If you want to create a dynamic time-series reference such as the value of a measure as at this time last year, or over the past three months, or year-to-date, you can use one of the OBIEE time-series functions (AGO, PERIODROLLING, TODATE) to provide an offset value for a measure.
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Note: OBIEE 11g offered a bunch of improvements that were particularly aimed at Essbase, and other OLAP server, customers; the new hierarchical columns feature brought proper OLAP analysis to OBIEE, and coupled with OLAP-oriented features such as hierarchical prompts and selection steps, made OBIEE 11g a much more conducive environment for Essbase users.
There's much better support for Essbase-native features such as value-based hierarchies, alternate hierarchies, multiple alias tables, UDAs and other Essbase artifacts, and the value-based hierarchy feature in particular is very welcome as it can avoid the need to completely re-import your Essbase database if your outline gains additional hierarchy levels.
So coupled with the new and improved visualization capabilities in OBIEE 11g, including maps, scorecards, improved dashboard controls, the whole new UI, improved BI Publisher and so on, there's a lot to recommend OBIEE 11g to users of the "legacy" Hyperion tools looking for a bit of a refresh of their BI environment.
