Essbase is a multidimensional database management system (MDBMS) that provides a platform upon which to build analytic applications.

[1] The database researcher E. F. Codd coined the term "on-line analytical processing" (OLAP) in a whitepaper[2] that set out twelve rules for analytic systems (an allusion to his earlier famous set of twelve rules defining the relational model).

[4] In August 2005, Information Age magazine named Essbase as one of the 10 most influential technology innovations of the previous 10 years,[5] along with Netscape, the BlackBerry, Google, virtualization, Voice Over IP (VOIP), Linux, XML, the Pentium processor, and ADSL.

Editor Kenny MacIver said: "Hyperion Essbase was the multi-dimensional database technology that put online analytical processing on the business intelligence map.

Multidimensional databases such as Essbase provide a data store for values that exist, at least conceptually, in a multi-dimensional "hypercube".

Say the above example was extended to add a "Customer" and "Product" dimension: If the multidimensional database reserved storage space for every possible value, it would need to store 2,400,000,000 (4 × 4 × 3 × 10,000 × 5,000) cells.

If the software maps each cell as a 64-bit floating point value, this equates to a memory requirement of about 17.9 GiB (exactly 19.2 GB).

In practice, of course, the number of combinations of "Customer" and "Product" that contain meaningful values will be a tiny subset of the total space.

If the Customer and Product dimensions are each in fact six "generations" deep, then 36 (6 × 6) aggregate values are affected by a single data point.

The number of cells stored is therefore 192000 (4 × 4 × 12000), requiring under 2 GiB of memory (exact 1,536 MB), plus the size of the index used to look up the appropriate blocks.

Users can specify calculations in Essbase BSO as: The first method (dimension aggregation) takes place implicitly through addition, or by selectively tagging branches of the hierarchy to be subtracted, multiplied, divided or ignored.

This process can be partially automated, where the administrator specifies the amount of disk space that may be used, and the database generates views according to actual usage.

Tableau Software originated at Stanford University as a government-sponsored research project to investigate new ways for users to interact with relational and OLAP databases.

A number of standard interfaces can administer Essbase applications: Since 2017, Essbase Cloud has been available as part of the Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC), a suite of analytics that include reports and dashboards, data visualization, inline data preparation and mobile.

Also note that of the above competitors, including Essbase, all use heterogenous relational (Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, IBM DB/2, TeraData, Access, etc.)