Essbase

Essbase is a multidimensional database management system (MDBMS) that provides a multidimensional database platform upon which to build analytic applications. Essbase, whose name derives from "Spread Sheet dataBASE", with the "E" being added to make it easier to spell/pronounce, began as a product of Arbor Software, which merged with Hyperion Software in 1998. Oracle Corporation acquired Hyperion Solutions Corporation in 2007, as of 2009^[update] it markets Essbase as "Oracle Essbase". Until late 2005 IBM also marketed the product — as DB2 OLAP Server.

The database researcher E. F. Codd coined the term "on-line analytical processing" (OLAP) in a whitepaper that set out twelve rules for analytic systems (an allusion to his earlier famous set of twelve rules defining the relational model). This whitepaper, published by Computerworld, was somewhat explicit in its reference to Essbase features, and when it was later discovered that Codd had been sponsored by Arbor Software, Computerworld withdrew the paper.

In contrast to "on-line transaction processing" (OLTP), OLAP defines a database technology optimized for processing human queries rather than transactions. The results of this orientation were that multidimensional databases oriented their performance requirements around a different set of benchmarks (Analytic Performance Benchmark, APB-1) than that of RDBMS (Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC)).