Database Reference
In-Depth Information
While it is not a calculation function, per se, I will quickly mention variance
reporting. variance reporting (the ability to tag Expense Items in the Accounts
Dimension and have the variance between Actual and Budget represented appropriately
to the report consumer) is a very desirable feature for a lot of corporations with respect
to their financial reporting. This feature cannot be used with ASo cubes.
Another consideration is whether you need or want to utilize Custom-Defined
Functions (CDFs) or an equally new function, Custom-Defined macros (CDms), in your
Essbase cube. The ability to create CDFs was introduced early in version 9 of Essbase.
If you are not familiar with the creation and usage of CDFs, there have been several
presentations on them at the last few oracle Developers tools user group Conferences
(oDtug). These presentations are available for download on the oDtug site and
provide a great starter guide. Essbase Developers have developed many of these and
provided them free of charge on various Web sites as shareware. In addition, some are
available directly through oracle and are even now provided with the base product
installation. Written in Java and then registered with Essbase using maxL, they are
considered an indispensable tool by many developers and administrators. Although
this has never been formally documented, I am surmising that because they are an
extension of the Essbase Calculator Framework, they are not available for use with ASo
cubes (as there is no mDx equivalent of the Essbase Calculator Framework). If using the
CDF and/or the CDm functions are important to you, you will need to stick with the
BSo cube option.
one Essbase feature that has been used sporadically throughout the years is Linked
reporting objects (Lro). The Lro allows the cube designer to attach documentation to
a cell within the database. This documentation can include a cell note (or series of notes),
a linked document (any type), or a urL (uniform resource locator) to a location on
the Web or corporate intranet to provide the user additional information. While some
developers may not even be aware of the existence of Lros, numerous developers and
administrators in finance areas have grown to love this feature. I have seen this feature
used to allow cell annotations for budgeting and forecasting applications. I also have
seen this feature used by insurance companies (the insured item in the database may
have a picture accessed by Lro), and research hospitals (the database may contain a
picture that shows what the research statistics pertain to). Functionally, an Lro is stored
within the block in a BSo cube. Because that construct does not exist in an ASo cube,
these cannot exist. If you already use this feature and are not willing to give it up then
stick with your BSo cube as this is not available in ASo cubes.
Another Essbase feature that seems to be either loved or hated is the currency con-
version module. Currency conversion is accomplished by adding a second database to
the application. Some setup is done and references are created within the outline. This
is actually a very nice feature and it works very well. A lot of developers over the years
bypassed this feature (especially if the customer had to purchase it), and created their
own home-grown calculations and scripts to do currency conversion. If you already
own the module, and you want to implement it, you will need to stick with BSo cubes.
As you may not yet know, ASo cubes can only have one Database per Application.
Therefore, even if you wanted to use it with your ASo cube, you could not because
you cannot create the currency database where it needs to be within the application
to work correctly. If you are willing to give it up, another solution can be developed to
support the database side of currency conversion. make sure if you go that route you
consider whether it will support the reporting side of the currency conversion module
