Using Cube Designer with OAC to convert to Hybrid

Recently on OTN (or was it network 54) someone asked about changing all of parents to be dynamic for a Hybrid cube in Essbase.  There were a number of suggestions from getting utilities to downloading the Next generation Outline extractor from Applied OLAP, to using Excel.  All good suggestions, But if you are using Essbase in OAC, there is even an easier way, wait for it - Cube Designer.

Huh? Cube designer is the Smart View extension for OAC that lets you build your outline in excel and uploads it to the cloud. It is pretty slick. One of the items they figured is people will want to convert cubes to the Advanced Analytic Engine (a fancy term for Hybrid).  So they added an Easy button. 

First you have to have imported your cube into the DBX format.(I’m guessing DBX stands for Database extract, but it could mean anything).  This can be done a few ways:

1.       If the cube is already in the OAC instance, in Cube Designer, select private->Export cube to application workbook

 

2.       If it is not in OAC, then get your hands on the DBXtool utility (ask a cloud friend for it). With it you can export your on-prem cubes into excel (and who wouldn’t want to do that)

Once you have it in Excel, go to the dimension you want to change. In my example it is Customer. For this example it is a nice small dimension

Next click on View Hierarchy

 

The hierarchy will appear in a dialog box. Expand “Edit Parents” and select “Set Storage to dynamic”

Click refresh and all of the parents in your worksheet are changed to dynamic. Close the editor

 

I know what you are saying. Glenn it was only two members. Yes in this case it was, but in most instances it will be hundreds of members scattered throughout the hierarchy. This will handle them all at once and it is super-fast.

After that you can use the Build cube icon to update your existing OAC cube or build a new one.  What could be easier than that?  (well at least for OAC).

Look for more of these little tidbits about Cube Designer and OAC in general in future posts