“Truly Taking Your Essbase Knowledge to the Next Level
You know how sometimes when a sequel to a movie or good book, comes out… it just stinks compared to the first release? For instance, Dumb and Dumber To or Speed 2… Other movies and books know that releasing a sequel to its classic first release just wouldn’t be the same and they smartly do not follow up their product with a sequel (like Old School or E.T.). Cameron and team’s first edition of Developing Essbase Applications: Advanced Techniques for IT and Finance Professionals was valuable addition to all Essbase administrator’s libraries. So how does their second edition (or “sequel”), Developing Essbase Applications: Hybrid Techniques and Practices fair? This new book follows in the footsteps of sequels like Empire Strikes Back, The Godfather II or The Dark Knight, taking the great things about the first edition and then improving upon them in the following release. They’ve hit another homerun, providing an invaluable tool to the Essbase community.
This Essbase book has something for every type of Essbase consumer, from the super techy Essbase administrator to the IT / infrastructure team supporting Essbase to the brand new Essbase administrator and finally the end user. So buy at least one (or more) for your organization and share with your Essbase stakeholders. The Developing Essbase Applications Hybrid Techniques and Practices writing team (John, Martin, Tim, Cameron, Glenn, Mike, William) has given us this handy toolkit with code examples and reusable code and detailed explanations of simple to complex topics like design best practices, how some of the new features work under the covers, and detailed “how to” steps so that you can follow along. When it comes to testing new features, they’ve done the testing for us.
A few of my favorite parts of the book: John provides general guidance on Essbase server configuration with Exalytics environments and seeing the testing results of just how powerful Exalytics can be. If you are looking to upgrade and purchase new hardware, read the Exalytics chapter! This might give you some of the ammunition to make your case for Exalytics in the purchase debate. I loved Martin’s Magical Number 7 and how it applies to Essbase dimension design. Even experienced admins can benefit from this design best practices chapter. All of the new buzz around hybrid cubes is really exciting! But what is it exactly? Tim and Cameron dissect the new hybrid option for Essbase and share actual performance results. You’ll find some interesting (and surprising) results. Glenn’s chapter on SQL for Essbase is a must read for every Essbase administrator. It helps both the IT developer and the business user understand how SQL can be utilized for loading data into Essbase, extracting data from Essbase back to relational targets. If you’ve ever wanted to load test your Essbase environment, Tim’s chapter will show you the way to accomplishing this tricky task. As of mom of two sibling girls, I completely appreciated the analogy OBIEE and Essbase provided Mike’s chapter, Copernicus was Right. Essbase isn’t the center of the universe? Why symmetry matters? Mike rocks the boat a little in this part of the book but shows how to really address challenges of Essbase and OBIEE integration. If you aren’t familiar with Dodeca, check out Cameron’s chapter on this alternative tool for end users to interact with both Essbase and relational sources. William’s Smart View chapter breaks down all of the different query options available within Smart View (did you even know these options existed?). He provides a super helpful comparison chart then deep dives into the content with examples on the different ways to use Smart View to interact with data.
Developing Essbase Applications Hybrid Techniques and Practices is not just a high level book. This is a roll up your sleeves and jump in the weeds kind of book. There is a LOT of information which can be overwhelming at times (but really that is a good thing). Reread if you need to because the all of the details are there to learn about Essbase. I concur with Steve Liebermensch who wrote the Afterword, add this book to your shopping cart and pay for it already! I’m certain you will learn something new (likely a lot of something new’s) that will help you in your journey with Essbase. “
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