Basic Essbase Components Overview

• Essbase Server: The server acts as a shared resource, handling all data storage, caching, calculations and data security.
• Essbase Database: This multidimensional data cube can be implemented in the storage models Block storage (BSO) and Aggregate storage (ASO).
• BSO supports dense data sets, enabling users to write back interactively and perform complex financial analytics.
• ASO databases drive operational analytics and are optimized for high dimensionality, extreme sparsity of data, and dimensions with millions of members.
• We cannot create more than 1 database in ASO, but we can create more than one database per application. If we have more dimensions (generally more than 10) then we will go for ASO.
• We cannot write back in ASO, but we can write back in BSO.
• Most of the dimensions are sparse in ASO whereas in BSO most of them are dense.
• In BSO, there is a concept of dense, sparse and blocks. But in ASO there are no such concepts.
• In BSO we have calculation scripts, but in ASO there are MDX scripts.
• Administration Services: This database and system administrator’s interface to Essbase provides a single-point-of-access console to multiple instance of Essbase server.
• Hyperion Smart view for Office: This s/w program provides a single Microsoft office interface for multiple Hyperion products.
• Spreadsheet Add-in: This s/w merges seamlessly with excel. Using this spreadsheet add-in, you can access instances of Essbase server and perform ad hoc reporting.
• Maxl: This practical, expressive interface for administering the Essbase system is one of the two functional domains of multidimensional database access language for Essbase. With Maxl DDL, we use statements to make requests. Maxl DDL improves on ESSCMD in that we can embed it in Perl programs by implementing the Perl module.
• ESSCMD: This command-line language performs server operations interactively or through batch or script files. It is a legacy language not used in latest versions.
• MDX: This multidimensional query language is the second of the Maxl functional domains. MDX provides the ability to perform advanced data extraction and querying by means of statement that include verb SELECT. We use MDX in general for ASO databases.
• Essbase API: This developer’s interface to Essbase enables you to create customized applications in VB, C, or java programming languages.
• Integration Services: It provides a metadata driven environment to bridge the gap between data stored in Essbase database and transactional data stored in relational databases.  It drills-through enables business users to view linked transactional data from Essbase reports.
• Essbase studio: This graphical front end enables to build Essbase cubes from disparate data sources and provides an environment for deployment, development and maintenance of enterprise-scale Essbase analytic applications.
• Administration services console: It is the common administration interface for Essbase. Database and system administrators use it to manage users and user security, server options, Essbase applications and databases, and database objects. It is organized into three frames as below.
• Navigation Panel: When we start admin services console by default it will be shown. It’s a graphical hierarchy view of Essbase environment. We can create custom views for specific servers, applications or databases to reduce the number of mouse clicks required to navigate.
• Object window: This workspace is where objects are displayed after we open them.  Since admin services console is a multi-window application, this provides a toolbar displaying shortcuts for opening and saving files.
• Message panel: The message panel displays system information messages. It displays any verification errors, syntax errors etc,.