Technology Blueprints & Strategy with Gary Crisci

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/technetwork/middleware/bi-foundation/4395-calc-to-mdx-wp-133362.pdf This content can also be found in the technical reference under the MDX node; there is a section called Aggregate Storage Topics. http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E57185_01/ESBTR/calc2mdx.html 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...

Quick update since I haven't posted in a while. I actually have a topic to post on I just haven't gotten around to putting it up, but should have it up soon. Things have been very busy lately, working in the financial services industry is a challenge these days, actually I suppose working in any industry is a challenge these days. Fortunately I do have some distractions, one of which is my participation on the ODTUG Hyperion SIG Board of Directors. Currently the BOD is engaged in putting together the agenda for the Kaleidoscope user conference in Monterey, CA. June 2009. Over the past few weeks, we have been reviewing abstracts and structuring the different tracks for the five days of the conference. I am very pleased with the content we have and really like the way the program is coming together. I strongly urge you to check out http://www.odtugkaleidoscope.com/ and consider attending this year. While expenses are going to be very tight this year for most of us, I stro...

Something I've worked on a number of times and even spoke about at the ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference is MDX and specifically how to use it to do time related calcs like period-to-date functions and Time Balancing. I've seen quite a few posts on the subject and figured it was worth putting up some examples here. More recent releases of Essbase will do time balancing natively, but period-to-date is something you still have to work out. My preferred method of doing this is to add an analytic dimension to the database and set the formula in one of the calculated members. For those of you who aren't familiar with the term, an analytic dimension is one that you add to your database that has a single default load member, all other members are calculated. In the case of time functionality I usually call this dimension [View] and have a default member called [Periodic]. I will then have some other members as needed, like [Time Balance], [QTD], [YTD], etc. For Example: The perio...

Ok, so for my first post I figured I would write about something that just happened the other day that I thought was pretty cool. By the way, this is pretty much going to be the format of this blog, when I do something that I think is cool, I'll write about it and if anyone can get any benefit out of it cool. So as I was saying, I came up against a little challenge the other day and the result came out pretty nicely. At the end of the day I had to create two different time roll-ups in my ASO cube. I thought about actually doing two different time dimensions (what the hell it's an ASO cube I can have as many dimensions as I want) I resisted this temptation and went back to my OLAP basics, would the two dimensions have any meaning if I cross tabbed them in a report? Answer: no; so I went back to alternate roll-up. Now an Alternate roll-up is certainly nothing new, and probably not worth writing about in and of itself, but this one did pose a couple of challenges. (For those...