Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
As this is typically how the business users will update the data, it is a more than
acceptable method. This method is also ideal for tweaking specific data values prior
to calculation.
Finally, this method is ideal for data validation when writing and executing new
Essbase calculation scripts. You can retrieve data into your spreadsheet, execute
your Essbase calculation script, and retrieve the data into another sheet to compare
the changes. If the results are not what you expected, then simply "Lock and Send"
the data in the first sheet back to the database, make adjustments to the calculation
script, and run it again, then retrieve the data once more to validate. The "Lock and
Send" method is explained in detail in the later chapters.
That was easy!
Building your first data load rules file
Actually, we should have said build your second data load rule file, as we have built
one rules file already. The first one you built, in the previous chapter, is a dimension
build rules file. Now, in this chapter, we are discussing how to load data into your
Essbase cube so this is a data load rules file.
In the previous section, we talked about how to load data without a data load rules
file. We will now learn how to cleanse the data, make the data Essbase-friendly and
then load the data into the Essbase using an Essbase data load rules file.
Once you have created a data load rules file, just like the dimension build rules
file, you can use it to manually load the data from the EAS or use EssCmd or MaxL
(Essbase scripting languages), to load the data into your Essbase database. You
can even write your own program that makes its own API call to load the data
into Essbase.
Here are some of the advantages of using the data load rules files:
• Makes the data Essbase-friendly
• Ignores the data ields that do not need to be loaded into Essbase
• Speciies whether to overwrite the existing data, add to existing data,
or subtract from existing data
• Trims out spaces
• Changes the scaling of decimal numbers
• Converts case from upper to lower and vice versa
• And much more
