cubeSavvy Review

One of my personal blogging goals this year is to take a tour of apps, code, libraries, and other third-party tools in the Hyperion ecosystem. I have some cool stuff on deck to be reviewed, starting with today.

Today I’d like to take a look at Harry GatescubeSavvy. cubeSavvy ostensibly purports to be “Planning without Planning”. Or, put another way, it’s a web-based interface for Essbase cubes, without all of the additional infrastructure and setup that Planning entails. This is an interesting approach. Let’s think about it for a moment.

As many of you know, by design, Hyperion Planning sits on top of Essbase and is synchronized down to Essbase. This design has some drawbacks and some advantages that are possibly worth musing on in a future post. Planning also brings a lot of extra functionality to the table that manifests itself in the user interface and/or is pushed down in some way to the underlying cube. cubeSavvy comes to the table and more or less says, “Hey, let’s do away with all of that and get a little more purist about this: let’s have grids (similar in concept to forms in Planning) defined that work with our vanilla Essbase functionality – and let’s just manage the cube instead of pushing and synchronizing things down to Essbase.”

So in theory, if you have an Essbase server up and running and then stick a cubeSavvy server in front of it, define some grids and provision some users, you’ve got a web-based budgeting and planning system on top of your cubes. Interesting.

In a first for me and this blog, this article will be split up in to several pages, covering Installation & Setup, Configuring Grids, User Experience, and Closing Thoughts. Please enjoy this whirlwind tour of cubeSavvy!

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7 thoughts on “cubeSavvy Review

  1. Jason,

    Excellent article. I had never heard of cubeSavvy but will now check it out.

    Thank you for sharing!

    Have you ever tried using Dodeca for budgeting instead of Planning? Just curious.

    Doug

    • Yes I have used Dodeca – in fact, I rolled out one of the earliest and largest (at that point) Dodeca deployments several years ago! I am going to do a long blog series on Dodeca as soon as possible. As I said, I am working through the third-party Hyperion ecosystem this year and next on the list is something quite interesting, followed by Dodeca. Stay tuned. :D

  2. Jason,

    Two things I didn’t see:
    1) How is dimensional security in grids represented? Does it follow the user’s username and so metaread filters would suffice or does cubeSavvy use a “ghost user” to do logins and handles security some other way?
    2) Is there any way to pass grid POV, page, row, and column settings to some kind of calc script execution stage? I am thinking either the way Planning forms work with business rules (not bad, but could use some real improvement in the row and column area) or the way tokens work in Dodeca (even better because if you set the views up just right you can drive aggregations in BSO with row and column information).

    Otherwise a very intriguing product.

    Regards,

    Cameron Lackpour

  3. […] you come up for air next week. It has been a busy week on my end, what with doing a fairly deep cubeSavvy review, building elegant/robust/awesome solutions for clients, polishing up open source Essbase […]

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