Essbase - History and Motivation

History and Motivation

Although Essbase has been categorised as a general-purpose multidimensional database, it was originally developed to address the scalability issues associated with spreadsheets such as Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Excel. Indeed, the patent covering Essbase uses spreadsheets as a motivating example to illustrate the need for such a system.

In this context, "multi-dimensional" refers to the representation of financial data in spreadsheet format. A typical spreadsheet may display time intervals along column headings, and account names on row headings. For example:

Jan Feb Mar Total
Quantity 1000 2000 3000 6000
Sales $100 $200 $300 $600
Expenses $80 $160 $240 $480
Profit $20 $40 $60 $120

If a user wants to break down these values by region, for example, this typically involves the duplication of this table on multiple spreadsheets:

North
Jan Feb Mar Total
Quantity 240 1890 50 2180
Sales $24 $189 $5 $218
Expenses $20 $150 $3 $173
Profit $4 $39 $2 $45
South
Jan Feb Mar Total
Quantity 760 110 2950 3820
Sales $76 $11 $295 $382
Expenses $60 $10 $237 $307
Profit $16 $1 $58 $75
Total Region
Jan Feb Mar Total
Quantity 1000 2000 3000 6000
Sales $100 $200 $300 $600
Expenses $80 $160 $240 $480
Profit $20 $40 $60 $120

An alternative representation of this structure would require a three-dimensional spreadsheet grid, giving rise to the idea that "Time", "Account", and "Region" are dimensions. As further dimensions are added to the system, it becomes very difficult to maintain spreadsheets that correctly represent the multi-dimensional values. Multidimensional databases such as Essbase provide a data store for values that exist, at least conceptually, in a multi-dimensional "hypercube".

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