The Oracle Developer Community (ODC), formerly named Oracle Technology Network (OTN), is the community behind the Oracle ACE program. This is just one of the many initiatives they promote. In the 2nd ever Appreciation Day (started by Tim Hall), those of us in the community are releasing blog posts on this day, October 10th, to celebrate the great knowledge shared by this community. The rules of this appreciation day post are simple:

• Release an appreciation post on Tuesday, October 10, 2017
• Title and tag it appropriately
• Discuss an Oracle product feature

Last year I blogged about a cool EPRCS feature called embedded content. This year, I’m going to switch gears to the BI product set and blog about Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC), the current shiny gold toy out in the Oracle EPM/BI world. This product contains several technologies, including Essbase Cloud, Analytics Cloud, Data Visualization Cloud, Data Visualization Desktop, Day by Day, and Synopsis. The feature I’d like to focus on is Cube Designer.

Cube Designer is an Excel add-in that comes with OAC and it’s specifically engineered for Essbase Cloud. It’s a very versatile, intuitive, and highly functional tool and allows Essbase Cloud developers to spin up custom and template Essbase cubes rather quickly. Personally, this is one of the outstanding features of Essbase Cloud and I use it every time I need to develop an Essbase Cloud cube.

Cube Designer allows Essbase Cloud cube developers to:

• Design the Essbase application and cube configuration
• Build Essbase dimensions and member properties
• Load Essbase data
• Build Essbase calculation scripts
• Build Essbase queries
• Incrementally update existing Essbase cubes
• And more!

In addition, the OAC community has the ability to create and share templates designed within Cube Designer, saving the Essbase developer community from having the reinvent the wheel.

So there you have it. #ThanksODC