Oracle Essbase 9 Implementation Guide- P28 ppt

Loading Data into Essbase
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Make your data Essbase-friendly
The reason this subject is something worth discussing here in Essbase is because
unlike traditional relational database packages, Oracle Essbase includes many
easy to use tools to quickly transform, alter, modify, or otherwise turn questionable
data into good, usable data that can be fully and correctly loaded into your Essbase
database. Creating Essbase-friendly data can be accomplished with a minimum
amount of effort and expense, both on the Essbase side and the data source side,
which is sure to please even the toughest business customer who no doubt is aware
of how creating an extract of data from a traditional system sometimes means a
lot of effort and even the writing of a complex program or two.
First, to make sure you understand, when loading data in Essbase the data must
contain a representative element of data for each dimension in the target Essbase
database's outline. For example, our Esscar database outline contains seven
dimensions, so the data you intend to load must contain an element for each
dimension plus the data value itself, for a total of eight elements of data. The
following gure shows you how your data would look in a perfect world:
Notice there are eight columns of data, one column for each dimension in the
Esscar database outline and the data value itself. Now, as mentioned, this would
be the perfect way to receive data from an outside source. It's too bad this is rarely
the case when receiving data from another department or business activity, even
within your own company. Heck, sometimes data from within the same company
is the most inconsistent.
In the real world, you are lucky when you get the bare minimum of the data
elements you need to satisfy your Essbase requirements from sources external
to your Essbase database. This is not a great concern most of the time with Essbase
and we'll tell you why, then we will take the rest of this chapter to show you how.
Essbase-friendly thoughts
Consider that you have constructed your Essbase database outline to be as exible and
detailed as possible for your business customer. You know very well that you won't

always get clean data from an external system that will load right into your database.
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Chapter 4
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There are many reasons why you may not get data sent to you just the way you
would like it. First and foremost is the expense of writing a complex program to
extract the data from one system and pretty it up for the receiving system. Second,
it takes time to write such a program.
With Essbase, you have tools designed specically to pretty up or make
Essbase-friendly, even some of the most objectionable data.
In other words, with the tools that Essbase provides you and a little bit of your own
creativity, there isn't much data out there that you would have a good reason to say
no to making Essbase-friendly.
Here is a real world example of making your data Essbase-friendly that shows just
what can be accomplished with very little effort. The data load rule you are about
to see was developed in less than two hours.
Essbase-friendly example
The following screenshot shows an input data le that has been opened in the Essbase
Data Prep Editor. The upper pane displays the data in its raw form and the lower pane
shows you what the data will look like to Essbase during the actual data load.
The rst column in the raw data view is the month column in numeric format.
The second column in the raw data view is the calendar year in four digit format.
Unfortunately, our month/year values in the database outline are formatted as MMM
YYYY (for example, Jan 2009), with the month as a three character abbreviation then a
space then the four digit year. You will also need them all in one column.
This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Paul Corcorran on 5th July 2009
8601 ave. p #1, , lubbock, , 79423
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Loading Data into Essbase
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Next we join the month and year columns using the column join option in the
Data Source Properties screen as shown:
Observe how we told Essbase to join columns 1 and 2 into a new single column.
But wait, the date format is still wrong. What do we do next? Easy enough, all we
need to do now is set up the replace function to convert the date column into an
Essbase-friendly date format. Watch how easy it is:
This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Paul Corcorran on 5th July 2009
8601 ave. p #1, , lubbock, , 79423
Download at Boykma.Com
Chapter 4
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Notice in the Field Properties screen how we replace the wrongly formatted date
column with the correct format. There are other options as well depending on your
specic needs.
Finally, looking at the data in the rst column, we see that what were once two
separate columns with the wrong date format is now one column of correctly
formatted data which will successfully load into our Esscar database. Total
development time for this column was about 15 minutes. This is how you make
your data Essbase-friendly!
Types of data sources
A typical data source for your Essbase database can contain many bits of
information. Unlike traditional relational databases, Essbase data sources can be
actual data values or they can be metadata. Because you can update your database
outline dynamically with the same data that you ultimately load, data sources in
Essbase take on a completely different meaning than in other types of systems.
When talking about data sources in Essbase, any of the following can be considered.
Type of data
The data loaded into Essbase can be of two types, one is to load the data into

the cube and the other is to update the outline of the cube:
• Data loads: These are the actual data values. This would be the numeric
value of one of the existing measures in the database. This type of Essbase
data source is usually the only usable type of data source in a traditional
relational database.
This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Paul Corcorran on 5th July 2009
8601 ave. p #1, , lubbock, , 79423
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Loading Data into Essbase
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• Dimension build loads: Information in the data that can actually be used
to update the outline's member names, member aliases, member attributes,
and more.
The Essbase data rules le can be used both as a data
load rules le, to load data values into the database and
also as a dimension build rules le, to update or add new
members to the database outline.
Types of les used for data loads
The data that is loaded into Essbase can come from different types of les like
Microsoft Excel les, Text les, Comma Separated les or directly from a relational
database. Let us talk about these le types and see how we can use each of them
in Essbase.
Microsoft Excel les
Microsoft Excel les can be used as data sources in a couple of ways. First, they can
be used to perform a "Lock and Send" of the data from the Microsoft Excel worksheet
directly into the Essbase database. A Microsoft Excel workbook can also be used as
an attached le or Linked Reporting Object (LRO).
Text les
There are two types of text les:
• Delimited text les: Delimited text les are les that use a certain character,

typically a comma or a semi-colon to delimit the data elds. This delimiter
is used by the Essbase load rule to determine where one data eld ends and
another data eld begins. Also, not all rows will be of the same length.
• Fixed column width text les: The xed width type of text le has all rows of
data the exact same length. Also, all of the data elds are the same length and
in the same position and do not vary from row to row.
Essbase data export text les
One type of data source that loads without any intervention, in the form of data
manipulation, or even without the aid of an Essbase data load rule is the Essbase
database export text le. Essbase offers you the option of exporting the data from
your database into text les (some do this for database backup purposes). When
loading an Essbase exported le into an Essbase database with a similar outline,
Essbase can automatically interpret the data elds and determine how to correctly
load the data. This process is used in a database performance enhancing tip, which
we will talk about later in this book.
This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Paul Corcorran on 5th July 2009
8601 ave. p #1, , lubbock, , 79423
Download at Boykma.Com