New On-Premise Essbase - Essbase 21c

This will be the first part in a series of blogs aimed at discussing both the new on premise Essbase 21c, and the 19c corollary available for installation in OCI via the Marketplace.

The new Essbase platform is available and with it comes a number of changes long discussed and anticipated.  For a complete listing of the differences between 11g and 19/21c, I’d recommend you look here.

Some high-level differences that are readily apparent are as follows:

• Essbase is now relationally driven and uses the RCU for repository creation and configuration of metadata storage.
  • Note, this is metadata storage only.  Essbase Cubes and data are still stored in their Application Folder directories.  The RCU/relational storage is used to manage the content required for the Fusion stack and other metadata objects.
• Essbase is now firmly tied to the Oracle Fusion Middleware stack, and can be deployed with WebLogic Server as the primary engine for both the end-user experience via the new Administrative Web Interface (or via EAS Lite) and also for security externalization.  The latter was a function previously performed by Shared Services.
• In Essbase 21c only, failover is baked-in as part of the Oracle Middleware/Fusion stack and no longer uses OPMN
• In Essbase 21c all data is encrypted in transit (though not necessarily at rest) using TLS 1.2.

The above are just a highlight of what these new versions offer.  It is my intent to discuss the Architecture of Essbase 12c/21c in the next article, and then to provide some highlights on Installation/Configuration.  Let me know if there’s interest in the community and I can also do a Webinar on installation, configuration and the challenges encountered therein.