Different ways to get data from Essbase Cube

There are many different ways to extract data from an Essbase database. Here is the list of various methods of extracting data from your Essbase database:

Essbase Add-in for Microsoft Excel: 

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. We can pull data out of our 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 we can even experience timeouts.

Oracle Smart View: 

This tool is separate from the Essbase add-in and in fact, must be purchased as a separate component to be used with the Essbase suite of applications. As will be discussed at great length in the Appendix, Smart View is a dynamic data retrieval tool that allows the user to pull data directly from an Essbase database into any of the Microsoft Office components. This allows for the creation of Microsoft PowerPoint presentations that never need data updating as fresh data can be retrieved in real time into the slides. The same holds true for Microsoft Outlook emails and Microsoft Word documents.

Essbase Query Designer:

This tool is a part of the Essbase add-in and is a menu pick from the Essbase menu in Microsoft Excel. The Essbase Query Designer tool allows you to create simple to complex Essbase queries. This is accomplished through the use of an easy to use visual query wizard. The saved query can be opened and retrieved in Microsoft Excel to return your data.

Essbase Report Script: 

An Essbase report script can be created from scratch as an ASCII text file or conveniently, a report script can be created by Essbase, as a by-product of the Query Designer function. Essbase report scripts can be executed within a Microsoft Excel worksheet, Essbase command script or MaxL script, or from an Essbase API call.

Essbase MDX Query Language:

Essbase MDX can be easily described as a structured query language for multidimensional databases. MDX queries for the most part use simple and easy to understand statements to extract data from your Essbase database. MDX queries can be executed in much the same manner as Essbase report scripts or MaxL scripts.

             All of the above mentioned methods are used to report or extract the data that is in your Essbase database or cube. Some of the above mentioned tools go beyond the scope of the Microsoft Excel add-in and can be used by the other Microsoft Office products as well like Oracle Smart View. The Essbase add-in is the most complete tool in terms of functionality and ease of use. Included with the Essbase Add-in for Microsoft Excel is the Essbase Query Designer (EQD), which allows you to visually design custom reports from Essbase. The downside to the EQD is that the reports are only usable in Microsoft Excel. The Essbase report script can be used to run reports from a batch program and automatically send a morning report to key persons. While the formatting can be orderly, the report is still an ASCII based report without the pretty colors or graphs. And then there's MDX, which is a nice option, but the scripts do tend to require a bit of maintenance. However, the resultant output is in a very usable format.