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