The objective of this five-day Applied Essbase course is to empower students with the skills necessary to develop and successfully deploy their Essbase applications. Developed and taught by experienced Essbase consultants from an implementation perspective, this comprehensive course includes rigorous hands on exercises, real world advice, and step-by-step '1-2-3' implementation methods.

Our unique teaching format allows us to cover more material in less time. The Applied Essbase course starts with the Essbase Basics by walking students through the process of developing an application—starting with metadata design and outline mechanics, the Excel Add-In, automating loads and dimension builds with load rules, Essbase architecture, and calculation fundamentals. Once the application is built, Advanced Essbase topics address fine tuning that application, including the use of database partitioning through replicated and transparent partitions and advanced applied calculations. System Administration topics include automation with Esscmd and MaxL for deploying applications, security management, performance tuning, and configuration settings. We finish covering all the essentials of Aggregate Storage Option, the new database storage option that allows for large scale databases at lightning fast speeds.

Depending on what version of Essbase you are on, our course can be delivered on the latest Version 11 or previous versions with similar agendas but covering the appropriate functionality for that version. In addition, our instructors have a long history with the product and can talk to the differences across versions. Whether the student is a more experienced developer or entirely new to the world of Essbase, this challenging course promises to empower the student with the tricks, tips and insights learned from our extensive Essbase implementation experience.

Here is the course description for this 5 day class in detail:

Overview of Essbase
We cover the role of Essbase in the organization and how it fits in the IT framework. Next, we establish the basic vocabulary and multidimensional concepts you will need to begin working with Essbase. In doing this review of the concepts, we introduce you to the tools used in Essbase development.

Application Design Overview
The main focus is to cover the modeling of databases. We establish a foundation by helping you understand the mechanics of building a database and hierarchy. A wide range of topics are covered including member properties such as aliases, shared members, and consolidation operators, and we look at various attribute solutions with UDA’s, alternate rollups, and attribute dimensions. In addition, we go over the special Accounts and Time functionality. Mixed in throughout this section will be modeling techniques, time design alternatives, best practices on loading data, accounts design, and typical scenarios.

Essbase Spreadsheet Add-In
Because the Excel Add-in is an intuitive tool for most developers, the focus is on those essential subjects needed in building and understanding the interface. We cover the mechanics of building reports and the underlying rules governing their validity, as well as focus on some of the more advanced features such as understanding the options, member selection, cascading reports, using Essbase Query Designer, and working with asymmetric reports. For those students just introduced to the Excel Add-in, the manual serves as a reference guide for the most common end-user tasks.

Load Rules
Essbase allows developers to do massive uploads of metadata and data. We cover all aspects of building dimensions; build method alternatives, building aliases and other properties, data file parsing such as joins, splits, and reject criteria, building shared rollups, adding property changes, and building attribute solutions. Once the model has been built, we load data into Essbase with load rules. Specifically, we show you how to load multiple and single data column builds, how to control data load properties, and how to work with the SQL Interface module.

Essbase Administration Services
(EAS) This section introduces students to the latest administration tool. We compare the advantages/disadvantages of EAS to Application Manager, navigating in EAS, how to work with outlines, load rules, and calculation scripts. We use both Application Manager and EAS throughout the class.

Architecture
In order to understand calculations in Essbase, we lay the groundwork by establishing a firm foundation in the architecture of Essbase. We go over the architecture of Essbase, choosing the optimal configurations of dense/sparse dimensions, understanding database statistics, and Essbase data file types. We finish up by reinforcing these concepts with an explanation of restructuring, compression, and database fragmentation.

Calculation Fundamentals
After learning the architecture, students are ready to dive into calculations. Topics covered include understanding calculation order, working with the calculation editors, the full consolidation, effects of calculating across dense and sparse dimensions, member calculation, and the most important settings. We finish up by showing you dynamic calculation solutions and a review of the function categories.

Applied Calculations
We present a series of challenging and common calculation problems. As the class steps through exercises, they will learn about the multi-dimensional nature of calculations, how to focus consolidations with Fix, IF and the cross-dimensional operator, ratio calculation solutions, allocation methods, clearing and copying data, and working with ranges of data.

System Administration
After building database models in Essbase, this section will show you the most critical components of managing it. We show you how to understand and manage security including special roles in Essbase and filter definition, automation of your production environment using Esscmd and MaxL batch script languages, database partitioning through replicated and transparent partitions, configuring Essbase and tips on database tuning.

Aggregate Storage Option
We cover the essentials of working with ASO including key differences from Block Storage, converting outlines to ASO, loading and designing optimal aggregations. This overview section is designed to give students enough knowledge to launch them into building ASO databases.