Oracle OBIEE Reviews

The advanced visualizations and the semantic layer. These allow for easy design of the warehouse.

We use the forecasting modules with financial data from the ERP system (EBS) and Hyperion.

This allows us to predict how the company will perform in the coming quarter and to take appropriate measures to mitigate the loss.

We also know the fast moving products. We know how to stock and market out products.

• OBIEE visualizations are still behind compared to Tableau and QlikView
• Visualizations, such as Gantt charts, are not available in OBIEE out-of-the-box: Needs a workaround to enable them

I’ve used OBIEE for six years.

The latest version of OBIEE is very stable, especially if it’s running on TimesTen for Exalytics.

OBIEE is designed to be scalable. It scales the best compared to all the other BI products.

I would give technical support a rating 3/5.

We did use previous solutions. The upgrade was a corporate decision. This was based on several factors, such as the new features, the approaching end of support, and the cost of maintaining an old system.

The initial setup is never simple. It was a long and difficult journey. It needed a lot of cooperation from the ERP consultants.

For enterprise BI, OBIEE is still one of the best products. Oracle does give a good discount and ensures a successful implementation.

We evaluated BusinessObjects, Cognos, and MSBI.

Understand your data and what information you want to gather from it before embarking on the BI journey. Ensure that you have a strong team to implement it. The best tools are useless when they are poorly implemented.

There are many valuable features. For example:

• Multiple data sources: I can easily combine multiple data sources and organize them into a common business model.
• Three-layer repository: With the three-layer repository, the development and interpretation are very simple. The three layers are divided from each other well both in logical and physical meaning. The physical layer is used for importing data, creating aliases, building physical joins, setting up connection pools, managing cache and hints for tables. The business model and mapping layer is used for creating logical columns, fact and dimension tables, hierarchies, measures, using fragmentations and filters, applying business logic. The presentation layer is used to prepare, group and organize the data for users to view.
• Security management: Security management is very detailed, complex and well defined in OBIEE. I can set up everything that I want; user security, object security, row-level security, etc. For example: I can easily connect users with application roles, different application roles with different privileges or set up data filters, other restrictions for users / application roles or manage subject areas/tables/columns access for users / application roles, etc.
• Smart cache management: I can easily manage cache and cache settings. I can use it for common tables only, I can purge it in a scheduled way, etc
• Interactive dashboards and analyses: Lots of rich visualization (dashboards, analyses, graphs, maps, etc); user interactions: drilling, pivoting, filtering, prompting, sorting, navigation and more.
• Spatial integration: Lots of rich map visualizations, many supported map suppliers and a wide range of possibilities to use map data.
• Individual customization using CSS and JavaScript.

I have worked for National Public Health and Medical Officer Service on the Child Birth Notification BI project. It was a very successful project both for us and the medical experts as well.

For example, with our analyses, the medical experts could improve healthcare and services at the regions where the child mortality was high.

Of course, there is some room for improvement, because a perfect BI platform does not exist in IT.

The following things would be welcomed:

• Detailed editing of dashboard prompts: By this, I mean the appearance and localization. If I create a dashboard prompt, I cannot edit freely the columns and texts on the user interface of dashboard prompts. For example, I cannot insert individual text fields that are independent from columns; I cannot use CSS to emphasize my texts of columns and the localization is quite limited as well.
• Smarter BI navigation using hierarchical columns: By this, I mean the navigation from a measure is quite difficult when I use hierarchical columns. When I use a hierarchical column in an analysis and expand the levels and click on a measure on the second level, for example, the BI does not know the appropriate level using navigation and it will result in wrong amounts. This is a known issue, according to the BI documentation, and there are other solutions, alternative ways to use navigation. Nonetheless, for hierarchical columns, it could be smarter.

I have used it for more than five years.

I have not encountered any stability issues with BI, but I did encounter stability issues with WebLogic.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. It has worked well.

I can't rate technical support, because I don't ask for help from OTN. Whenever I find any errors or have any issues, I read solutions or best practices from forums or BI channels.

I used only open-source solutions before OBIEE, but the functionality of these tools is not even close to OBIEE.

I think the install of OBIEE is not so complex; it's quite straightforward. Of course, the configuration can be complex, if we would like to use completely different settings from the default.

Unfortunately, this is the most difficult point with OBIEE. The license is very expensive.

When I first encountered OBIEE, I had no choice to use other options, because this platform was preferred at that company. That was five years ago and since that time, I have been using OBIEE and I can recommend using it to everyone.

On the other hand, if our customers would like to use an open-source BI platform, I can recommend using SpagoBI, for example.

