What’s Coming this Fall in Essbase 19c

This upcoming fall season won’t just see the changing of the leaves, but also big changes for Oracle’s Essbase database management system. Essbase has over 10,000 customers, including many Fortune 100 and 500 companies, so it’s important to know how these differences will affect your business.

 
At the Kscope19 conference, Oracle announced that Essbase would soon be separated from Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) and spun off as a standalone product. Essbase 19c, the next version of the product, will be released for the cloud before the end of 2019, and the full version of Essbase will be available in the first half of the 2020 fiscal year.

Some technical points to note:

• Like the current version Essbase 12c, Essbase 19c will be available for both the cloud and on-premise.
• Initially, Essbase 19c on-premise will be available only on Oracle Linux 7.x. However, this will likely expand in 2020, since most Essbase systems run on Windows.
• Essbase 19c in the cloud will use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Oracle’s hosted cloud services platform.

 
Here are a few more things we know about the upcoming version of Essbase:

• Both cloud and on-premise Essbase 19c will be “customer-managed,” meaning that users will take more responsibility for the Oracle relationship. One consequence is that backups and patches will be under the user’s control.
• As with the OAC version of Essbase, the new version will offer an unlimited number of cubes, as long as you have more OCPUs (Oracle CPUs) to spare.
• Data can be loaded into Essbase using rules files, Essbase connections, Oracle’s Data Sync tool for data replication, and the third-party software OneCloud.

 
These issues are largely details, however. For the most part, Essbase 19c remains very functionally similar to its 12c predecessor, which should help smooth the upgrade process.

Despite this fact, it’s clear that the cloud represents the future of Oracle. The Essbase source code was rewritten for the cloud, and it now offers significant performance improvements over on-premise. In addition, new features and patches will be rolled out to the cloud before they are released on-premise as well.

Essbase 19c is an exciting opportunity for current and future users, but it’s also a chance to reflect on your current IT strategy. What are the new features and benefits of Essbase that your business can enjoy in 19c? How should you plan for the upgrade from 12c to 19c? If you’re currently using Essbase on-premise, should you stick to that, or is it finally time for a cloud migration?

You have questions—and Datavail has answers. Our white paper Essbase 19c On-Prem & Cloud: What You Need to Know is a one-stop shop for everything that we know so far about Essbase 19c, and what users should understand about the new update. Download it today so you can be prepared for the changes that are about to arrive with Essbase 19c.