Oracle Hyperion Planning VS IBM Cognos TM1 Series - Part 3 (Dimensions)

In this post, we will see how Hyperion Planning and Cognos TM1 deal with dimensions. to start with Hyperion Planning as explained in the previous post, you must have the standard six dimensions (Account, Period, Scenario, Version, Entity and Years) and two more in the case of multi-currency applications (Currency and HSP_Rates).

Let us look at our Demo application's outline.

Under Account dimension, you can see we don't have any members(elements for TM1 folks) created so far; whereas in TM1, you cannot create a dimension without having at least one element. In Hyperion Planning, if you add a dimension, you cannot delete it, unlike TM1. Now let us look at our Essbase Demo application directory.

You can view Oracle's online documentation for more information on Essbase files and extensions, what is of interest for me here is the Finance.otl file (.otl = Outline file) which is the file storing our outline details, dimensions, hierarchies, members etc. By looking at the directory above there is no way you can find out the number of dimensions.

Cognos TM1

When we created our Demo application server in the previous post, there were no dimensions created/associated with the application as shown below.

I'm going to create the same dimensions we have in our Demo Hyperion Planning application, in TM1 architect, right-click on Dimensions and select Create New Dimension. In Cognos TM1 you must have at least one element before creating any dimension. After clicking on Create New Dimension, the dimension editor menu will open, right-click and Insert Element. In later posts I will explain the types of elements in TM1, for the time being, we will create elements with Simple type.

My Account dimension after inserting an element.

Will repeat the same process to create the rest of dimensions.

Now let us look at Years dimension in TM1, I have created an element called FY14

In Hyperion Planning year members are always created with the prefix FY (fiscal year), followed by year number. In TM1 there are no restrictions on year elements names. and unlike Hyperion Planning, in TM1, you can play around with Years dimension as much as you like. I deleted the element FY14 and created a new element called No Year for the time being.

Finally, let us look at our TM1 Demo application directory.

By looking at your application server directory, you can find out how many dimensions are there.


Until we meet again, may the Cosmos be with you.