Developing Essbase Applications: Advanced Techniques for Finance and IT Professionals

If you love Essbase and hate seeing it misused, then this is the book for you. Written by 12 Essbase professionals that are either acknowledged Essbase gurus or certified Oracle ACEs, Developing Essbase Applications: Advanced Techniques for Finance and IT Professionals provides an unparalleled investigation and explanation of Essbase theory and best practices.

Detailing the hows and the whys of successful Essbase implementation, the book arms you with simple yet powerful tools to meet your immediate needs, as well as the theoretical knowledge to proceed to the next level with Essbase. Infrastructure, data sourcing and transformation, database design, calculations, automation, APIs, reporting, and project implementation are covered by subject matter experts who work with the tools and techniques on a daily basis. In addition to practical cases that illustrate valuable lessons learned, the book offers:

• Undocumented Secrets―Dan Pressman describes the previously unpublished and undocumented inner workings of the ASO Essbase engine.
• Authoritative Experts―If you have questions that no one else can solve, these 12 Essbase professionals are the ones who can answer them.
• Unpublished―Includes the only third-party guide to infrastructure. Infrastructure is easy to get wrong and can doom any Essbase project.
• Comprehensive―Let there never again be a question on how to create blocks or design BSO databases for performance―Dave Farnsworth provides the answers within.
• Innovative―Cameron Lackpour and Joe Aultman bring new and exciting solutions to persistent Essbase problems.

With a list of contributors as impressive as the program of presenters at a leading Essbase conference, this book offers unprecedented access to the insights and experiences of those at the forefront of the field. The previously unpublished material presented in these pages will give you the practical knowledge needed to use this powerful and intuitive tool to build highly useful analytical models, reporting systems, and forecasting applications.

Cameron Lackpour (Chapter 2 and editor) is president and chief bottle washer of CL Solve, an Oracle EPM consulting company. He first worked with OLAP technology in the dinosaur days of mainframe multidimensional databases and saw the Essbase light in 1993. He has been in the consulting business since 1996, creating solutions for customers using Essbase, Planning, and anything else that ties to those two products.

An Oracle ACE since 2011, Lackpour is active on OTN’s and Network54’s Essbase message boards, the ODTUG Hyperion Special Interest Group, the ODTUG Board of Directors, and his Essbase Hackers blog.