- February 10, 2021
- Posted by: Jim Kromer
- Categories: Cloud Computing, Oracle
Leveraging Hybrid BSO on EPM Planning Cloud
Overview
At PARC consulting, we have implemented Hybrid BSO in Planning with several clients since its inception in mid-2019. The Hybrid BSO engine provides the benefits of block storage functionality with the ease of an aggregate storage engine facilitating rapid and dynamic aggregations.
If you have a typical BSO application on EPM Planning Cloud, or if you are considering a fresh cloud implementation, leveraging Hybrid BSO could simplify your application and improve Business Rule performance while reducing or even eliminating aggregations.
Case Study
One of our clients has a three cube BSO model with one ASO Reporting cube. The application has 13 dimensions, and the block size of each of the cubes was between 30-80 KB, relatively small for a typical Essbase implementation. We built out a fully-dynamic BSO model in the implementation, meaning all upper-level members are set as dynamic. The benefits of a fully-dynamic BSO outline are immense: no aggregations are necessary, the number of blocks in the cube is significantly reduced, and dense restructure times are shortened.
The application’s design is that the BSO cubes are predominantly used as a staging area where the base data is loaded and calculated. Data is then moved to and viewed in the reporting (ASO) cube. The Business Rules in the application (predominantly currency and elimination calculations) run very quickly because the cubes have a much smaller number of blocks than if they were “regular” BSO. The most significant benefit is an overall decrease in the routine end-to-end process’s timing: from source data loads into the BSO cubes to the final loads to the ASO reporting cube.
Leveraging Hybrid BSO
There are other ways to leverage Hybrid BSO on your Cloud platform other than a fully-dynamic Hybrid model, depending on your organization’s needs.
You can configure your application in a “Partial Hybrid” mode and still gain a massive benefit to your application’s performance:
- One method is to set one or two larger dimensions as fully dynamic and aggregate the other smaller dimensions.
- Another method is to set the Upper Most Sparse dimensions as dynamic, which will reduce the number of blocks.
Note that there are some considerations when implementing Hybrid BSO:
- Upper-level sparse data is dynamic, so data retrieval occurs in real-time. If your query is large and contains many upper-level members, the query may take longer to run than in a regular BSO database. Tuning the application can often mitigate this.
- Hybrid BSO will not by itself replace the need for an ASO Reporting cube. There are still great reasons to use ASO Reporting cubes, such as cubes with very large dimensions, large data sets where aggregation times are demanding, and data from multiple cubes and other sources.
Summary
The ability to leverage Hybrid BSO can be a huge opportunity for organizations, especially since the Hybrid Essbase engine is already in the Oracle Cloud Instances today. If you are considering upgrading your EPM Cloud Planning instance or considering a move to the Cloud, PARC can provide roadmaps, guidance, installation, migration assistance, and ongoing management of your environment. Contact us today!
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