Shared members are another great tool offered by Essbase to help you increase your data and reporting versatility in a simple and extremely efficient manner.
In a nutshell, a shared member is another occurrence of an already existing member in the outline. The shared member only stores a pointer to the existing outline member, thereby giving serious space and processing efficiencies in the database.
The benefits do not end there either. What you can do is have the shared member /original member be a child to many different parents. For example, if you have a product that is available in several markets, you can organize your outline with the child members as needed for each market. The shared member can appear in several places simultaneously and be selectively calculated with relative ease.
In the preceding screenshot, notice how we have the individual vehicles located in three different groups in the database outline. The vehicles under the Total Vehicles parent are the original...