I had some time today to quickly install Essbase and BI EE 10.1.3.3.2 to test out the newly added feature of Essbase connectivity. Following are the list of bare minimum components that you would need to get this up and running.
1. BI EE 10.1.3.3.2 – If you are doing an upgrade from an earlier release ensure that you have added ESSBASE = nqsdbgatewayessbasecapi; to your NQSConfig.ini
2. Hyperion Essbase Server
3. Hyperion Essbase Client (This is very important for the connectivity to work. If you already have an Essbase server somewhere then you would just need 1 and 3).
4. Hyperion Administration Services (This is for starting up various Essbase applications).
You can download the Essbase components from http://edelivery.oracle.com. Just an observation from my end. Ensure that you are restarting your machine once all the components have been installed (After installing Essbase, it might not ask you to restart. But BI EE would not be able to identify Essbase immediately since the Essbase client APIs need some Environment variables that get populated only after a restart). Once this is done, go to the admin tool and click on Import from Multi-Dimensional.
So far so good.
As you see, you can import databases from multiple applications simultaneously. The next step is to create a Business Model and Presentation Layer. For this we do not have to design BM and PL. All we need to do is drag and drop the folders directly into BM and PL. For example, when you drag the Sample database, you can see that all the hierarchies and joins would automatically be imported from Essbase.
Even the final reports seem to be very fast. Of course, the sample applications do not have a large dataset. Lets see how the connectivity works on a larger data set in a future blog entry.
P.S: Came to know about the existence of a new Oracle OLAP blog via Mark’s blog here. Any users who want to know about Oracle OLAP, this blog is where you should go since this is maintained by 3 well known OLAP gurus, if i may call them that. Having grown to reading Kevin Lancaster’s long educative replies in our internal mailing lists, i have been waiting for him to be part of a blog so that others can also benefit. Looks like the wait is over :-). Also, the other 2 authors, Keith and Jameson are well known within Oracle OLAP circle. Both Keith and Jameson are former Product Managers. If you do not know where to start you should start with their Workshop series.