Who am I and why should you read this blog?

I've been working with Business Intelligence software in one form or another for the past 10 years. Beyond my BI experience, I have a finance background ranging over 17 years. Primarily in recent years I've focused on working with the Oracle/Hyperion Essbase OLAP product. Over the years I've been an end user, administrator, developer, consultant, and most recently I am a Vice President for Financial Systems Development at a large financial brokerage firm. I was certified on Essbase in 2004 and received an Oracle Ace award in 2008. I can honestly say I've gotten a lot out of working in this field and I like to give back as much as I can. I've always been very active in user forums and I thought I could be of more service to my fellow developers (presumably by sharing my ideas) if I started a blog to share some of my experiences. Beyond Essbase and its related products I am also a heavy relational database user/developer and ETL developer. So you can expect to find more on this blog than just Essbase. I love the idea of manipulating data and turning it into something useful and when I can, I'll share with you how I do it.
Beyond the technical talk, I find BI to be an architecture for management and when applicable I'll also be talking about the human side (some say the ugly side) of Business Intelligence. I hope you enjoy and can make use of the content you find here.

Best Regards,

Gary Crisci

Monday, December 8, 2008

MDX Resources

Today I received an email from someone asking what resource material I recommend for MDX with Essbase. After I wrote up and sent the response, I thought it would be something good to post, so below is the body of the email I sent:

I would recommend the following reference material for working with MDX for Essbase

If you have block storage experience then the following PDF is very helpful. You can find a copy at http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bi/epm/pdf/4395_Calc_to_MDX_WP.pdf

This content can also be found in the technical reference under the MDX node; there is a section called Aggregate Storage Topics.

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E10530_01/doc/epm.931/html_esb_techref/techref.htm


Beyond the material provided by Hyperion, there are two books I recommend:

Fast Track to MDX – Whitehorn, Zare, and Pasumansky.

Fast Track is not Essbase specific, it is MS Analysis Services focused, but it provides a good introduction to the basics of MDX that I found very useful. Moshe Pasumansky created the MDX language, so it stands to reason if you are serious about learning MDX you should read at least one book that he has authored or co-authored.


MDX Solutions with Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 and Hyperion Essbase, Second Edition – Spofford, Harinath, Webb, Huang, Civardi

Make sure you get the second edition of this book; the second edition is the one that focuses some chapters on Essbase. Again, the content is more on Analysis Services, but at least there are a couple of chapters dedicated to Essbase.

Beyond those resources, practice and experimentation, and leverage the user forums.

http://forums.oracle.com/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=405

http://www.network54.com/Forum/58296/

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