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Databricks vs Oracle OBIEE comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Databricks
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
88
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (7th), Data Science Platforms (1st), Streaming Analytics (1st)
Oracle OBIEE
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
157
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (5th), Reporting (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. Databricks is designed for Cloud Data Warehouse and holds a mindshare of 8.4%, up 3.2% compared to last year.
Oracle OBIEE, on the other hand, focuses on BI (Business Intelligence) Tools, holds 3.8% mindshare, down 4.6% since last year.
Cloud Data Warehouse
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

ShubhamSharma7 - PeerSpot reviewer
Capability to integrate diverse coding languages in a single notebook greatly enhances workflow
Databricks offers various courses that I can use, whether it's PySpark, Scala, or R. I can leverage all these courses in a single notebook, which is beneficial for clients as they can access various tools in one place whenever needed. This is quite significant. I usually work with PySpark based on client requirements. After coding, I feed the Databricks notebooks into the ADF pipeline for updates. Databricks' capability to process data in parallel enhances data processing speed. Furthermore, I can connect our Databricks notebook directly with Power BI and other visualization tools like Qlik. Once we develop code, it allows us to transform raw data into visualizations for clients using analysis diagrams, which is very helpful.
VishnuReddy - PeerSpot reviewer
Handles large datasets and easy to interact with and handle but performance could be better
Oracle's technical support usually recommends to upgrade when you contact them for support. They don't focus on fixing the issue at hand or providing guidance on how to do it. If you are in a lower environment, like one version down, they will blindly suggest upgrading. Additional patches are given for other Oracle products like WebLogic, databases, and apps. They fix issues and create patches based on client needs. But from an OBIEE point of view, they mostly provide bundle patches of around 5 to 6 GB that need to be applied and tested end-to-end. It's not an easy way to get small patches, and if issues arise after applying the patches, you have to contact Oracle again.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The simplicity of development is the most valuable feature."
"Databricks provides a consistent interface for data engineers to work with data in a consistent language on a single integrated platform for ingesting, processing, and serving data to the end user."
"Databricks' most valuable features are the workspace and notebooks. Its integration, interface, and documentation are also good."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to use SQL directly with Databricks."
"The fast data loading process and data storage capabilities are great."
"I would rate them ten out of ten."
"The most valuable feature is the Spark cluster which is very fast for heavy loads, big data processing and Pi Spark."
"It can send out large data amounts."
"The main features of this solution are that it is easy to use, intuitive, and user-friendly. When I retrieve the data from the database it is in a very raw form, then when I use the Oracle Report Builder it has advanced intelligence features to allow me to view and make changes to the data easily."
"The most valuable features of Oracle OBIEE are ease of use, the graphical user interface is simple to understand, and the reports can be done without problems. There are many tutorials and training materials available if needed."
"Some of the dashboard capabilities are good. The dashboard capabilities that tell you what kind of reports are available and provide you a summary of the reports are valuable. It is easy to navigate and easy to download reports into Excel to utilize them."
"The most valuable feature of Oracle OBIEE, for me, would be the Web Catalog. From a development perspective, I do not need any client or any software to be installed on my laptop or desktop. Everything is browser-based, so I just open the browser and start development."
"The most valuable features of Oracle OBIEE are the ease of logging in, the dashboard, and showing the problems in the data. Additionally, the reports are well integrated and it has good technology."
"The solution has great reporting and forecasting capabilities."
"It is a very stable solution."
"The primary reason for using OBIEE is connectivity with Oracle E-Business Suite. It makes it easy to connect with our Oracle E-Business Suite. There are the standard dashboards available, which we sometimes use, and now we are looking for customized dashboards."
 

