This course is designed to add to the toolset of Planning or Essbase users who already have at least a fundamental understanding of Essbase. Students will go deep into Essbase and through interactive discussions, demonstrations, and hands-on exercises, will learn methods to improve design decisions, ease the maintenance workload, and add value to your current and future Essbase projects, and strengthen your understanding and ability to maintain your Planning applications. Discussion areas include choosing between Block and Aggregate storage options, member and dimensional storage options, advanced calculation development and testing techniques, ASO development options, MDX, MaxL, backup and recovery, tuning for optimal performance across all aspects of the application, configuration strategies, and security. We have had students of all experience levels – ranging from modest to very experienced – walk away thrilled by all the new things they have learned in this course.
Have a good understanding of the architecture of both BSO and ASO cubes. They will know the best practice approaches for modeling Essbase and Planning environments. Students should be able to write calculation scripts for BSO and MDX formulas for ASO. They should also have a good understanding of System Administration topics including security, metadata management, partitioning, backup/recovery, data load options, automation, integration options between cubes, and basic tuning and configuration options.
- Important modeling decisions – BSO vs ASO, storage properties, time series options, Attribute dimensions/Shared/UDAs
- Dimension building best practices – dimension build options for Essbase using load rules, exploration of other build options, incremental vs complete rebuild approaches, 24 x 7 cubes
- Loading data – loading data with load rules, optimizing loads, ASO load strategies
- Smart View – gotchas and the things you need to know to support it in your organization
- BSO architecture and calculations – Dense/Sparse and why you need to know it, advanced calculations including, FIXs, Ifs, cross dimensional operators, range functions, XREF & XWRITE, export calcs, counting calculations, and more.
- Partitioning – replicated and transparent partitions. Other means of pushing data/sharing data across cubes
- Server settings – Essbase.cfg, Server.properties, diagnostic logs
- Tuning – outlines, loads, BSO calculations, ASO aggregations, reports, process
- Security – best practices. Differences between Essbase and Planning. Filters, roles for Essbase and Planning
- MaxL – automating the build, load and aggregation process. Explore other useful MaxL commands
- ASO architecture and aggregations
- MDX for ASO – solving similar problems as presented in BSO using MDX formulas.
- ASO allocations – write back calculations using ASO allocations
- MDX for report writing out of Essbase