Reporting against OLAP Data from Microsoft Analysis Services and Oracle Hyperion Essbase Applies to: SAP BusinessObjects XI 4.0 Feature Pack 3, information design tool, Web Intelligence, SAP Business Objects Mobile 4.2.0, Microsoft Analysis Services 2008 and Oracle Hyperion Essbase 11. Summary OLAP databases provide useful features for building reports based on a cube. In this paper we will describe how to define MDX objects for reporting purposes using the information design tool. We will show Web Intelligence documents on laptop, iPad and iPhone devices that address typical use cases like time comparison, custom groupings, asymmetric report and scheduled report. You can find all the examples presented in this article in the zip file attached. Author: Marc Daniau Company: SAP Created on: June 22, 2012 Author Bio Marc Daniau joined Business Objects in 1992 as project consultant in France. He moved to the product group in San Jose in 1998 to work on EPM products. He moved back to Paris in 2003 to work within the semantic layer team. SAP COMMUNITY NETWORK SDN - sdn.sap.com | BPX - bpx.sap.com | BOC - boc.sap.com | UAC - uac.sap.com © 2012 SAP AG 1 Reporting against OLAP Data from Microsoft Analysis Services and Oracle Hyperion Essbase Table of Contents Time Comparison ............................................................................................................................................... 3 Period-To-Period ............................................................................................................................................. 3 Year-Over-Year ............................................................................................................................................... 7 Custom Layouts ................................................................................................................................................ 13 Grouping Members ....................................................................................................................................... 13 Renaming Members ...................................................................................................................................... 15 Merging Two Dimensions.............................................................................................................................. 17 Asymmetric Report ........................................................................................................................................... 18 Actual & Budget ............................................................................................................................................ 18 Rolling Months .............................................................................................................................................. 22 Scheduled Report ............................................................................................................................................. 28 Current Calendar Period ............................................................................................................................... 28 Current Fiscal Period .................................................................................................................................... 30 Latest Period ................................................................................................................................................. 31 Related Content ................................................................................................................................................ 33 Copyright........................................................................................................................................................... 34 SAP COMMUNITY NETWORK SDN - sdn.sap.com | BPX - bpx.sap.com | BOC - boc.sap.com | UAC - uac.sap.com © 2012 SAP AG 2 Reporting against OLAP Data from Microsoft Analysis Services and Oracle Hyperion Essbase Time Comparison Time comparison is usually the first thing that a business user wants to do with his data. When that data sits in an OLAP database, we can take advantage of the built-in OLAP capabilities around the time dimension that Oracle Hyperion Essbase and Microsoft Analysis Services offer. Period-To-Period We will start by showing how we can compute a change from previous period on top of the Hyperion cube „Sample.Basic‟. We first create a connection to the Essbase cube in the information design tool and generate the Business Layer. We choose Scenario for generating measures in the Business Layer knowing that the Scenario hierarchy is flat and has a small number of members. At the end of the wizard we obtain the following Business Layer outline where we can see the four Scenario members as measures. For his period-to-period change analysis, the end-user must be able to run his report for any given period available in the time hierarchy. Hence we will define in the Business Layer a prompt based on the time hierarchy. SAP COMMUNITY NETWORK SDN - sdn.sap.com | BPX - bpx.sap.com | BOC - boc.sap.com | UAC - uac.sap.com © 2012 SAP AG 3 Reporting against OLAP Data from Microsoft Analysis Services and Oracle Hyperion Essbase We will then define four calculated members under the Year hierarchy to compute the change. The corresponding MDX expressions are listed in the table below. Name Expression of the calculated member As of Period @prompt(As of Period) Prior Period @prompt(As of Period).PrevMember Change @select(Year\Year\As of Period) - @select(Year\Year\Prior Period) IIF( ISEMPTY(@select(Year\Year\Prior Period)), MISSING, % Change @select(Year\Year\Change) / @select(Year\Year\Prior Period) ) The function @prompt(As of Period) will be substituted with the time member chosen by the end-user. The function @select(<object_qualified_name>) is a reference to an existing object in the Business Layer; it will be replaced at query time to form a standard MDX expression. SAP COMMUNITY NETWORK SDN - sdn.sap.com | BPX - bpx.sap.com | BOC - boc.sap.com | UAC - uac.sap.com © 2012 SAP AG 4 Reporting against OLAP Data from Microsoft Analysis Services and Oracle Hyperion Essbase To make the Business Layer available to the SAP Business Objects front-end tools like Web Intelligence, Crystal Report or Dashboards (Xcelsius), we must publish it as a Universe into the CMS repository. We are now at a stage where we can access the cube from WebI. First we define a query by selecting the Profit measure and its descendants, our newly created calculated members and the scenario Actual. After hitting Run Query the prompt “As of Period” pops up. We choose May; there is no need to choose a year since the cube contains only the current year‟s data. The MDX query is generated under the cover and sent to the Essbase server; the resulting dimensional data set is brought back to WebI. We turn the table into a cross table and after some formatting we obtain this. We observe that the total expenses grew in May compared to April; however the expenses grew slower than the Margin leading to an increased Profit. SAP COMMUNITY NETWORK SDN - sdn.sap.com | BPX - bpx.sap.com | BOC - boc.sap.com | UAC - uac.sap.com © 2012 SAP AG 5 Reporting against OLAP Data from Microsoft Analysis Services and Oracle Hyperion Essbase All figures are formatted in dollars except for the percent change numbers for which we have applied a conditional formatting. If we wanted to do a custom sort to present for instance the “Prior Period” column before the “As of Period” column, WebI would not let us do it. The custom sort feature in Web Intelligence is disabled on a hierarchy object. We will see during our next section how we can work around it. The WebI document can be made available to mobile users as well. On their iPhones the mobile users are able to navigate the measures hierarchy up and down. Tapping a horizontal gray arrow will expand the node whereas tapping a vertical orange arrow will collapse the node. The mobile user can also customize the display. Double tapping the column header allows you to hide a column like we did with the absolute change. One can also move a column like we did with “Prior Period”. The document can be sent via email as an image thanks to the mail icon at the bottom. SAP COMMUNITY NETWORK SDN - sdn.sap.com | BPX - bpx.sap.com | BOC - boc.sap.com | UAC - uac.sap.com © 2012 SAP AG 6 Reporting against OLAP Data from Microsoft Analysis Services and Oracle Hyperion Essbase Year-Over-Year Often comparing from the previous period is not sufficient especially when dealing with seasonal data. Business users need to compare their numbers with the same period last year. In this section, we will see how to implement a year-over-year comparison with a Microsoft cube. Let us go back to the information design tool. We need to have a XMLA connection defined against Microsoft Analysis Services. With that connection, we generate a Business Layer from the sample cube „Adventure Works‟. We choose the measure groups “Reseller Sales” and “Sales Summary” with their related dimensions that constitute enough reporting items to work with. The result gives this. The next step is the creation of a prompt on the hierarchy Calendar so that the end-user can choose the time period when running the querye. Now we can extend the hierarchy Calendar with members for calculating the change from the same period last year as well as the change from the previous period. SAP COMMUNITY NETWORK SDN - sdn.sap.com | BPX - bpx.sap.com