Foglight for Databases vs Oracle Essbase comparison

Quest Software and Oracle are both solutions in the Database Development and Management category. Quest Software is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.2, while Oracle is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.1. Quest Software holds a 7.6% mindshare in DDM, compared to Oracle’s 0.9% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Quest Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Oracle users who would recommend it.

Foglight for Databases

Read 14 Foglight for Databases reviews

1,842 Views
1,824 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Oracle Essbase

Read 18 Oracle Essbase reviews

1,850 Views
130 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Foglight for Databases

Oracle Essbase

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 19, 2025

Oracle Essbase and Foglight for Databases compete in the business analytics space, offering unique strengths. Foglight for Databases has the upper hand due to its superior features and adaptability to various database environments, despite Oracle Essbase’s advantages in pricing and support.

Features: Oracle Essbase specializes in multidimensional data analysis, robust calculation capabilities, and scalable reporting tools, which are ideal for financial forecasting. Foglight for Databases offers extensive performance monitoring, database diagnostics, and comprehensive monitoring capabilities, providing adaptability across various database environments.

Room for Improvement: Oracle Essbase could enhance its analytics features and adaptability to non-financial sectors. Increasing scalability and integrating more real-time capabilities might benefit users. Foglight for Databases could improve its UI, reduce setup complexity, and expand its customer support availability to ensure quicker issue resolution.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Oracle Essbase features a straightforward deployment with extensive documentation and highly responsive customer service. Foglight for Databases provides a flexible deployment model suited for diverse IT environments, supported by strong technical assistance focusing on proactive issue resolution.

Pricing and ROI: Oracle Essbase offers competitive setup costs, yielding high ROI through effective analytics and reporting. In contrast, Foglight for Databases, while having a higher initial setup cost, justifies spending with long-term database performance optimization benefits, appealing to strategic investment decisions.

To learn more, read our detailed Foglight for Databases vs. Oracle Essbase Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Foglight for Databases vs. Oracle Essbase

July 2025

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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

Foglight for Databases

Ranking in Database Development and Management

2nd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Oracle Essbase

Ranking in Database Development and Management

11th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

4.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Database Development and Management category, the mindshare of Foglight for Databases is 7.6%, up from 7.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Oracle Essbase is 0.9%, down from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Database Development and Management

Featured Reviews

Stuart Dairiki

Senior IT Manager at a wholesaler/distributor with 1,001-5,000 employees

Empowers efficient database monitoring and performance troubleshooting with powerful workload analysis

I find it extremely helpful to use Foglight to triage any database issues, specifically performance issues using what Foglight calls PI investigator. It is a very powerful workload analysis tool that helps me understand where bottlenecks are. It allows me to see performance issues as end users report them. It can save time and effort when doing root cause analysis. It enables me to obtain information quicker and easier compared to manually compiling it. Foglight provides us with a near-real-time activity database. It's not 100% real-time. It has less than a minute latency. It allows us to see performance issues as end-users report them. We started seeing benefits pretty much immediately. We use Foglight to display intensive databases. However, it's not something we monitor regularly. It's only something we kind of dig into as we troubleshoot and triage issues. It does help us determine potential IT help issues. When we use Foglight, we find it helps drill down holistically into potential bottlenecks. It helps us to see what is going on in the database. Foglight allows us to monitor multiple database platforms. We use, for example, Oracle, SQL Server, Postgres, Amazon Redshift, and SAP HANA. It gives us insight into our entire landscape of production workloads in near real-time. The solution saves costs when performing root cause analysis. It can save time and effort when doing root cause analysis. It allows us to obtain information quicker and easier than by manually compiling information.

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Bhavya N

Senior System Engineer at Infosys

Ensuring efficient data analysis and reporting while identifying areas for calculation and export improvements

The features of Oracle Essbase are valuable, such as its multi-dimensional database used for dynamic calculations and reporting purposes. These features are valuable because they support multi-dimensional data views, allowing users to analyze relationships across various data categories and establish a comprehensive perspective on business operations. Moreover, dynamic calculations allow real-time data analysis, significantly improving the accuracy and depth of financial insights. I have utilized Essbase's data aggregation capabilities. The Oracle Essbase interface provides a good user experience, allowing users to easily navigate and analyze data with fast query performance, effective data visualization tools such as charts, graphs, and tables, and flexibility for customizable analysis and reporting, including the ability to create ad hoc reports. The benefits of the interface include improving productivity and enhancing decision-making.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The alarms alert proactively if there are any potential or ongoing issues with the databases that we support. That means we can take preventive or corrective action before the issue becomes a big issue. And the SQL PI features enable us to drill down into performance issues in our databases so that we can improve performance, which is important."

