OLAP Underground - Utilities are Back

Thanks to the Tim Tow and the other good folks over at Applied OLAP, the two most popular OLAP Underground Essbase utilities are back and they've been updated to work with Essbase versions 6-11 (and they're free!). For those of you who haven't been around Essbase for too many years to count and have never heard of them, OLAP Underground was a group of anonymous Essbase programmers who built utilities to handle the things they did a lot that Essbase didn't do at all (or very well). OLAP Underground was then nice enough to give them away.

After a brief sabbatical to get the code updated to the newest versions of Essbase, two of my favorite utilities are back.

Outline Extractor

The most popular of their applications was called the "Outline Extractor" and it, well, it extracted outlines to text files. Since Essbase would let you extract an entire outline but in a completely useless format, the Outline Extractor became everyone's favorite "dimension export" tool.

You could export one dimension at a time or all the dimensions at once and you could pick which fields you wanted to export. There was a Windows thick client as well as a command-line so export tasks could be scheduled. Here's the link to the page with the Outline Extractor:

http://www.appliedolap.com/free-tools/outline-extractor

Now of course there are much better tools nowadays for exporting dimensions, but if you need a quick and dirty text export of one or more dimensions, this is the tool for you.

Advanced Security Manager

The other hugely popular OLAP Underground utility was called the "Advanced Security Manager." It's a tool for managing Essbase security even across servers. Even in the days of EAS and Shared Services, it's still hugely useful for exporting security to text files (or importing from text files). Like the Outline Extractor, the Advanced Security Manager also has a command-line for scheduling security updates. Here's the link for the Advanced Security Manager:

http://www.appliedolap.com/free-tools/advanced-security-manager

Thank you to Applied OLAP (an interRel partner) for updating and hosting these utilities. If you have a minute, send Tim Tow a quick "thank you" (which is best expressed in the form of a Pay Pal money transfer to his personal account). Also note that while Applied OLAP is hosting these applications, they're not officially supporting them. This means that you're on your own if you have questions or things break.