Oracle's Hyperion Essbase (Essbase) is an OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) Server that provides an environment for deploying pre-packaged applications or developing custom analytic and enterprise performance management applications.

With a rapid application development environment, Essbase enables business users to quickly model complex business scenarios. Aside from its high scalability, a key strength of Essbase lies in its ability to allow users to "write back" to an application's data repository under security. This makes it ideal for developing forward looking applications such as forecasting, scenario modeling, and "what if" type analysis. With Essbase, organizations define a dimensional view of their business—and provide business users with new levels of self-sufficiency to access, navigate, and gain actionable insight into critical business issues. All of this through the various end-user tools for Essbase.

For example, Hyperion Smart View for Office (Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Outlook), Hyperion Visual Explorer, and several modules of Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition Plus, such as Hyperion Interactive Reporting, Hyperion Web Analysis, Hyperion Financial Reporting, are some of the various Oracle tools that enable users to interact with an Essbase application. Essbase provides adaptable data storage mechanisms for specific types of analytic and performance management applications, thereby ensuring sub-second response times regardless of the complexity of the analytics. For example, Block data storage option (BSO) enables driver-based scenario modeling, forecasting, and predictive analytic applications. Aggregate data storage option (ASO) is optimized for massive sparse data sets, supporting thousands of concurrent business users performing sophisticated analyses at the speed of thought.