Essbase Connections
Use stateful connections when necessary to boost performance
Dodeca uses stateless connections by default. In other words, each Essbase transactions makes a connection to Essbase, does its business, and then disconnects. This normally works very well, but in certain cases, such as when the authentication process is slow, the Essbase transaction can be unacceptably slow. Set the Stateless property to False to enable stateful connections. Stateful connections remain connected on the server for a configurable amount of time. By default, the connection stays connected to Essbase for 10 minutes.
Use Essbase JNDI connections for enhanced security and ease of central management
Java Naming and Directory Interface, also known as JNDI, is an industry standard for application servers which provides the ability to create a named connection on the server. This makes connections more easily maintained at the server while never passing connection information, such as user credentials, across the network. Beginning in version 7.3.0, Dodeca has a custom implementation of JNDI for Essbase. The Essbase JNDI implementation allows you specify the following properties on the server: * apsUrl * server * application * cubename * encrypted * username * password * adminCredentialsRequired * adminUsername * adminPassword
Define common connection properties, especially the AdminUsername and AdminPassword, centrally using essbase/DEFAULT JNDI connection
The essbase/DEFAULT JNDI connection is a reserved connection name that is used to provide the default settings for all Essbase Connection objects. The most common usage for the essbase/DEFAULT JNDI connection is to provide the AdminUsername and AdminPassword that is used by certain internal functionalities that require a higher level of authorization. For example, the Outline XML Extract functionality requires the Essbase user to have a higher level of authority which is provided by the AdminUsername and AdminPassword properties. In addition, those two properties are used for Essbase Impersonation utilized with the Dodeca SSO strategy.
Use Outline XML Extract to enable the display of Essbase outlines inside of Dodeca
The Outline XML Extract is used in conjunction with the built-in Dodeca Outline Viewer and the Dodeca Outline Viewer view type. The outline may be launched by administrators from the Essbase Connections metadata editor. Administrators may optionally setup an Outline Viewer view for a given Essbase connection in order to display the Essbase Outline to end users.
Note: The Outline XML view does not enforce Essbase security on members in the outline.
Don’t use the current version of Relational Outline Caching unless you specifically need it (and then only if the outline is BSO)
The Relational Outline Caching introduced in Dodeca version 6 is be removed from Dodeca in version 8.0. The reason it is being removed is that the Next Generation Outline Extractor created by Applied OLAP can more easily manage extractions and can take advantage of the Outline XML Extract functionality which performs much better than the Essbase Java API approach used in the original Relational Outline Caching implementation.