Tired of long calculation times, waiting for refreshes, taking forever to back up your application?  That will now all change with the addition of Hybrid.

 

You may have heard about Hybrid capabilities within native, on-premises Essbase as it’s been around for years.  In its simplest form, Hybrid takes all the process and analytical power of BSO cubes and combines the instant aggregations of ASO.  Hence the name Hybrid meaning a combination of both types of cubes all in one. Hybrid cubes are a change to technical programming on the backend, but they are completely transparent to administrators and end users.

 

In a Hybrid cube, every parent in the sparse dimensions that you currently aggregate can now be tagged as a Dynamic member so that the values are aggregated only when called upon.  So when you run a Financial Report or Smart View query, the system will aggregate values on the fly.

 

What this does is eliminate all upper level stored blocks in the application, which for organization’s with large dimensions can be millions of blocks.  With these reductions of blocks not only can aggregations be eliminated but the overall size of the application is also greatly reduced making backups and refreshes much quicker.  Hybrid also eliminates the need to move data from BSO to ASO reducing another administrative step.

 

You may be thinking this is all too good to be true, well there are some things to consider.  For one, in every sparse dimension where you have a parent with more than 200 children you’ll have to create subgroups.  You’ll receive a warning for 180 children but for 200 you’ll get an error message upon refresh (the error message is actually very clear on identifying which parents have over 200 children).  The second thing to consider is reporting. If you have a lot of people querying the database at the same time you may want to consider making some of the sparse parents stored and aggregating those in the traditional way.  We suggest a few scenarios like this to determine the right setup for your organization.

 

All in all we are extremely impressed with what we’ve seen with Hybrid in EPBCS and would recommend it for most of our clients.  If you’d like to learn more about Hybrid please email us.