Hyperion Essbase Book

Hi,

One good news for people who wants to learn Hyperion Essbase on their own.
There are not many books available on Essbase and I know only one book which is available 'Look smarter than you are with Hyperion Essbase' by Edward Roske.

Sarma and Joseph have written a 444 page book on Hyperion Essbase 9 with the title

'Oracle Essbase 9 Implementation Guide'.

The book covers Installation, Essbase cube designing and creation, loading data, Excel add-in, MDX, Max-L, calculation scripts, reports etc and explained them with real time examples in sufficient step by step details with the help of pictures, Notes and Hints.

The book is for students who are new to Essbase and Multidimensional OLAP concepts as well as professionals who are already working on the Essbase technology wants to refresh their knowledge.

For those who feel that Essbase is only for financial applications, this book will completely change their belief as at one place the author mentioned as
"Oracle Essbase is widely known as a financial analytical tool. We want to change the mindset just a bit, right here and now. Oracle Essbase absolutely is a superior financial OLAP tool, but it is an equally superior OLAP tool for just about any type of data analysis."
As the Authors have rich real time implementation experience in a Motor company, most of the examples are from that domain only. I am sure the readers would greatly benefit from these real time examples.

I am happy to see that Venkat has reviewed this book and feel proud to have worked with him in Oracle.

Though this is a great attempt to bring out such a nice book there are few points which I think should have been added in this book to make it more useful and practical.

1. As Essbase is not like other BI tools where you can visualise the schema and how dimensions are joined or related to facts, it becomes difficult in Essbase to visualise that. For that reason, it would have been helpful if a small cube have been designed with some small dimensions and facts and a relation is shown with a OLAP schema diagram. I am saying this because I myself was not able to understand how the data which is getting loaded into the Essbase cube is related to each other and it took me so much time to understand that. Please excuse me if I am the only one having this problem.

2. I do not think Essbase is complete without EIS(Essbase Integration Services) in version 9.3.1 or Essbase studio in Version 11.
Even though you can do almost all of the Essbase stuff without them but it would have been much better even if a small portion has been described about either of them in the book. As going forward Essbase studio is going to replace EIS, a small chapter on Essbase studio is desirable.

You can download one complete chapter Essbase Data and Design Considerations. By downloading this chapter in pdf format you can also see the list of chapters and table of contents.

All in all, a great attempt and thanks to people involved in bringing out a much needed book on Essbase.

Manohar Rana