAP (ROLAP/MOLAP), and
MicroStrategy (ROLAP).

Also note that of the above competitors, including Essbase, all use heterogenous
relational (Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, IBM DB/2, TeraData, Access, etc.) or non-
relational data sourcing (Excel, text Files, CSV Files, etc.) to feed the cubes (facts and
dimensional data), except for Oracle OLAP which may only use Oracle relational
sourcing.

[edit] Export and/or product migration of Essbase

As of 2009 two options can export Essbase cubes into other formats:

1. CubePort, a commercial conversion application, converts Essbase cubes to the

Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services product. This product performs an
object-to-object translation that make up an Essbase cube, including: outline,
member formulas, calc scripts, data loading (load rules), report scripts to MDX
queries, substitution variables, and security model. It can extract from any
platform version of Essbase, including Oracle/Hyperion Essbase on Windows,
Unix, AIX, HP UX, Solaris, IBM DB/2 OLAP, or AS/400 Showcase Essbase.
2. OlapUnderground Outline Extractor performs a pure, rudimentary, export of the
outline, though it does not directly create any new objects. The output is a simple
text file that can be pulled indirectly into other OLAP products, among other uses,
such as synchronizing outlines. The Outline Extractor is now maintained,
supported and distributed free of charge by Applied OLAP, Inc.

[edit] See also

• OLAP
• Oracle OLAP
• Business Intelligence
• Data Warehousing
• Hyperion Planning
• Comparison of OLAP Servers

[edit] References
v11.1.1.3 documentation: *
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E12825_01/nav/portal_3.htm

v9.3.1 documentation: * http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E10530_01/doc/index.htm

1. ^ http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/db2/db2olap/
 2. ^ Codd, E. F.; S B Codd; C T Salley (1993-07-26). "Providing OLAP to User-Analysts:
An IT Mandate". Computerworld.
3. ^ http://www.regdeveloper.com/2007/01/26/olap_speed/
4. ^
http://web.archive.org/web/20070927190115/http://www.hyperion.com/company/news/n
ews_releases/press_release_2005_000512.cfm
5. ^ a b Earle, Robert J. (1992) "Method and apparatus for storing and retrieving multi-
dimensional data in computer memory". United States Patent 5,359,724 assigned to
Arbor Software Corporation.
6. ^ Hyperion Solutions Corporation (2006). Essbase Database Administrator's Guide.

[edit] External links

• Oracle EPM, BI & Data Warehousing
• Oracle Essbase
• Hyperion at Oracle
• Russian Essbase Site

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