What-if analysis, Planning, and Business Analytics with Oracle Essbase
Essbase is a multidimensional analytics platform that you can use with Autonomous AI Database to build planning, forecasting, financial reporting, and what-if analysis applications. Use Essbase to retain the multidimensional capabilities, plan, analyze, and report on business data interactively. When enabled for an Autonomous AI Database instance, Essbase is a managed external application. You use the Essbase web interface without deploying or administering separate Essbase infrastructure.
Essbase integrates with Autonomous AI Database security, lifecycle management, and compute configuration. It supports the Transaction Processing and Lakehouse workload types. Essbase is disabled by default.
When to Use Essbase
Use Essbase when you need multidimensional analysis that complements SQL-based analytics in Autonomous AI Database. Typical uses include:
- Complex financial calculations and business intelligence, such as distinguishing favorable budget variances from unfavorable actual variances.
- Time intelligence and complex calculations for Month-to-Date (MTD), Quarter-to-Date (QTD), Year-to-Date (YTD), rolling forecasts, and period-to-period comparisons.
- Interactive analysis in Smart View, allowing users to explore relational business data through familiar drill, zoom, pivot, and slice-and-dice operations in Excel.
- Formatted Smart View reports, Multidimensional Expressions (MDX) queries, and report-script exports.
How Essbase Works with Autonomous AI Database
Enable Essbase after provisioning the Autonomous AI Database instance.
- In the OCI Console, open the Autonomous AI Database instance.
- On the Autonomous AI Database details page, select Tool configuration.
- Click Edit, and on the Configure tools pane enable Essbase.
- If applicable, configure Essbase compute settings.
- Click Apply and wait for the lifecycle state to return to Available.
- Open the Essbase URL shown in the tool configuration.
Essbase uses the Autonomous AI Database broker for authentication. After you sign in, Essbase opens without a separate Essbase sign-in prompt. Grant users the Essbase role that matches the access they require:
ESSBASE_SERVICE_ADMINISTRATOR- Full Essbase administration access.ESSBASE_POWER_USER- Create and manage Essbase applications and cubes.ESSBASE_USER- Access provisioned Essbase applications and cubes.
For example, a database administrator can grant the appropriate role to a database user with the following statement:
GRANT ESSBASE_USER TO <user_name>;Replace ESSBASE_USER with ESSBASE_POWER_USER or ESSBASE_SERVICE_ADMINISTRATOR when granting a higher level of access. For example:
GRANT ESSBASE_POWER_USER TO planning_owner;
GRANT ESSBASE_USER TO planner1;For general instructions on enabling and configuring database tools, see Manage Autonomous AI Database Built-in Tools.
Limitations and Restrictions
- Essbase is disabled by default and cannot be enabled during Autonomous AI Database provisioning.
- Always Free instances do not provide tool-configuration options, therefore, Essbase cannot be enabled.
Example: Create an Essbase Application for Planning
A planning team uses an Autonomous AI Database Lakehouse instance for financial data and requires Smart View analysis and writeback.
The database administrator allocates Essbase compute based on expected calculation workload, concurrency, and validation results. The administrator grants ESSBASE_POWER_USER to the application owner and ESSBASE_USER to planners. The application owner creates a standard Essbase application for planning and reporting. Planners then open <database-URL>/essbase and access the application through Essbase or Smart View.