"Foglight is also able to help the DBAs proactively fix problems before they become an issue. It provides them with real-time activity screens that help in this regard. The DBAs are able to go to these screens and look at what's happening in real time, and that buys them time. It helps them see problems ahead of time and find solutions to them."

"Foglight's Change Tracking capabilities are another huge feature. It is wonderful to be able to do that. People don't realize the amount of information that Foglight gathers from a given server or instance. It gets down to the version of SQL, the disk array, everything that's there. Any change that's made, any upgrade to SQL, shows up on the dashboard almost immediately. You don't know how much time you save just having a tool in your back pocket that does that for you."

"We can visualize all the different types of DB servers that we are monitoring in a single pane of glass. It uses a 360-degree overview of the database, for each of those databases that we are monitoring. That includes what kind of resource utilization is happening and what kind of DB parameters are getting monitored, as well as the different types of DB parameters that are being offered for each database type."

"What I really like is the SQL PI feature, which allows us to drill down into queries and identify what is causing contention in the database. Using the SQL PI feature, I am able to drill down into the queries, see what is blocking, and try to improve it."

"The ability to monitor multiple database platforms streamlines our database operations. The single pane of glass is what we were really after when we picked Foglight. We knew we wanted something that could monitor cross-platform because it does save a lot of time to use the same tool. The one thing that I like with Foglight is that we don't have to install anything locally, like agents, directly on the database servers. That was also a big seller because it simplifies things."

"It can save time and effort when doing root cause analysis. It enables me to obtain information quicker and easier compared to manually compiling it."

"The most valuable feature is the in-depth capability SQL Performance Investigator provides. It allows you to drill down to the smallest detail that occurs on our platform. It does a highly detailed and atomic follow-up of what one wants to look for in relation to time and our different instances."

More Foglight for Databases pros

"It is highly efficient and easily scalable, particularly for handling large databases."

"Oracle Essbase is a web integration system that integrates with other data systems."

"The solution can handle a large volume of data."

"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."

"I have found the most valuable aspect is the user-friendly environment and current features."

"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."

"It helps us fetch specific data sets per users' requirements."

"Oracle's capability to define custom hierarchies and dimensions has helped my organization in performing nuanced data exploration and advanced modeling because we use Oracle Essbase for dimension definition and also to define the properties of these members, such as dynamic members, stored members, shared members."

More Oracle Essbase pros

Cons

"Quest must release a Spanish version. That's critical because not everyone speaks English in Latin America. It's an excellent product, so it's super important that they offer the application and customer service in Spanish."

"I get a lot of alerts that, while important, are not critical. Then I have to dig in and figure out how to turn alerts off, but not the logging. I want to be able to go back, once we get the other big issues out of the way, and start fine-tuning some of those other areas, but I don't necessarily want to receive an email for all of them."

"The version that I'm using is not the latest version, so there might have been some improvement, but the OS monitoring is a bit lacking, and the high-availability option is a bit complicated to set up and it doesn't work all the time."

"It would be amazing if they could enable the "Performance Investigator" functionality across all database platforms."

"One thing that I would like, and it's probably something that I could set up internally, is something other than a dashboard which I have to look at to know that a server is down. I'd like bells and whistles to go off... If I look at the dashboard I know there's a server down. But if I'm not looking at it, if I'm looking at some other problem, I want to know about it. You can do that, you can use SMSs and alerts to your phone, and I could set it up to handle that, but it would be nice if, out-of-the-box, Foglight did that."

"The system is not that stable. We have been facing a lot of issues. We built a new store environment of Foglight, an environment for monitoring the Lowe's store servers, which are all Db2 servers. The objective is to monitor 800 Db2 servers in each Foglight instance. Up to 150 Db2 servers, the environment was working fine. The moment it crossed 150 or 160, we started having a lot of stability issues."

"Better communication and alerts regarding the transaction logs getting full would also be beneficial. What I have noticed is that if the log files on the SQL server are full, we cannot log in and have to do some cleanup on the Foglight DB. It would be good if they could monitor that and alert us when it is getting too full."

"I would like the rule development code to be made available so we don't always have to be referred to professional services for custom solutions. For example, if we want to exclude certain databases from a particular rule, we shouldn't have to go to support and to professional services for that solution. If the code and syntax were available, we have resources that could quickly turn something like that around."

More Foglight for Databases cons

"It's an expensive product to use."

"The solution could enhance business analytics. I delved into the data using Oracle Essbase to create a new support tool."

"The main concern is that Oracle is ending on-premises server support, so it would be better if there was a cloud platform available for Oracle Essbase."

"The initial setup could be simplified."

"I would like to see an integration with application performance management and a version control management tool."

"They should improve the solution's performance."

"The ability to drive external reporting out for development could be improved."

"The reporting tool of Essbase needs improvement."

