Book Image

Oracle Essbase 9 Implementation Guide

Book Image

Oracle Essbase 9 Implementation Guide

Overview of this book

The hot new data analysis trends involve business intelligence and analytics. The technology that supports business intelligence and analytics better than anything else is today's multidimensional OLAP technology ñ and there is none better than Oracle Essbase! Although storing data in a cube and developing analytical applications leaves many people grasping for understanding, especially if their experience is with relational databases, embracing OLAP technology will pay big dividends in the long run. It's easy to develop multidimensional analytic OLAP solutions when you have got this Oracle Essbase book to hand. It is a step-by-step guide to timeless Essbase fundamentals, which takes you from a basic software installation through to launching a fully functioning Essbase database cube. This book will guide you through every stage of installing Oracle's Essbase software on your analytic server, the Essbase Administration Services client, and the client software itself. You will learn, in easy-to-understand language, the concepts of multidimensional database technology as you are taken step by step through building an actual Essbase application complete with database, database calculation scripts, and database report scripts. Once you have your system built and functional, the next course of instruction covers the available automation features included in your Essbase software package and how to use them. These chapters alone are worth the price of admission! As an IT professional you quite rightly have a desire to understand multidimensional OLAP ñ this book gives you that understanding. Should you wish to embark on an exciting career as an Essbase developer/administrator, this book provides a fantastic foundation from which to grow. Best of all, this book is filled with the tips and tricks that you can only get from many years and countless hours spent playing with Essbase. You get them all in just the time it takes you to complete this book.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Oracle Essbase 9 Implementation Guide
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
Acknowledgements
Preface

Essbase Calc commands and functions


As discussed earlier, database calculations are very important features in the Essbase world. For some situations, you may need to write complicated calculation scripts, in other situations, they will be fairly simple. In order for you to become proficient in writing calculation scripts you need to have an understanding of some of the predefined commands and functions that can be used in an Essbase database calculation script. Let's discuss some of the more commonly used commands and functions in detail.

Data declarations

When you are writing some of the more complex calculation scripts, you will find it necessary to manipulate the data while calculating. For manipulating the data, you need to create variables.

In an Essbase calc, you can create temporary variables or global variables (also called substitution variables, which are discussed in greater detail later in this chapter).

The temporary variables are only available when the calculation script is...