Creating scenario dimension and loading data

Question

Hi all,
We have two fact tables. The first one is sales that include quantity and subtotal columns. The other one is budget that include quantity and subtotal. We are working with hyperion essbase 9.3. First of all we are creating two model. For sales model we create 7 dimensions (product, chanell, time, company, currency, customer, account) and 3 attribute dimension and for budget model we create 4 dimensions (account,company,customer,product) in metaoutline. And we create 2 application for each metaoutline. We plan to report sales vs budget but we don't know how to join sales and budget data. Everybody recommends scenario dimension. we don't know how to create sceneraio dimension and in which application Essbase integration or Essbase administration services.
thank you.

Answer 1

I agree with Cameron. The best way is to put them into one cube. Since you are using a SQL source you can manulate it to have your budget load to the same time level as your actuals. For example suppose you load actuals daily and Budget is Monthly. for consistancy, you could load the budget data into the 15th day of the month. At the Monthly level where you would compare budget to actual, the numbers will be correct. Loading into dummy members for the dimensions that don't exist for budget is a common practice when trying to sync up data. If you really want to make it easy, you could union a view to make it look like you have a single fact table (based on the combo of budget and actual) and have a single metadata outline to load everything. I prefer having two because of different load requirements, but this is an option.
If you don't want to go this way, the next option is to partition your budget data into the actuals cube. this would keep them seperate but allow you to see them togeter. Between the two option, I prefer the single cube approach better