Re: and Hyperion...
Essbase was my first experience with OLAP databases, back in the mid to late 90s. It was great, but recalculating was horrendous!
We had servers with dual and quad Pentium Pros, running at 60Mhz. I had a Pentium II 233 at home... It was actually quicker to export the bottom layer data, drive an hour home, import the data, calculate, copy the database and drive back to the office and copy the database back onto the server (thank goodness for Zip Drives!). I once forgot to set the compress flag on a new database, instead of around 90MB, it killed the server, when it got to 4GB and there was no more space!
We used Essbase for monthly reporting and planning and Hyperion for budgeting, back then. Hyperion bought Essbase a few months after I moved to a different customer and I never got to use either again.
I've been lucky, I've not worked anywhere that has used Oracle's database or software suites, or SAP for that matter. I did some consulting for a couple of months on a SAP data warehouse project, but on the business analysis side, not the SAP BW side, thank goodness. I looked at it, but it felt really old and creaky (2001), compared to Essbase and Hyperion that I had used 5 years earlier!
Most places I've worked have either used industry specific ERP solutions or a couple have used Navision/Dynamics NAV. We currently use a specialist ERP for the chemical industry in our German parent company, whilst the American sub-division uses NAV at the moment. Before that, I was working for a software house that provided ERP solutions for the food industry, especially eggs and meat processing.