Essbase

ShowCase® Essbase® Features

Give your organization unrivaled analytic power.

There's a reason that Essbase is the industry-leading OLAP solution. It simply offers more features and functionality than any other solution. ShowCase Essbase brings these technologies to companies using the IBM® eServer System i™.

With Essbase, your company's managers, executives, and analysts can:

Analyze even large, complex data sets quickly
Move easily between summarized information and detailed data
Employ familiar spreadsheet programs such as Microsoft® Excel® and Lotus® 1-2-3® to arrange and analyze data
Perform trend analysis and develop "what if" scenarios
Carry out complex analyses, such as multi-currency financial translations and inter-departmental budget allocations, using sophisticated, built-in Essbase formulas
Analyze relational data just as though it were loaded into an Essbase cube, thanks to hybrid analysis functionality, a feature that both saves time in building and re-calculating cubes and delivers greater analytic capabilities. (Note: Hybrid analysis functionality requires licensing the Essbase Integration Server.)

Your IT managers and project leaders can:

Access data in legacy systems, online transaction processing (OLTP) systems, relational data warehouses, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and even spreadsheets to create multidimensional Essbase applications
Include thousands of dimensions and attributes—up to a million members per dimension
Modify databases to reflect changes in business structures and conditions
Use custom-defined macros and functions to express both simple and complex relationships in your data
Provide end users with rapid response times to queries, even if many users access the database simultaneously

Your system administrators can:

Improve performance and maintain data integrity by hosting data, data model, calculations and data security controls on an iSeries server
Simplify administrative functions by having your relational data warehouse and OLAP data marts on the same platform
Manage user sessions so that system maintenance can be performed efficiently

If your organization uses a System i server equipped with multiple processors, you can achieve faster turnaround on batch operations, such as re-calculating the cube, thanks to this release’s enhanced parallel calculations feature and high-concurrency kernel.

Boost productivity with powerful capabilities

Essbase continues to take the lead in bringing greater efficiency to companies that value business intelligence. Key capabilities include:

The Aggregate Storage Option (ASO). This feature enables you to store and calculate data. Using ASO, you can create applications that previously were too large or complex for your systems, expanding the value of Essbase to your enterprise. You can calculate cubes more rapidly, refresh data more frequently, and provide more timely information to your organization's business users.
Essbase Administration Services (EAS). This graphical interface makes it easy for your staff to develop and administer analytic applications. It provides:

Support for user administration, outline editing, partition management, filter management, as well as very powerful script editing
Wizards to guide your staff through tasks such as migrating applications from one server to another or from block storage to aggregate storage

Visual Explorer. This separately priced feature displays multiple dimensions of data graphically for faster, easier identifications of trends, exceptions, and interdependencies in your data.
Support for data mining. You can perform basic data mining tasks by using built-in clustering, correlation, and association algorithms.
Essbase Integration Services (EIS). Through the separately licensed EIS component, your staff can integrate data or metadata from multiple data sources.
MDX support. MDX is a powerful data manipulation language, similar to SQL. Now MDX can be used to query the database, add new information to it through calculations and formulas, and calculate applications built with the ASO feature.

Here is information about system requirements for Essbase.

Contact SPSS Sales