I recommend using OBIEE because of its wide functionality (multiple data sources, interactive dashboards and analysis, spatial integration, delivers and alerts, mobiles, etc.).

In my opinion, it is one of the best BI platforms. It provides a full range of capabilities (from development to user experience).

I have worked on a lot of interesting and special projects, and I haven't been assigned any task that I could not do with it.

Obviously the most valuable feature is the data, both in the way it's presented visually with graphs and just the accessibility to that data.

It empowers users to perform ad hoc analyses themselves rather than having to go to IT or somewhere else. That makes it much more efficient for our users to do their jobs because they have access to data analysis in front of them instead of having to find that information elsewhere.

It would be beneficial to allow the user to further personalize their own page a little bit more instead of just being presented with data. I think the user interface still needs more fine-tuning. It needs to be easier to create user reports. People who first use it don't know where to get what they need as there are so many tabs and so many things you can do. It would be nice for it to be made more intuitive.

We've had no issues deploying it.

I would say it's pretty stable. We've had no issues with instability.

It has scaled well for our needs.

We've opened tickets and the IT side handles that. I'm more on the functional side. We send the request to IT and they open up the tickets, but the turnaround time is a little long.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, thought I haven't heard that it was particularly difficult or complex.

We implemented it with our in-house team.

We didn't evaluate other options because we did a pilot program ten years ago and we already had the licenses and infrastructure in place for it.

It's a valuable tool and it really benefits our work. The main thing is to let your users know how valuable it is so it's worth their effort to learn how to use the tool.

The most valuable feature for us is the ability for endusers and superusers to do some deeper dives without IT intervention. It allows our users to be more responsible and to manage their data a little more responsibly without IT interference.

OBIEE is essentially a queue-based data mining tool that allows all aspects of the business, from finance to manufacturing, to do a little more data analysis on our 24/7 operational data.

I wish there was a way you could implement real-time data easier rather than through the ETL process. I know that Oracle's got their own ETL process that does have that feature, though.

We've been using it for a couple years now.

We've had no issues with deployment.

I'd say it's pretty stable. With anything that's web-based, there are some issues with browsers, but nothing huge that's obvious.

But with some of the ETL processes, such as bringing in new pieces of data like cost categories, anything from the EBS Suite into the cube, you can get issues.

We don't have that many functional users using it, so scaling has not been a true issue for us.

We use a third-party hosting solution. A lot of the setup in technical maintenance is all handled through them. I know we've logged several SR's for several OBIEE issues.

We set it up with the stock Oracle solution because we purchased a lot of the stock reporting cubes. We've slowly added our own custom ETL processes to pull data as needed. Since we're a 24/7 manufacturing company, there's a lot of data that wasn't there that we've had to slowly bring in. We're still fighting through a lot of it, and since it's not a priority service, it's kind of a secondary function. There's gain on it, but it's definitely lower on our priority list than a lot of the day-to-day, 24/7 operations.

Make sure they understand the true use of it. Originally, we were shown the dashboard, all the great features that come with OBIEE and OBIA. But we weren't truly told what it takes to maintain it, what it takes to get valuable data for our company out of it. It's a lot more work than Oracle led us to believe at first.

• Dashboards - Thousands of users get the exact information that is relevant to them.
• Agents - The system automatically sends information when you need it.
• Answers - Power Users (aka Data Scientists) investigate the data.
• Integration - Analyse any data and present it in any format.

Implementation has led to a complete change in the way we create and consume information. People no longer spend hours creating spreadsheets; they now make informed decisions.

Right now, there's no ability to add comments to the dashboards. We'd like to be able to do that.

I've been using it for 16 years.

It's very easy to install.

The 12c version is much more stable than previous versions. We've had no real issues with instability.

The system will scale out easily to thousands of concurrent users. We've had no issues with the inability to scale.

Oracle provides good support, but the community is the place to go. Online experts, bloggers, conferences and the ACE program all contribute to a huge knowledge pool.

Microsoft Office products are great, but they don't scale to billions of rows.

You can go from download to fully-installed in just a couple of hours.

Negotiate hard! These products are not cheap.

I also looked at Power BI and Cognos.

Bring in an expert -- someone with real experience and who's independent.

It's just drag-and-drop, versatile, very user-friendly, and intuitive. OBIEE makes data analytics easy.

It's provided versatility to both the user and developer sides. It can present data in various way to the end user. With it, we have options on what to do and how to present information, such as in graphical form. There are several graphics, in fact, such as pie charts or any other kind of data illustration.

