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Databricks vs Oracle Essbase comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Databricks
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
88
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (7th), Data Science Platforms (1st), Streaming Analytics (1st)
Oracle Essbase
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.5
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Database Development and Management (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Databricks and Oracle Essbase aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Databricks is designed for Cloud Data Warehouse and holds a mindshare of 8.4%, up 3.2% compared to last year.
Oracle Essbase, on the other hand, focuses on Database Development and Management, holds 1.0% mindshare, up 0.8% since last year.
Cloud Data Warehouse
Database Development and Management
 

Featured Reviews

ShubhamSharma7 - PeerSpot reviewer
Capability to integrate diverse coding languages in a single notebook greatly enhances workflow
Databricks offers various courses that I can use, whether it's PySpark, Scala, or R. I can leverage all these courses in a single notebook, which is beneficial for clients as they can access various tools in one place whenever needed. This is quite significant. I usually work with PySpark based on client requirements. After coding, I feed the Databricks notebooks into the ADF pipeline for updates. Databricks' capability to process data in parallel enhances data processing speed. Furthermore, I can connect our Databricks notebook directly with Power BI and other visualization tools like Qlik. Once we develop code, it allows us to transform raw data into visualizations for clients using analysis diagrams, which is very helpful.
RANOJOY PAUL - PeerSpot reviewer
Stores multidimensional data, good customer support and interface is very easy
It is very fast compared to other normal databases, like SQL and MySQL. It doesn't store data in tables in the back end. To load data into Essbase, we need to prepare it in a table format. When we find the data in the table, we need to verify it. This way, you can rate the data. But Essbase stores multidimensional data. We have dimensions, which means the data belongs to some company or some time period. For example, if you work for three years, your salary should be something. In this way, we prepare top-level members called dimensions. The dimension defines your position, the year, and the section you were working in the company. We get an intersection of all these dimensions for certain data, and fetching that data is very fast in Essbase compared to normal SQL. If you store this data in a normal SQL table, you need to prepare a row with your company name, employee name, employee ID, joining date, and everything, and then you need to push it into a SQL table. You can search it using your query, but here, that thing is different. Here, you can collect data using forms, reports, and we use a Microsoft tool, which is an add-in called Smart View. Using that, you would just take that data. Here, you need to just create an integration of all these dimensions, and then only you can find the data.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The solution's features are fantastic and include interactive clusters that perform at top speed when compared to other solutions."
"There are good features for turning off clusters."
"I like that Databricks is a unified platform that lets you do streaming and batch processing in the same place. You can do analytics, too. They have added something called Databricks SQL Analytics, allowing users to connect to the data lake to perform analytics. Databricks also will enable you to share your data securely. It integrates with your reporting system as well."
"Databricks gives us the ability to build a lakehouse framework and do everything implicit to this type of database structure. We also like the ability to stream events. Databricks covers a broad spectrum, from reporting and machine learning to streaming events. It's important for us to have all these features in one platform."
"I haven't heard about any major stability issues. At this time I feel like it's stable."
"The most valuable feature is the Spark cluster which is very fast for heavy loads, big data processing and Pi Spark."
"Ability to work collaboratively without having to worry about the infrastructure."
"The notebooks and the ability to share them with collaborators are valuable, as multiple developers can use a single cluster."
"It's a very powerful analytical engine with Essbase as the back end. We can analyze, transform, or utilize a big chunk of data for our calculations."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"The solution is scalable."
"Essbase is extremely stable and low-maintenance."
"It is very fast compared to other normal databases, like SQL and MySQL."
"It helps us fetch specific data sets per users' requirements."
"Unlike relational, where you're linking together multiple tables, with Essbase, you basically define what the dimensions are beforehand, and you define the hierarchy, and then load the data. This allows you to do a pretty sophisticated analysis so that you can drill into it and slice and dice the data."
"Essbase is a kind of backbone, or back end, for systems like Hyperion Planning."
 

Cons

"The product cannot be integrated with a popular coding IDE."
"When I used the support, I had communication problems because of the language barrier with the agent. The accent was difficult to understand."
"They release patches that sometimes break our code. These patches are supposed to fix issues, but sometimes they cause disruptions."
"While Databricks is generally a robust solution, I have noticed a limitation with debugging in the Delta Live Table, which could be improved."
"I have had some issues with some of the Spark clusters running on Databricks, where the Spark runtime and clusters go up and down, which is an area for improvement."
"I would like to see the integration between Databricks and MLflow improved. It is quite hard to train multiple models in parallel in the distributed fashions. You hit rate limits on the clients very fast."
"It would be great if Databricks could integrate all the cloud platforms."
"Performance could be improved."
"Essbase has a programming language, and it has a couple of functions to do forecasting, however, their feature set for that is not that good."
"They should improve the solution's performance."
"There is room for improvement in terms of cost-effectiveness."
"The solution could enhance business analytics. I delved into the data using Oracle Essbase to create a new support tool."
"The ability to drive external reporting out for development could be improved."
"The initial setup could be simplified."
"The initial setup is pretty complex."
"The reporting tool of Essbase needs improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We pay as we go, so there isn't a fixed price. It's charged by the unit. I don't have any details detail about how they measure this, but it should be a mix between processing and quantity of data handled. We run a simulation based on our use cases, which gives us an estimate. We've been monitoring this, and the costs have met our expectations."
"I do not exactly know the costs, but one of our clients pays between $100 USD and $200 USD monthly."
"The pricing depends on the usage itself."
"There are different versions."
"We have only incurred the cost of our AWS cloud services. This is because during this period, Databricks provided us with an extended evaluation period, and we have not spent much money yet. We are just starting to incur costs this month, I will know more later on the full cost perspective."
"We're charged on what the data throughput is and also what the compute time is."
"Price-wise, I would rate Databricks a three out of five."
"We find Databricks to be very expensive, although this improved when we found out how to shut it down at night."
"It is a costly solution."
"The solution is expensive."
"Essbase is competitively priced."
"I believe the licensing is on a monthly base."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which do you prefer - Databricks or Azure Machine Learning Studio?
Databricks gives you the option of working with several different languages, such as SQL, R, Scala, Apache Spark, or Python. It offers many different cluster choices and excellent integration with ...
How would you compare Databricks vs Amazon SageMaker?
We researched AWS SageMaker, but in the end, we chose Databricks. Databricks is a Unified Analytics Platform designed to accelerate innovation projects. It is based on Spark so it is very fast. It...
Which would you choose - Databricks or Azure Stream Analytics?
Databricks is an easy-to-set-up and versatile tool for data management, analysis, and business analytics. For analytics teams that have to interpret data to further the business goals of their orga...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Oracle Essbase?
It's not that expensive, but also not cheap. I'm not sure because it's a private license.
What needs improvement with Oracle Essbase?
If I got the opportunity to work with Hyperion, which is the best product, I would definitely go with that. The main concern is that Oracle is ending on-premises server support, so it would be bett...
What is your primary use case for Oracle Essbase?
We provide complete ownership of this application to Walmart projects. In the UK system, we support and develop for the Asda account, known as Eltham. We provide installation and support to over 50...
 

Also Known As

Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash
Essbase
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware
CHU de Rennes, Bellco Credit Union, Akindo Sushiro Co. Ltd, Deutsche Telekom AG, Samarco MineraÊo S.A., PCCW Ltd., QDQ media S.A.U., Boiron Italia, Specialized Bicycle Components Inc., Akindo Sushiro Co. Ltd., Air Canada, Daelim Industrial Co. Ltd.
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