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", was originally developed
by Arbor Software, which merged with Hyperion Software in 1998. It is currently
available from Hyperion Solutions Corporation (now a subsidiary of Oracle Corporation
[1]), and until late 2005 was also marketed by IBM as DB2 OLAP Server. [2] Oracle
announced the acquisition of Hyperion on March 1, 2007. The acquisition closure was
announced on April 18, 2007.

The term "on-line analytical processing" (OLAP) was coined by database researcher E. F.
Codd in a whitepaper 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 controversially withdrew the paper.[3]

By comparison with "on-line transaction processing" (OLTP), OLAP defines a database

technology that is 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)).

Many Hyperion products were renamed 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. [4]

Hyperion Essbase was named as one of the 10 most influential technology innovations of
the last 10 years by Information Age magazine in its 10th anniversary issue, along with
Netscape, 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 References

• 7 External links

[edit] History and Motivation

Although Essbase has been categorised 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. [1]

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

Jan Feb Mar Total Jan Feb Mar Total Jan Feb Mar Total
Quantity 240 1890 50 2180 Quantity 760 110 2950 3820 Quantity 1000 2000 3000 6000
Sales $24 $189 $5 $218 Sales $76 $11 $295 $382 Sales $100 $200 $300 $600
Expenses $20 $150 $3 $173 Expenses $60 $10 $237 $307 Expenses $80 $160 $240 $480
Profit $4 $39 $2 $45 Profit $16 $1 $58 $75 Profit $20 $40 $60 $120

An alternative representation of this structure would be 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
A technical problem faced by multidimensional databases is the physical representation
of data as the number and size of dimensions increases. 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 × 10000 × 5000) cells. If each cell is represented
as a 64-bit floating point value, this equates to a memory requirement of at least 17
gigabytes. 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
want to also be able 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 be 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[1] 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, this was named Block Storage Option (Essbase BSO), and later referred to as
Essbase Analytics in marketing material.

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 is
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 megabytes of memory, plus the size of the index used to look
up the appropriate blocks.

Because this implementation is hidden 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

Calculations in Essbase BSO can be specified 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) is implicitly performed 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 are calculated when a value addressed by that member is accessed by a
user, and are not stored.

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 be used to 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 is limited by 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 is 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.

The major drawback of this approach is 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

Calculations in Essbase ASO can be specified as:

• the aggregation of values through dimensional hierarchies; or

• dynamically calculated dimension members.

The first method (dimension aggregation) is basically the same as for Essbase BSO.

The second method (dynamic calculations) evaluates MDX expressions against

dimension members.

[edit] User Interface

The most widely known user interface to Essbase is 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).[2]

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".[3] Tableau was originally developed 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 are:

• 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)

The previous offerings from Hyperion are offered with new names as given below:

Hyperion's previous offerings Hyperion System 9 BI+ offerings

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

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

[edit] Administrative Interface

A number of standard interfaces are provided for the administration 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; and
• 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.
• 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] References
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E10530_01/doc/index.htm

1. ^ 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.
2. ^ Hyperion Solutions Corporation (2006). Essbase Database Administrator's
Guide.
3. ^ Tableau Software (2005). Tableau Software Lands Global OEM Deal with
Hyperion. Press release.

[edit] External links

• Hyperion at Oracle

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essbase"

Categories: OLAP