The Oracle installation instructions tell you to install the product and give it a name, a skimmer name would be dev. That way it's called dev because you’re doing the operation in dev. Call it dev BI platform, but even that is just a skimmer name. The best thing would be to just call it BI platform and leave it at that. That way, to move to any environment, from dev to test to prod without changing anything. In dev, it's great, but if your test environment is called test something, your users would be test something. Now your guys on the dev BI platform suddenly don't work here because it's dev. In production, you have to call it prod something. The bookshelf says call it dev, but you really shouldn't do that. Really it should be just BI platform.

If you have a lot of Oracle products, they would conflict if they are running the same box due to code names, code numbers, and pretty much use the same numbers. So, if you have Oracle Data Integrator and OBIEE in the same box, they would conflict. They would want to be in their own separate boxes to be able to work together. They don't work together, but they do help each other. ODI just makes the data available to how you want it. You need separate boxes, and once again, that means space and there's obligations with Oracle where you cannot have "something something" on the VirtualBox. There are licensing issues there, too.

The issues we've had with deployment are with the naming conventions described in the Areas for Improvement section. Other than that, we've had no deployment issues.

It's a stable product, but Oracle products generally conflict when they're deployed in the same box.

We've had no issues with scalability.

Tableau is visualization, and OBIEE is not as visual. It's a visualization tool, but Tableau's got more bells and whistles, a more "wow" factor. OBIEE is more data driven. Also depending on the user's capability, it presents data in a way in which you can make your own reports.

Visual Analyzer is a nice feature that gives us options on how to view our data.

Once fully used, the Visual Analyzer has great promise. However, you're allowing end users to upload spreadsheets that can mash with your existing data. This is a great idea (Tableau attack on Oracle's part), but it can be dangerous if the end-user data is wrong. In that case, the great report will be wrong. It still needs a data manager's blessing to check it, IMO.

Installing it is quite different now with the steps. Once the product becomes more mainstream with lots of blogs, the installation process will be easier to follow, but even with existing documentation it was quite a chore. Then, there's the issue of using it within a virtual server and the loop back challenge you have to hunt for on the internet to get it working correctly.

I've been using it about a week or so.

Mainly just the change in install process and virtual server 'challenge'.

It's Oracle - you get what you pay for service-wise, and even then it's the person you work with that dictates whether it's a good or not so good service.

8/10 in general, but don't be afraid to raise severity if you're being essentially ignored.

We previously used v11.x.

It's pretty good, but as with all things Oracle you have to read the install notes first.

We did it ourselves.

OBIEE 11c is pretty slick these days, and it has a new look so that's nice. Everything's pretty darn good now with the following 2 caveats.

1. Allow more than one RPD. I don't know how or when, but one RPD for an entire production environment is brutal.
2. What's with BI Publisher? It seems everyone states that it's just for pixel perfect reports but the IMO shows that's just not true. There are a large number of standard reports that can, and should, be created in BIP. Daily Orders report bursts to various departments? That's not pixel perfect and it's one of a huge number that should be BIP. Sure there should be lots of analysis reports but BIP is still very important. So why has it not changed in this release? I'd swear Oracle's setting it up for removal like they did Discoverer, Hyperion, etc.

For me, it makes the difference is in terms of our users being able to take advantage of a product which allows you to get access to data, reports, make decisions quickly, and have better insights regarding operations.

We're using it since 2010 or 2011. From a functional point of view, as well as implementation, setting it up, configuring it, updating. We have gone through the entire lifecycle.

In the beginning it had it's stability issues, but it became stable. It's better now. I think we are in more of a "cruising" stage in our product lifecycle.

We did hire consulting services to help us implement. Then our superusers took it from there and went to a lot of sessions and user groups to better understand.

We think it will meet our needs moving forward. 

Oracle support can be tricky. I would rate it as, maybe, six or seven out of 10. It's not the best.

Response time can sometimes take a little while. Redundant questions. As an experienced user, you can kind of tell what the problem is, versus... It's like they have a pre-written script, "Okay, this is what I need to ask you."

Yeah, we were using an old product that Oracle sunsetted, I believe.

This product, OBIEE, they acquired, they didn't build it. This is now their choice of tools for reporting. Before, they were using an Oracle product which was not the greatest. It was Excel-type stuff.

Surprisingly, this was straightforward. If you follow the implementation guide or installation guide, it was very well written, so we were good.

I would recommend that you get your end-users ready, because a lot of information is transparent with this tool, which gives them better insight regarding how their operations are running. They might find something that was not visible to them. It may mean negativity around improvement but take that as an opportunity. That's what my suggestion is. It's a powerful tool.

We are happy with it. I think that Oracle tried to compete, but they realized that there was a better product. Buying them (the better product) was a better choice (for Oracle), because it really provided a lot of users access to data quickly, and Oracle's former solution sometimes wasn't the greatest, so good stuff.