As an industry-leading multi-dimensional online analytical processing (OLAP) server,

many organizations depend on Oracle Essbase for its power, flexibility and reliability in
reporting.
Essbase has stood the test of time by continually crunching data and delivering key
reporting capabilities. However, despite its reliability, even Essbase needs to be finetuned from time-to-time.
Whether its improving declining calculation times or troubleshooting extended report
retrieval requests, there is truly an Art to the Science of tuning Essbase.
Based on our years of practical client experience and testing in our internal
development lab, SC&H has turned the Science of tuning Oracle Essbase into an
Art. As a result, we have been able to develop an approach to troubleshooting
Essbase performance issues and tuning Essbase to achieve maximum results.
In addition, SC&H can help organizations to:

Analyze the Essbase outline to maximize performance

Understand how to calculate and adjust cache settings to improve performance

Understand the Art of the Evolving Hourglass on performance

Use ASO vs. BSO cubes together to achieve desired performance

Know the performance must-haves for your Essbase configuration file

Understand impact of hardware on performance

Develop best practices on performance tuning and testing

SC&H is an Oracle Platinum Partner, and its Business Performance Management

(BPM) consulting team specializes in the effective and expeditious design,
development, configuration, and implementation of multiple Oracle Hyperion EPM and
BI solutions.

To learn more about our Oracle Essbase capabilities, click here.

Essbase Performance Checklist

This is a modified version of an Essbase troubleshooting checklist I made for the good people at Dell
many years ago. Even though it was made for version 5 (and maybe even version 4) a lot of it stands to
reason today. Besides, I couldn't resist blogging more Essbase.

Item.

Notes & Implications

1. Verify which databases are running

and check access, security and startup
information.

2. Check operating system

environmental variables as defined on
installation and verify path information.

This can be the cause of a major. Chances are

these are set correctly.

3. Check machine and operating systems

constraints impacting Essbase
performance.

Commonsense dillgence.

4. Determine whether lack of disk space

or incompatible file systems are
impacting Essbase performance. On NT
systems, consider separating the
physical drive on which the NT page file
is utilized to minimize disk contention
with the drives which essbase is using
for paging. A combination of NT
settings and ESSBASE.CFG settings
can permit this.

Dont use SAN or NFS mounted drives unless they

have large memory caches.

5. Check to see what applications

and databases are loaded.

Databases which are not being used still use

memory. It could be useful to have a periodic script
shutdown or quiet applications that are not being
used. They do not automatically shutdown.

6. Check database storage,

database statistics, and lock contention.

Lock contention is all about writeback users and

concurrent loads and calcs. Try to segregate that
activity out.

7. Check database status and

startup information, cache sizes, and
data compression settings.

8. Examine the configuration of the

currency database.

Currency conversion can be a major source of

performance issues. If it is possible to be done
outside of Essbase, you should try to do so. The
exception would be a specific currency hedging
applications for modeling.

9. Check dimension information

and characteristics of data blocks in the
database (block density, percentage
of maximum blocks existing, block size,
compression ratio).

9. Check dimension information and characteristics

of data blocks in the database (block density,
percentage of maximum blocks existing, block
size, compression ratio).

10. Check run time page for lock

contention, insufficient cache size
(buffer shortage), "hit" ratio on
index searches, and number of read
and write operations.

This can make a significant dent in performance. It

helps a great deal to understand the virtual
memory model of Essbase.

11. Check to see where index files or

page data files are stored, and whether
they span multiple disks.

12. Check record of database

Actions to be taken will Include things such as

modifications for information On last

successful data load, calculation, and
outline Update operations.

raising the various caches to possibly Splitting a

database into multiple cubes (rare).

13. On exception, check exception error

log report written in $ARBORPATH
directory designation.

14. Check Application Event Log File.

15. Check Server Event Log File.

Consider licensing a 3rd party tool to collect and

analyze essbase log files. Or, consider using VB
and Essbase to load log files into an essbase
database for analysis.