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This chapter provides an architectural overview of the product components and introduces the key features of Essbase products, including:
Essbase products provide companies with the ability to deliver critical business information to the right people when they need it. With Essbase, companies quickly leverage and integrate data from multiple existing data sources and distribute filtered information to end-user communities in the format that best meets the users' needs. Users interact and intuitively explore data in real-time and along familiar business dimensions, enabling them to perform speed-of-thought analytics.
This chapter contains the following sections:
Essbase products provide the analytic solution that integrates data from multiple sources and meets the needs of users across an enterprise. Essbase products enable the quick and easy implementation of solutions, add value to previously inaccessible data, and transform data into actionable information.
Essbase products integrate with your existing business intelligence infrastructure. Essbase products meet the enterprise analytic demands of users for critical business information with a minimum of information technology (IT) overhead and thus enable organizations to realize maximum return on their existing IT investments:
Essbase products enable organizations to leverage data in their data warehouses, legacy systems, online transaction processing (OLTP) systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, e-business systems, customer relationship management (CRM) applications, Web log files and other external data sources. For database integration, Essbase Integration Services provides a suite of graphical tools, data integration services, and a metadata catalog that tie into relational databases or data warehouse environments (including SAP BW).
Essbase products provide a cross-platform administration console. The console gives you detailed control over the Essbase environment:
A middle-tier framework extends the power of Essbase products by creating a Web-enabled, distributed platform for Essbase applications hence serving the analysis needs of large numbers of users in Web-based environments. Essbase Deployment Services provide connection pooling, clustering, and failover support, which extend the scalability and reliability of the platform and support mission-critical applications in a 24 x 7 environment.
Large communities of business users can interact with data in real time, analyzing business performance at the speed of thought. Using Essbase products you can organize and present data along familiar business dimensions, thus enabling users to view and explore the data intuitively and to turn the data into actionable information.
Essbase Analytic Services includes powerful calculation features for demanding analytic requirements. A rich library of functions makes it easy to define advanced and sophisticated business logic and relationships. Analytic Services gives users the flexibility to build, customize and extend the calculator through custom-defined macros and functions, as well as the ability to span calculations across databases. On multiprocessor systems, a database administrator can configure a single calculation request to use multiple threads to accomplish the calculation, providing enhanced calculation speed.
Aggregate storage databases provide an alternative to block storage databases, and enable dramatic improvements in database aggregation time for certain types of applications.
Analytic Services provides unique multi-user read and write capabilities, including data update and multi-user recalculation. Business users with front-end tools can write data back to a server and recalculate the data on a server using calculation scripts - key functionality to support sophisticated modeling and planning applications.
The robust, multi-level security model provides server-, database-, and cell-level security. Full control of data access, views, and write capabilities are managed through administration. Integration with external authentication systems, such as Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), allows the quick creation of security models and reduces the time and the cost of application development and maintenance.
Analytic Services offers many key advantages to help users develop effective multi-dimensional applications. Users can:
For information about supported applications, operating systems, and networking protocols, see the Essbase Analytic Services Installation Guide.
Essbase products incorporate powerful architectural features to handle a wide range of analytic applications across large multi-user environments. Figure 1 provides a high-level view of the information flow between the source data and the product components.
Figure 1: High-level Information Flow Between Product Components
Note: For information on Hyperion Objects, Hyperion Analyzer, and Hyperion Application Link (HAL) visit our website at www.hyperion.com
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Analytic Services-a multi-threaded OLAP database software that takes advantage of symmetric multi processing hardware platforms-is based upon Web-deployable, thin-client architecture. The server acts as a shared resource, handling all data storage, caching, calculations, and data security. The Analytic Server client needs only to retrieve and view data that resides on a server.
All Analytic Services application components, including database outlines and calculation scripts, application control, and multi-dimensional database information, reside on a server. With Analytic Services you can configure server disk storage to span multiple disk drives, enabling you to store large databases. Analytic Services requires a server to run a multi-threaded operating system so a server can efficiently manage multiple, simultaneous requests. A server also runs a server agent process that acts as a traffic coordinator for all user requests to applications.Aggregate storage databases-using a new storage kernel for multidimensional databases-provide an alternative to block storage databases, and enable dramatic increases in database dimensionality. Using aggregate storage, Analytic Services serves a wide range of analytic needs-financial analysis, planning, budgeting, sales analysis, marketing analysis, supply chain analysis, profitability analytics-all from a single analytic infrastructure.
MaxL-a multidimensional database access language that is part of Analytic Server-provides a flexible way to automate Analytic Services administration and maintenance tasks.
See dev.hyperion.com or the Essbase Analytic Services Installation Guide for information on the supported operating systems, and for specific information about server configuration requirements.
Administration Services-the database and system administrators' interface to Analytic Services-provides a single-point-of-access console to multiple Analytic Servers. Using Administration Services you can design, develop, maintain, and manage multiple Analytic Servers, applications, and databases. You can preview data from within the console, without having to open a client application such as Spreadsheet Add-in. You can also use custom Java plug-ins to leverage and extend key functionality.
Deployment Services allows multiple instances of Analytic Server to run on multiple machines, while serving the user as one logical unit and removing and single point of failure. Deployment Services enables database clustering with load balancing and fail-over capabilities.
Hyperion Analyzer, Spreadsheet Services, and Spreadsheet Add-in-the business users' interface to Analytic Services-provide interactive analysis and delivery of corporate information to diverse user communities. Hyperion Analyzer, Spreadsheet Services, and Spreadsheet Add-in provide out-of-the-box solutions and easy-to-use personalization and visualization tools allow you to create intuitive, Web-based analysis and reporting from ERP systems, relational, multidimensional and other data sources.
Integration Services-an optional product component-provides a metadata-driven environment to bridge the gap between data stored in Analytic Services databases and detailed data stored in relational databases. The Hybrid Analysis feature gives business users more detail for decision-making and IT managers more modularity in designing and maintaining large-scale analytic applications. Hybrid Analysis allows portions of Analytic Services databases to be stored in a relational database. This relational stored data is mapped to the appropriate Analytic Services hierarchies. HAL (Hyperion Application Link) is an application integration and business process automation tool that allows bi-directional information exchange between transaction processing applications, desktop applications, and Hyperion Business Performance Management applications.
Analytic Services API-the developers' interface to Analytic Services-allows you to create customized applications. The API Reference provides a complete listing of API functions, platforms, and supported compilers.
Essbase developer products enable the rapid creation, management and deployment of tailored enterprise analytic applications-with or without programming knowledge.
The products (for example, Application Builder, and Hyperion Objects) provide a comprehensive set of application programming interfaces, drag and drop components and services.
Data Mining-an optional product component of Analytic Services-shows you hidden relationships and patterns in your data, enabling you to make better business decisions. Using Data Mining you can plug in various data mining algorithms, build models, and then apply them to existing Analytic Services applications and databases.
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