I had the chance to attend the Next Generation Essbase 21.8 webinar a couple of weeks ago. Ekrem Soylemez and Ashish Jain from Oracle gave a preview of Essbase 21.8 and what the future will bring. Many forward-looking statements were made which are covered by Oracle’s standard Safe Harbor disclaimer.
Essbase 21.8 is a cross-channel release and will be the foundation of Fusion SaaS and EPM Cloud in addition to OCI Marketplace and traditional on-prem Essbase. This will be the final major release of 21. The next version of Essbase will be 26.
Essbase 21.8 also reflects Oracle’s continued commitment to supporting both existing customers and teams planning future cloud migrations. The release signals stability for organizations that rely heavily on Essbase while introducing capabilities that pave the way for modern analytics workflows. It is clear that Oracle intends to strengthen Essbase as a core component of its broader data and analytics strategy.
Some of the key enhancements in 21.8 revolve around modernization, performance, and the first wave of AI-driven capabilities coming into the Essbase ecosystem. The Redwood UI, which debuted as an optional interface in 21.7, becomes the primary and only UI in 21.8. It brings a more streamlined experience with faster navigation, multi-tab support, improved notifications, and easy access to common artifacts like calc scripts, outlines, and job definitions. The ability to bookmark specific artifacts using the browser URL is a subtle but meaningful improvement for developers and administrators.
Another major area of investment is Dynamic Filters. Oracle introduced these in 21c as a way to dramatically reduce the number of static filters required to manage security. In 21.8, Dynamic Filters gain support for SQL functions and Essbase member set functions, allowing security rules to align more naturally with the way customers store metadata in relational sources. This makes conditional access simpler, cleaner, and far more scalable particularly in environments with large or frequently changing hierarchies.
On the server side, Oracle continues to enhance the engine with better MDX export optimization, improved BSO calc support, and significant work around Federated Partitions. With 21.8, customers now have the option for “Essbase-managed facts” where Essbase itself creates and manages the fact table inside Autonomous Database, while customers continue to use the familiar Essbase interfaces (MaxL, REST, Redwood UI) to load and manage data. This brings the power of Autonomous Database to traditional Essbase deployments without requiring teams to redesign their processes.
Marketplace customers will also see improvements, including a new automated policy manager designed to streamline the deployment experience and reduce failures caused by missing OCI IAM configurations.
Erkrem and Ashish devoted a substantial portion of the webinar to upcoming AI capabilities. The “Ask Essbase” experience allows users to interact with their cubes in natural language, with Essbase automatically generating the MDX behind the scenes. Users can ask follow-up questions, apply filters, save AI-generated reports, and even revisit prior conversations. Oracle is also working on calc-script-focused AI, including natural-language generation of calc snippets and explanations of existing calc script logic. Longer-term, Essbase will support an MCP (Multi-step Conversational Processing) server that enables LLM-driven agent workflows, effectively making Essbase callable as a tool by AI.
Finally, they previewed its roadmap for Essbase 26, targeted for mid-2026. This release will retire EAS Lite and introduce full integration of Essbase as a service inside Autonomous AI Database. The strategic goal is a smooth path for existing Essbase applications to run natively on ADB, with multi-cloud availability (OCI, AWS, Azure, GCP), auto-scaling, auto-pause, disaster recovery, cloning, and access to ADB’s lakehouse and ETL capabilities. Oracle is clearly positioning this as the long-term architecture for Essbase going forward.