More Oracle Essbase cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Foglight could be a little more competitive in Chile, and it should be lowered for long-time customers— at least by 20 percent. Sometimes the price is a limitation. We have seven instances and nearly 5 million users. If Quest Foglight could reduce its prices for the clients that have been with it for a long time, we would be able to have more instances."

"Pricing is very reasonable. We were able to construct a pretty easy contract with Quest, who were very easy to work with and very amenable to what we are trying to do. It worked out well for us."

"The price is worth it, if you have the time to go through the information."

"It is cost-effective. With our EA, it is really based on the scale of our database environment. We found the Quest team to be reasonable and flexible when it comes to pricing and scaling of licenses."

"This is like the "Cadillac" of performance monitoring software. It's not cheap... I am currently with a company that I was able to convince that the product is worth the cost."

"Compared to the other tools on the market, Foglight is okay in terms of pricing and licensing."

"The solution is expensive."

"Essbase is competitively priced."

"I believe the licensing is on a monthly base."

"It is a costly solution."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Government

11%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

10%

Insurance Company

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Quest Foglight for Databases?

The pricing is palatable. We've already done one renewal and we are in our second contract. We're happy thus far.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Quest Foglight for Databases?

It would be amazing if they could enable the "Performance Investigator" functionality across all database platforms. I've been talking to their product development team about enhancements that I wo...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Quest Foglight for Databases?

I primarily use the solution for database monitoring, specifically for Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Postgres, SAP HANA, and AWS Redshift.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Oracle Essbase?

Improvements for Oracle Essbase could be made, as there are many tools available now, such as FCCS, TRCS, and ERCS. I find managing the database difficult, especially regarding optimization and dat...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Oracle Essbase?

I have been using Oracle Essbase for the last thirteen years and I am into this space for thirty years. I am working on the sales-based platform where I work with different clients for GE, Thomson ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Spotlight vs Foglight for Databases

Compared 36% of the time

SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer vs Foglight for Databases

Compared 26% of the time

Redgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials vs Foglight for Databases

Compared 10% of the time

Oracle Enterprise Manager vs Foglight for Databases

Compared 8% of the time

SQL Sentry vs Foglight for Databases

Compared 7% of the time

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Microsoft Power BI vs Oracle Essbase

Compared 24% of the time

SAP Analytics Cloud vs Oracle Essbase

Compared 11% of the time

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs Oracle Essbase

Compared 10% of the time

IBM Cognos vs Oracle Essbase

Compared 7% of the time

IBM Planning Analytics vs Oracle Essbase

Compared 7% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Foglight for Databases

August 2025

Download Foglight for Databases product report

Buyer's Guide

Oracle Essbase

August 2025

Download Oracle Essbase product report

Also Known As

No data available

Essbase

Overview

Foglight for Databases offers comprehensive monitoring with real-time activity screens and adaptive baselines. It provides a 360-degree overview and efficient UI, requiring no custom scripts, aiding in proactive issue identification and resolution before impacting end users.

Foglight for Databases is a robust tool for monitoring across multiple platforms, including SQL and Oracle. It provides features like the "Morning Coffee" dashboard and SQL Performance Investigator, enabling effective workload analysis and historical investigation. Despite some challenges with sluggish performance on large data volumes and excessive non-critical alerts, it remains a preferred choice for its ability to support proactive management and resource planning. Users appreciate its centralized view of extensive database systems, enabling swift detection and resolution of issues in real-time.

What are the key features?

Comprehensive Monitoring: Provides cross-platform real-time monitoring, ensuring effective database management.
Adaptive Baselines: Adjusts to various workloads, enhancing monitoring accuracy.
SQL Performance Investigator: Offers detailed workload analysis without server impact.
Proactive Alerts: Delivers timely notifications, aiding in immediate issue resolution.
Efficient UI: Streamlines user interaction, minimizing the need for custom scripts.

What benefits and ROI should be considered?

Time Saving: Reduces time in root cause analysis, enhancing productivity.
Proactive Management: Detects issues before they affect end users, minimizing downtime.
Resource Planning: Aids in effective allocation planning for enterprise and cloud platforms.

Foglight is extensively implemented in industries managing extensive database systems, handling numerous servers to ensure availability and performance. It assists businesses in resolving blocking and locking deadlocks, crucial for maintaining smooth operations in production and development environments.

Quest Software

Oracle 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.

Oracle

Sample Customers

CommitDBA

CHU de Rennes, Bellco Credit Union, Akindo Sushiro Co. Ltd, Deutsche Telekom AG, Samarco MineraÊo 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.

Buyer's Guide

Foglight for Databases vs. Oracle Essbase

July 2025

Free Report: Foglight for Databases vs. Oracle Essbase

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