Understanding the Outline Extractor Relational Extraction Tables

I was going to do a nice in-depth post to follow up on my discussion of the relational cache outline extraction method/improvements on the Next Generation Outline Extractor, but someone already beat me to the punch. It turns out that the tool’s primary author, Tim Tow, blogged about the technique and the tables for ODTUG a couple of years back.

I’ll just add on one thing that I wanted to highlight, though: the general technique behind most relational extractions from an Essbase outline is to generate a single table, with such common columns as PARENT, CHILD, ALIAS, UDA, STORAGE, CONSOLIDATION, and so on. If you think about this, it tends to imply a number of limitations that might make this technique unfeasible for you:

  1. The table can only hold one extraction at a time
  2. You can only get the member name and a certain alias table alias at a time
  3. The columns in the table are variable based on the attribute dimensions that may be associated with the dimension
  4. More than one UDA: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Next Generation Outline Extractor version 2.1.3: Relational extraction enhancements

We’ve made some enhancements to the Next Generation Outline Extractor to incorporate user feedback and requests. The main improvement to this newest release, version 2.1.3, is with the way that relational database extractions are handled. More specifically, the storing of relational credentials has been improved so that they are no longer stored in cleartext. This will lead to improved security for organizations using this functionality in their automation. Additionally, the configuration for relational extractions has been simplified a bit. There is now no longer a need to edit the persistence.xml file, rather, everything is stored in the main properties file.

As part of this  post, I want to go over how the new functionality works, including a full “soup to nuts” use case. I think a lot of people use the outline extractor for “one-off” extractions, although a lot of people might be unaware that it can just as easily be used to quite easily automate extractions.

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New Indenting Options in Next Generation Outline Extractor writer

Besides talking about and working on all things Dodeca Spreadsheet Management System, Dodeca Excel Add-In, and Drillbridge, one of the other things I am helping with these days at Applied OLAP is continuing work on the Next Generation Outline Extractor.

Most readers of this blog are probably familiar with the outline extractor. Almost everyone I know in the EPM world uses it or has used it in the past. It is an incredibly popular tool and I am very proud to contribute my efforts to making it even better.

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