Tableau and Essbase – A Match Made Perfect By ExoInsight

There is one area that Tableau and almost all other visualization tools have struggled to seamlessly adopt: OLAP data. Data stored in OLAP cubes such as Oracle Essbase is often difficult to work with in a reporting tool built primarily to handle relational data. OLAP data sources are almost always proprietary and built for speedy access from a native interface. Enabling OLAP data in a reporting tool such as Tableau is like putting a square peg in a round hole.

ExoInsight eliminates this challenge by presenting your Essbase data and metadata in a relational format, instantly and on-the-fly, unlocking it for downstream reporting tools such as Tableau. The challenges with Tableau’s built-in Oracle Essbase connector are well documented, not because the connector doesn’t do the job advertised, but because of the inherent discrepancies between OLAP and relational data. Tableau’s internal engine prefers data in row-and-column format, and this concept simply doesn’t apply to OLAP sources such as Oracle Essbase.

Enter ExoInsight. Instead of struggling to get your Oracle Essbase data in a format that Tableau prefers, ExoInsight does all this heavy lifting for you, formatting your Essbase data in such a way that makes it easy to work with.

Full article here.

What is Casabase and why should I use it?

Casabase is a multidimensional engine that aggregates data instantly across multiple, sign-based hierarchies. You can view your data by any combination and at any level of Year, Month, Day, Product, Department, Entity, Location, Account, Scenario, Version, or any other dimension you want. And you don’t have to wait for a nightly or hourly process to do it – gone are worries that your upper-level data has not been processed and is out of sync with base-level data.

Casabase Dimensions - Off-the-shelf functionality

Casabase is OLAP made simple. Read more here: What is Casabase?

Power BI and Essbase

The popularity of Power BI has skyrocketed in the past couple of years. Many companies are now mandating PBI as their corporate data analytics standard. It’s ability to connect to any data source (web service, relational database, analytics platform, flat file, even Excel files) has made it easy for companies to pull all their data into one place for analysis. However, Essbase users have been left out, until now.

At Casabase Software, we are now offering the ability to report directly on live Essbase data from Power BI. The key word here is “live”. As Essbase developers, we all know the different ways to get data out of Hyperion: calc scripts using dataexport, report scripts, mdx queries, exports, etc. The problem with automated processes using these methods though is that users often end up seeing stale data – i.e. the data in the cube has changed since the latest export. Even the slightest possibility of this occurring is unacceptable in today’s world of instantly available updates.

In order to make retrieving data accessible for even novice users, we’ve made it possible to do so without any knowledge of MDX. You can still use MDX if you’re comfortable doing so, and it also allows for more powerful reporting, but you’re no longer stuck if you don’t know the intricacies of crossjoin.

Please contact us if you’re interested in learning more.

Casabase is ready

We’re happy to announce the official production release of Casabase!

Casabase Personal Edition (PE) is a powerful aggregation and analysis tool that runs directly in Excel on your desktop machine or laptop, requiring no server component whatsoever. This doesn’t mean that your data is siloed off though! You can export databases to a file and share them (either on a shared drive or any other file-sharing method) with other Casabase users, who can easily import them. The database itself can have refreshable data sources that point to other SQL databases, or even files, ensuring that the database always contains the latest data even after being shared.

Because there’s zero infrastructure outside of Excel (we recommend Excel 2016), getting started is ridiculously simple. And to make it even easier to see the potential of Casabase, we’ve included a sample database as part of the install.  CASAsamp is already setup and configured. Based on the Microsoft Contoso dataset, it allows you to try out Casabase’s free-form retrieval, as well as get acquainted with Casascripts. In fact, the Casascripts included with the application were actually used to build CASAsamp itself.

There’s a free, fully-functional 14-day trial, so please download Casabase and let us know what you think.

Casabase: A Closer Look

We just put up some short videos demonstrating Casabase functionality. If you've been wondering what Casabase looks like in action, please go take a look here.

We've been converting some Essbase cubes to Casabase recently. These are cubes that are not a good fit for Essbase: either they have way too many calculations or the granularity of the metadata is too fine. For example, one of the cubes has a member for each employee in a huge company - and since you can't delete a member (without losing data) when an employee leaves, there are tens of thousands of members in this one dimension alone.

These types of databases, however, are an excellent fit for Casabase. All retrievals are faster than in Essbase, but some are in the jaw-dropping range of 20x improvement. Loading metadata and data is also much easier, as there is no down-time for either operation in Casabase. Not to mention that aggregations are dynamic, so there's no more waiting around for calculations to complete before you can view the data. And there's never a question as to why the sum of the child members doesn't match the value in the parent. Priceless!