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 8.0, while Oracle is ranked #11 with an average rating of 7.9. Quest Software holds a 3.9% mindshare in DDM, compared to Oracle’s 1.2% 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

2,275 Views
2,230 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Oracle Essbase

Read 18 Oracle Essbase reviews

1,800 Views
342 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Foglight for Databases

Oracle Essbase

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 23, 2025

Oracle Essbase and Foglight for Databases are both major players in the data management and analytics category. While Oracle Essbase shines with its robust analytical capabilities, Foglight for Databases has an edge in comprehensive monitoring and performance management.

Features: Oracle Essbase offers advanced analytical tools with multi-dimensional analysis, complex calculations, and flexibility in integrating various data sources. Foglight for Databases specializes in real-time monitoring, diagnostics, and optimization, providing insights into system health and resource usage essential for database management.

Room for Improvement: Oracle Essbase could benefit from simplified deployment processes, better user interface design, and enhanced support for non-financial analytics. Foglight for Databases might improve by expanding its analytical capabilities, enriching its data visualization tools, and better integration with newer database technologies.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Oracle Essbase requires strategic deployment due to complexity, with robust customer support from Oracle. Foglight for Databases has a more straightforward deployment process and focuses on seamless integration with extensive customer service to resolve issues efficiently.

Pricing and ROI: Oracle Essbase tends to have a higher setup cost due to its complex configurations, offering great ROI for businesses with demanding analytical needs in financial sectors. Foglight for Databases typically sees lower initial costs and strong ROI potential through database performance optimization, leading to long-term cost savings.

To learn more, read our detailed Foglight for Databases vs. Oracle Essbase Report (Updated: February 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Foglight for Databases vs. Oracle Essbase

February 2026

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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

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

4.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Database Development and Management category, the mindshare of Foglight for Databases is 3.9%, down from 7.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Oracle Essbase is 1.2%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Database Development and Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Foglight for Databases	3.9%
Oracle Essbase	1.2%
Other	94.9%

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The PI module allows [my colleague] to identify which new indexes or modified indexes are going to make the biggest impact."

"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."

"One of the hardest things to do in database management is to evaluate performance deviation across time. The adaptive baseline that Quest is using is by far the most helpful. That doesn't necessarily mean I use it on a daily basis, but it is something that I have not been able to find in any other tool, at the same level."

"Its reporting capabilities are immense."

"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."

"The profiler allows us to look at the profiles of the database queries that are being run over time. It allows us to go back to our customers and say that these are some of the queries causing them some headaches. It gives us the opportunity to provide suggestions on how to improve their experience."

"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."

"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."

More Foglight for Databases pros

"The solution is stable and reliable."

"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."

"With Oracle Essbase, everything is centralized in a comprehensive financial statement analysis, allowing for complete management of budget, actuals analysis, and forecast."

"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."

"Essbase is extremely stable and low-maintenance."

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

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

"Oracle Essbase enables organizations to take their strategic decisions, which helps them make the right decisions at the right time."

More Oracle Essbase pros

Cons

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

"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."

"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."

"When we decided to go with Foglight, a lot of people stopped using the diagnostics part because it was very intimidating... They still won't use it because they feel it's too intimidating. They will open something up and not know what to do. It's not very user-friendly. You have to click on a lot of stuff to find the information."

"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."

"The data model needs improvement when it comes to creating custom reports. That is an area where it needs a bit of improvement. Foglight gathers a lot of information around our databases as part of its monitoring. While I know all this information is in there, trying to pull the metric we want out for custom reports is sometimes hard to find. One nice thing about Foglight is that you can create custom dashboards, which you can easily convert to reports. We would be doing a lot more of that if it weren't for the challenging data model."

"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."

"The monitoring capabilities for Postgres should be at par with SQL Server. This is the area where we push back on our Quest representative."

More Foglight for Databases cons

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

"There is room for improvement in terms of cost-effectiveness."

"The initial setup could be simplified."

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

"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 consolidation engine, which is HFM or FCCS, needs some room for improvement."

"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."

"It's an expensive product to use."

More Oracle Essbase cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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

12%

Government

11%

Manufacturing Company

University

Financial Services Firm

21%

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	10

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	14

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?

A significant area for improvement in Oracle Essbase is that financial statement analysis, CAPEX and OPEX analysis, and financial consolidation must be done manually, as Oracle Essbase doesn't incl...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Oracle Essbase?

The initial setup of Oracle Essbase is dependent on whether you select BSO or ASO cubes. First, you need to set up the type of information and once the type of cubes is defined, you need to define ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Spotlight vs Foglight for Databases

Compared 21% of the time

Oracle Enterprise Manager vs Foglight for Databases

Compared 13% of the time

SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer vs Foglight for Databases

Compared 13% of the time

Redgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials vs Foglight for Databases

Compared 9% of the time

IDERA DB Optimizer vs Foglight for Databases

Compared 8% of the time

More Foglight for Databases Competitors

Microsoft Power BI vs Oracle Essbase

Compared 20% of the time

SAP Analytics Cloud vs Oracle Essbase

Compared 11% of the time

IBM Cognos vs Oracle Essbase

Compared 8% of the time

IBM Planning Analytics vs Oracle Essbase

Compared 8% of the time

Tableau Enterprise vs Oracle Essbase

Compared 6% of the time

More Oracle Essbase Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Foglight for Databases

February 2026

Download Foglight for Databases product report

Buyer's Guide

Oracle Essbase

February 2026

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

February 2026

Free Report: Foglight for Databases vs. Oracle Essbase

Find out what your peers are saying about Foglight for Databases vs. Oracle Essbase and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.

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