Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Financial analysts
Okay, these are the guys you need to watch out for. What the financial analyst does
is take in everything all of the other analysts do and crunch it into money numbers.
It seems as though a financial analyst in a company typically carries a lot of weight.
Well, lucky for you and for your programming in Essbase.
Once again, Essbase comes through for you and your customer. Essbase provides
a full complement of financial calculation functions which will satisfy the most
discriminating number cruncher. From such computations as compound interest,
discounts, and growth, you can be sure that the financial picture of your company
is in good hands.
The real target users of your Essbase data
As an IT person you may ask, "Why do I need to know who the Essbase data
user is?" Well, because of the usefulness and versatility of your Essbase data to
the decision makers in the company, the real end-user of your Essbase data is
usually an executive or some other big shot. In fact, you may not even know it,
but the data in a typical Essbase database system usually shows up in reports
that are used at the highest levels of the company.
Your job is to make these people happy. Thankfully, Essbase makes your job
easy in so many ways.
Ways to extract your Essbase data
There are many different ways to extract data from an Essbase database. We have
described several of them at different times in this topic, depending on the topic
being covered. For the sake of organization, we will list the various methods of
extracting data from your Essbase database here:
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Essbase Add-in for Microsoft Excel:
It seems like we can't say enough about
this particular tool. Designed to work seamlessly with the world's most
popular spreadsheet program, the Essbase add-in is the tool of choice of data
analysts everywhere. Yes, you can pull data out of your Essbase database with
the add-in and load up an Excel worksheet. Even though Microsoft Excel has
a limit of 65,536 rows through the 2003 version and many more rows available
in Microsoft Excel 2007, it seems that Essbase can have a hard time handling
spreadsheets that contain more than 1,000 rows. Performance rapidly degrades
and you can even experience timeouts. We highly recommend that you pay
attention to this and at the first signs of trouble with large spreadsheets, you
split them into smaller subset spreadsheets.