Cons

"Performance could be improved."
"I would like to see the integration between Databricks and MLflow improved. It is quite hard to train multiple models in parallel in the distributed fashions. You hit rate limits on the clients very fast."
"The initial setup is difficult."
"We'd like a more visual dashboard for analysis It needs better UI."
"Databricks may not be as easy to use as other tools, but if you simplify a tool too much, it won't have the flexibility to go in-depth. Databricks is completely in the programmer's hands. I prefer flexibility rather than simplicity."
"I would like more integration with SQL for using data in different workspaces."
"I would like it if Databricks adopted an interface more like R Studio. When I create a data frame or a table, R Studio provides a preview of the data. In R Studio, I can see that it created a table with so many columns or rows. Then I can click on it and open a preview of that data."
"A lot of people are required to manage this solution."
"From an improvement perspective, the technical team should be able to provide more accurate answers by taking into consideration the context of the issues faced by users."
"I would rate its current performance as a five out of ten because a lot of features are missed out in OBIEE."
"The graphical capabilities could be better. They are also cumbersome, and they are limited compared to Tableau, Power BI, or even Business Objects to a certain extent and Cognos. The error logging isn't great either. The errors that come out when you schedule aren't easy to understand. I find how they filter within a query quite cumbersome and difficult to debug if somebody else has done it. You can see as you build, and I think that's where the problem is. It doesn't lend itself to debug something. For example, if you create a formula that's quite complicated, it's not easy to understand what goes with what. It becomes spaghetti, and it's very difficult to unpick. That's really my gripe about it, and in some ways, it's too flexible. It tries to be a Jack of all trades when it's not. I think a lot of these products, if they concentrate on trying to produce your reports, then that's fine. But when they're trying to do all sorts of other things as well, then it isn't very easy. We get lots of support from Oracle, but I think the problem is that we get many invalid file operations. Nobody understands why. It can be a multitude of reasons, but no one reason could cause it. That's just one of the issues we've had in the last year. But the scope of reporting has gone through the roof over the previous 12 to 18 months. We want an end-of-life OBIEE in our environment because some of the infrastructure runs unclustered. We weren't allowed to go clustered for some reason, and we never knew why. Unfortunately, going down that route means that the platform we run it on, WebLogic, has now become non-standard within our organization. Everything's been moved off it and onto other platforms. Unfortunately, our OBIEE runs on that platform, and we're being pushed down different routes, and we don't know where we're going at the moment. Within the next two years, I don't think we'll have OBIEE in our part of the business. In the next release, I think having the capability of being able to develop and then promote to a production environment rather than having to have separate environments will help. I know that Tableau and Power BI can be created on a desktop application, and then when it's ready to go live, you can promote it."
"If the data is large, the dashboard takes a really long time. So, based on the database, if you have around a million cost contacts, the load time is very low, and the dashboard fails."
"One of the things that have been difficult with OBIEE during all the time that I've known it is that when something goes wrong, many times, the error messages are not specific, and you've got to spend a lot of time digging and digging and digging before you say, "Oh, okay. I figured out what it was." There should be more detailed error messages or troubleshooting messages."
"Oracle OBIEE only displays KPIs, but it does not include strategic objectives or display risk in a strategic map."
"There's a lot of redundancy, especially in relation to creating the code."
"The solution needs to be easier to scale."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We find Databricks to be very expensive, although this improved when we found out how to shut it down at night."
"We have only incurred the cost of our AWS cloud services. This is because during this period, Databricks provided us with an extended evaluation period, and we have not spent much money yet. We are just starting to incur costs this month, I will know more later on the full cost perspective."
"The solution uses a pay-per-use model with an annual subscription fee or package. Typically this solution is used on a cloud platform, such as Azure or AWS, but more people are choosing Azure because the price is more reasonable."
"Databricks' cost could be improved."
"The pricing depends on the usage itself."
"My smallest project is around a hundred euros, and my most expensive is just under a thousand euros a week. That is based on terabytes of data processed each month."
"We implement this solution on behalf of our customers who have their own Azure subscription and they pay for Databricks themselves. The pricing is more expensive if you have large volumes of data."
"I do not exactly know the costs, but one of our clients pays between $100 USD and $200 USD monthly."
"Oracle products are extremely expensive."
"The price of Oracle OBIEE is expensive, it is difficult for a small business to afford."
"The licensing cost is based on the number of users using it."
"For the license in part of Oracle, my company makes yearly payments."
"Power BI is less expensive than Oracle OBIEE. A benefit to Power BI is having the option to work with concurrent licensing."
"Compared with the other products in the market, I feel Oracle OBIEE is an expensive product."
"This was not an expensive product for us, although the price varies depending on conditions for each company."
"The pricing we negotiated with Oracle. But, I do not have details."
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Comparison Review

it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 4, 2015
Comparison of SAP BO, Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, Microsoft, OBIEE and Pentaho
1. SAP BO/BI Enterprise scalability Security Ease of use Semantic layer 2. Tableau Visualization Data discovery Turnaround time 3. IBM Cognos Enterprise scalability Security In-memory feature 4. MS BI - Flexibility 5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade 6. QlikView Data…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Government
13%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which do you prefer - Databricks or Azure Machine Learning Studio?
Databricks gives you the option of working with several different languages, such as SQL, R, Scala, Apache Spark, or Python. It offers many different cluster choices and excellent integration with ...
How would you compare Databricks vs Amazon SageMaker?
We researched AWS SageMaker, but in the end, we chose Databricks. Databricks is a Unified Analytics Platform designed to accelerate innovation projects. It is based on Spark so it is very fast. It...
Which would you choose - Databricks or Azure Stream Analytics?
Databricks is an easy-to-set-up and versatile tool for data management, analysis, and business analytics. For analytics teams that have to interpret data to further the business goals of their orga...
How does Oracle OBIEE compare with Microsoft BI?
Oracle OBIEE is great in allowing design and creativity per the individual needs of the organization. Dashboards are fully customizable and very user-friendly. This solution is very stable. Oracle ...
Which Oracle product is better - OBIEE or Analytics Cloud?
Oracle OBIEE is designed to be relatively easy to set up and has a helpful customer support staff at the ready to assist customers. These are two attributes that make this system quite valuable. OB...
What do you like most about Oracle OBIEE?
The most valuable feature of Oracle OBIEE is its ability to handle large volumes of data and provide traditional BI functionalities that developers can easily understand.
 

Also Known As

Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash
OBIEE, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, Oracle BI, Oracle BI EE 11g
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware
Banca Transilvania, BeckmanCoulter, Hong Kong Housing Society, HealthShare, Ivanhoe Cambridge Unifies, and Home Credit, and Finance Bank.
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