With the aim to provide a fabulous integration between Oracle BI/EPM, i.e.: OBIEE and Oracle Essbase / HFM , etc Oracle has made some wonderful strides.  OBIEE 11g is a testament to that integration’s roadmap.  This post is all about just getting OBIEE 11g  configured for interaction with Oracle Hyperion Essbase as close to right out of the box as possible.  Although the Essbase integration doesn’t completely work directly OOTB, Oracle has at least set the stage for the infrastructure.  What do I mean by that? Let me explain.

OOTB the Oracle BI 11g instance already installs/contains the following items for integration with Oracle Essbase 11.1.2:

1. Essbase JAPI files
2. Essbase C API files

What is missing for this OOTB Oracle Essbase integration is:

1. Configuration of PATH variables pointing to the location of the Essbase API files
2. Configuration of the Administration Tool to know where to point for the Essbase API files
3. Oracle BI Server (now managed by OPMN) to know where to point to the Essbase API files
   • Actually this is done OOTB but one will want to confirm the location is indeed set propertly
   • This has to do with the machine where the OBI Server itself is installed and is not an issue if just running the OBIEE 11g Client Tools

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So, one of the questions I constantly get when teaching, talking, or raving about the integration between Hyperion Essbase and Oracle BI (specifically 11g), aside from the native hierarchy drill-down capability, of course, is can a user drill down to level 0 or drill all the way back up from whence they drilled-down?  They then proceed to talk about how other native Hyperion tools such as Brio, Production Reporting, and the Essbase Excel add-in can clearly achieve this operation with ease.  An example of this would be “expand all levels” or “drill to level 0″.  I of course, must tell them that right now OBI 11g does not have that as a specific feature but it is slated as a future release.  Ideally, I would like to believe that Oracle has this slated for the very next release, though I have not heard anything about that around the campfire.

Why do I believe this functionality will be in the next release?  I’m glad you asked.  If you open the AdminTool for OBI 11g and right click on a subject area (Presentation Layer) you will see a new option called “Generate Drill Graph”.

Unfortunately clicking on this option gives you a rather vague prompt message that doesn’t tell you much of anything.

But if you search in the RPD help menu for this menu option you will see the following text:

“The Drill To Levels and Drill From Levels tabs are reserved for a future release and are not currently used. An additional option called Generate Drill Graph, available as a right-click option for any Presentation layer object, is also reserved for a future release.”

If you right-click > properties on any hierarchy column in the presentation layer you will see that there are two tabs related to drilling: drill-to and drill-from.  The drill-to column is where I suspect this capability will eventually reside.  Right now it seems more like a place holder.  The drill-from simply lists out the level drilling capabilities that are defined in the Business Model dimension levels.

Based on the statement from the Oracle RPD help menu, I hope that this logic does come to exist as it is asked for by a lot of folks.  On top of that I would like to really see that dynamic Web 2.0 functionality in the tool so that it is hands-down the winner of all BI Analytical and Ad-hoc analysis tools on the market.  Cheers to that.

Oracle BI folks correct me if I am wrong.  Or, leave a comment letting us know which release this will be revealed in.

References:

• OBI 11g RPD Help

If the following or similar error is received when compiling the C API the resolve comes by simply adding the ESSAPINU.lib into the project.  Don’t just link it, actually add it to the project and recompile to resolve the compile issue.

Error    11    error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol _EssInit referenced in function “void __cdecl ESS_Init(void)” (?ESS_Init@@YAXXZ)