Monday, May 21, 2018

Introduction to Cube Designer - Overview

With the Essbase Cloud, we are introducing a new set of functionality for quickly creating Essbase cubes based upon Excel workbooks.  An end user can literally go from an Excel workbook to a fully functional Essbase cube in a matter of seconds.


How?
One new capability of the Essbase Cloud is that a table of data contained within an Excel workbook can be uploaded to the cloud.  An algorithm will then be applied to this table of data to determine the shape of the cube including dimensions and hierarchies.  The data will be loaded into the cube and all aggregations will be set to dynamically calc at query time.

Another new capability of the Essbase Cloud is what we are calling Design by Example (or DBX).  DBX can be thought of as a contract between an Excel workbook and the Essbase Cloud.  A DBX workbook has a pre-determined layout and format that the Essbase Cloud understands and when sent to the Essbase Cloud, will result in a fully functional Essbase cube.

What is it? 
The Cube Designer is an Excel Add-in.  Since Oracle already has a great Microsoft Office platform called Smart View, the Cube Designer was developed as a Smart View extension in order to seamlessly integrate into the Smart View paradigm.

What does it do? 
The Cube Designer will allow an end user to quickly create their own Essbase cubes in the Essbase Cloud using Excel.

The Cube Designer supports using either a table format or a DBX format Excel workbook to build a cube in the Essbase Cloud.

The Cube Designer can be used in both a connected and disconnected mode.

The Cube Designer allows access to a Gallery of Excel workbooks in both DBX and table formats.  These workbooks can be used to jump start the cube building process.

The Cube Designer also allows the user to create their own private workbooks for building Essbase cubes.

The Cube Designer has the capability to generate a DBX workbook based upon any existing Essbase Cloud cube, and download it to the client.

The Cube Designer uses the new Essbase REST APIs for communicating with the Essbase Cloud.  Most operations on the cloud are submitted as jobs and run asynchronously.

The Cube Designer contains a wizard that will aid a user in mapping the fields of a table into the dimensional hierarchies of the cube.

With the Cube Designer the user can build the structure of the cube, load data into the cube and calculate the data in the cube.  This can be done as one operation or multiple separate operations.

The Cube Designer employs a local job manager to track the operations submitted from the client.  This allows the user the flexibility to manage their jobs across multiple servers and applications.

The Cube Designer is seamlessly integrated with the ad-hoc query capabilities of Smart View.  Once a cube is generated, a Smart View quick connection is automatically created for the user and they can immediately start querying the data in the new cube.

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