Oracle recently made an important announcement for all EPM environments that all administrators need to know.
First, some history, then what's happening, and then the consequences.
In the fall of 2025 the Essbase version in some products was upgraded to 21c. There were some product issues in the October 2025 and there was some communication from a group within Oracle advising customers to skip the updates. Probably more for the confusion as much as product issues, Oracle skipped the November and December 2025 releases and the January 2026 release (which usually doesn't have much anyway as it happens during year end close for the majority of customers).
Now, after further review and I'm guessing out of an abundance of caution, Oracle is skipping the February and March 2026 updates as well. The next scheduled release will be the April 2026 release. If following the normal cadence, the test environments will be updated on April 3 and the production environments on April 17.
So, consequences. The EPM Automate skipupdate command doesn't need to be used to skip these periods like was required for the October 2025 release. But, once April comes the environments will not have been updated in more than three months, so the skipupdate command won't work then either. To skip the April update (quarter end close for a majority of customers) an SR is required and Oracle will have to do it.
Customers will need to make a choice regarding the test environments. Currently, the test environment is most likely either the same version as production or one version ahead, meaning that an artifact snapshot (application backup) can be moved back and forth. If both production and test are not updated in April, then that will continue but the new version won't be available for testing. If the normal update cadence described above is followed, then the test environment won't be able to import the production snapshot during the two week testing window (more than one version different).
Recommendations. If you want to test the new version in the test environment, do a fresh clone from production to test right before the update gets applied to test (like on April 2). Also consider creating an extra environment so the current test environment can skip the update (if needed to support production and/or migration policies) and the new test environment can get updated (best of both worlds).
