The Med Center Financial Affairs dept. has purchased Hyperion/Pillar for developing budgets.

From my very limited knowledge this all looks like EssBase is a collection of business objects and Pillar is an Excel-type front end.

There is supposed to be "local" data on our server which is then batch-loaded to some (possibly) terrabyte-sized database somewhere (an ODBC SQL database?).

Someone may want me to add data electronically to all of this from our division's Fox tables, or extract data so I'm trying to be prepared.

What will I be dealing with? I would appreciate idiot-level
explanations since COM and business objects are still a new idea for me. I couldn't find much in the way of programming details at www.Hyperion.com, just overviews.

Thanks.