You are right, however...

Gary

You are (as ever!) spot on and in an ideal world we would stage in a relational DW first then populate the ASO cube second.

However, we have a situation where we have a small processing window. Tables are made available to us around 7:00. We have a limited amount of time to update the cube with prior day data before the start of the business day. Therefore we made the decision to update Essbase directly from the source tables.

In addition our option allows us to archive off selected historical data. For example, for some Measures we only need to archive the month-end (i.e. last day of the month) position.

I am sure there are others out there too who, for various reasons, cannot or do not mirror the source data in relational tables and for whom this type of export may be of use.

I know this is heresy and I should flayed alive for taking this approach, but hey nobody died...yet