Showing posts with label Star Integration Server. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Star Integration Server. Show all posts

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Super Fast Essbase ASO Extraction with New Release of Star Integration Server

The latest release of Star Integration Server 2.8.6.2 has amazing extraction performance for Essbase ASO and BSO source cubes.  This release introduces a new "Sparse Discovery" mechanism that identifies the pockets in the database where no data exists (which is typically over 90% of the possible intersection points) and only processes intersections where data does exists.  In turn, this provides a tremendous performance boost especially with large sparse Essbase ASO cubes.

This release of Star Integration Server also removes any of the 2^32 limitations that Essbase administrators might experience when using traditional report scripts for data extraction as well as expanded parallel extraction with up to 128 extractor threads to leverage higher-CPU hardware.   

Another great improvement is client-side extraction. This feature removes the need to place a Star-specific Essbase CDF file directly on the Essbase server. The client-side extraction leverages native Essbase security filters so that users who need to extract data only get access to their authorized POV.   The underpinnings of client-side extraction is either using Essbase MDX scripts or Reports scripts.  However since the MDX and Reports scripts are spread across parallel extraction threads and only focus on areas where there is data, the extraction is very fast.  As noted by a friend in the Hyperion Community, Gary Crisci, a side benefit of this approach is ASO Query hints can be optimized since SIS will quickly loop through all the combinations to help optimize the process. 

Here is a press release announcing the product launch:  http://staranalytics.com/2012/01/11/star-analytics-introduces-new-release-of-star-integration-server-to-speed-access-to-oracle-data-for-business-decisions/

It also should be noted that Star has a trial version available (http://staranalytics.com/products/product-trial-request/?dlv=sis) but has removed the metadata-only SIS "Express Edition".

More details of this release can be found in the release notes: http://staranalytics.com/public-downloads/sis/documentation/SIS_2.8.6.2_ReleaseNotes.pdf

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

QlikView for Essbase

In the previous posts, we discussed Hyperion Automation and noted that long time Hyperion luminaries within Oracle have been very supportive in lending their praise to the Star Finance Command Center (SFCC) and its value proposition for automating processes not only across Hyperion products, but a whole ecosystem of other applications as well. This post focuses on our second product: the Star Integration Server (SIS).

Star Analytics’ goal is to provide software that truly opens and connects application processes and data with other applications. SIS is designed to provide high volume extract of any level of data and metadata from Oracle Essbase, Oracle Hyperion Planning and Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) to a standard Star Schema. Star has many customer cases of SIS being used to not only move data between the varying dimensionality of Hyperion applications, but also to data warehouses for consumption by various reporting and BI tools. Thus, SIS far more fully enables users to have open application solutions and more easily use their tool of choice around their Hyperion data.

One BI tool of choice that has been gaining popularity over the past few years is QlikView. At Star, we’ve seen a notable uptick in QlikView at large enterprise accounts, and a growing interest to bring Hyperion data into QlikView for mashing with other operational data for a more comprehensive organizational view.

Recently, Star Analytics released a new version of SIS that serves up QlikView ready data; making it easy to share all levels of Essbase data across financial and operational oriented dashboards. To see more, check out the PDF file: http://staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/Integrating_Hyperion_to_QlikView.pdf

As a final note, consulting companies like NxGen Consulting see the demand for this solution which is contributing to growing their practice: http://nxgenconsulting.com/services_Star.html