This post demonstrates the use of Amazon S3 to archive and restore Oracle Essbase Cubes.

The advantages of doing this include: 

• Virtually unlimited storage at pennies per GB per month. 
• Data geographically and asychronously stored
• You only pay for what you use

The usual prerequisites apply:

• Get an Amazon AWS account here
• Followed these instructions and have your AWS Access Key, Secret AWS Access Key and "pem" files handy.

Set the environment up

The other prerequisites, Ruby (RPM) and S3Sync are already installed and ready to go on the cubeFlex AMI. You do have to set three environment variables, this can also be set in the ~/.aws_env or manually:

[full360@domU]# AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=xxxx[full360@domU]# export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID[full360@domU]# AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=xxxx[full360@domU]# export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY[full360@domU]# export S3_ARCHIVE_BUCKET=archive.full360.com 

Backup the cube

Now you can use the cubeFlex to backup any of your Essbase applications to S3, this script will do a level zero export of the database, copy the outline, package the two files and upload to  backup the essbase outline file and level zero data on S3:

[full360@domU]# ./f360/scripts/ec2_hyp_app_backup.sh XYZ XYZ

You should have your backup file XYZ.tgz on your specified S3 location, in this case archive.full360.com

Restore the cube

To restore your application back from S3 Execute the command:

[full360@domU]# /f360/scripts/ec2_hyp_app_restore.sh \<Application Name> <Database Name> <ASO/BSO> 

This script downloads the packaged zero level export and outline file from S3 and restores the application back on Essbase server. For Example

[full360@domU]# ./f360/scripts/ec2_hyp_app_backup.sh XYZ XYZ ASO 

You should have your application XYZ back on your Essbase server, with data and default aggregations ready. Log files for the process can be found in /f360/scripts/logs