Oracle OBIEE Reviews

• BI Dashboards
• BI Publisher

We previously used a stand-alone desktop-based business reporting tool which did not enable us to maintain a single source of truth, or provide users with pervasive intelligence. However, with this enterprise solution, we have less reliance on the MIS teams to produce reports. Management and operational teams have access to information as and when they need it, insights pop up on a daily basis, and the business has transformed into a knowledge-empowered operation, with decisions at all levels being made on facts rather than guess work.

• Tighter integration of BI Publisher with RPD/BI answers is essential
• Enhanced big data tools will be valuable for industries like ours
• Simplified analysis drill-down setups
• Running BIP report once in the interactive view should not require a rerun when the view is switched, for example, to HTML or Excel

I've been using OBIEE for eight years in total. It's been three years on v11g, and prior to that I had been using v10 since 2007.

No issues with deployment.

We have experienced bottlenecks due to an increased load causing users to fail to login, or too many stuck threads. Perhaps the linkage between BI and Weblogic needs to be optimized to improve stability.

No issues with or scalability.

Customer service in general, is responsive enough to keep you aware of the fact that someone is looking into your issue.

Technical Support is only good when issues are escalated to the development or third line support teams.

Other solutions have been explored before. My reasoning for recommending OBIEE for my organization was that apart from having previous experience working in older versions, and being aware of its scalability, was that most of the banks systems are Oracle based which meant seamless integration. We also wanted to explore deployment of the Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Analytics Server which comes inbuilt with OBIEE.

It was straightforward because we had external assistance. However, due to the expertise we developed, we were able to build and test our backup server from scratch internally. We also restored the Exalytics system with ease after power issues caused the disks to crash.

Both sides need to be part of the team at each stage of deployment so that knowledge transfer is effective. The tendency for most vendors, however, is to avoid too much knowledge transfer for obvious reasons.

There is a need for a per CPU rather than per user license for OBIEE as this impacts the number of users that can be deployed, and therefore the level of security of data throughout the system.

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.

What I like about OBIEE is the kind of interface we have at OBIEE gives us all the financial reporting, all the operational reporting, as well as the delivery reporting. All of these reporting modules are quite good at OBIEE, and they actually help us.

It's quite faster, the way it is integrated with the whole Oracle ecosystem. Speed is one of the key issues. You don't like clicking on something and just waiting for even a few minutes. It becomes a pain; so performance is the key when it comes to using OBIEE.

I just saw somewhere, OBIEE on cloud: that could be the good thing. Right now, what we have is OBIEE on premise. Certainly, I cannot currently check the reports on my mobile. But that could be one advantage OBIEE would have on cloud, once they move.

Certainly the look and feel of the user interface is something should be improved further.

I have been using it for three years.

I've been using it for the last three years, and we never faced any such issues.

It is certainly scalable. Obviously, I can't predict how it will respond to millions of users working, but certainly a few thousand. We have added, subtracted, and soon, and it works perfectly.

We get quite good support if we enter a service request, and so forth. It's good.

Obviously, I can't answer that because, as an end user, setup is more a matter of configuring parameters, like, if I need to generate certain reports on basis of certain dimensions, for different quarters, and so forth. Apart from that, as an end user, I don't customize or configure the application.

Obviously, I would prefer a product which was integrated with the whole Oracle ecosystem. If you are already using an Oracle ecosystem without some database, an ERP solution ,or integrations and so forth, OBIEE is a natural choice in that case. Obviously, there some advantages with the ecosystem, and it works perfectly fine for us.

• Ad hoc analysis
• Dashboarding
• Dimensional modeling (Administration tool)
• Security and permissions

For me as a consultant, these are the most valuable features of the product. By using the Analytics feature, users (and consultants) are able to build both simple and complex reports / graphs. The user is able to add complex calculations and to create almost any column he desires.

The Administration tool is the workbench for the implementation consultant; this is where the data warehouse is called, and facts and dimensions are defined and joined. Here we transform data into a business model and make it accessible to the end user. It is possible to join multiple physical sources and combine their data into a single business model. So, if sales are recorded in a sales application and inventory is recorded in a different system, it can be combined right here.

Security and permissions are important when, within a company, specific roles are defined that are (not) allowed to certain areas of data. OBIEEprovides roles and groups and data shielding by role or even user-level to cope with almost any business requirement at this point.

Users find it difficult to understand which combinations of facts and dimensions are ‘allowed’ in a single report. The application does not provide feedback up front, but gives an error afterwards.

The user interface provides subject areas where the user can choose columns for a report. A column can be either a fact (measure) or a dimension (like company, or date).

It is not uncommon to have two measures that cannot be compared by the same dimension. The report will show a blank column, or give an error message saying something like ‘incomparable measures at this level’.

Most of the times, this is a design flaw in the underlying dimensional model, but this does not have to be the case. If a user could see the unavailable columns based on their selection - by greying out options that are not available - this would greatly help the user understand the underlying data model and prevent frustration.

I have used it for five years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is excellent; there are many companies specialized in delivering technical support for OBIEE.

For the end user, the product runs inside the web browser; technical setup requires a specialist.

Contact a reseller (such as Ordina) to negotiate the best price. Oracle list prices are always negotiable.

Seriously consider a cloud implementation. Cut back on implementation and maintenance / upgrade costs and very little time-to-market.

We are a solution provider and Oracle OBIEE is one of the products that we implement for our clients.

The security is good. For example, we can implement column-level security.

For a beginner, this is a product that is difficult to learn. You cannot learn it quickly.

There are a few utilization-level limitations in Oracle OBIEE that can be improved. However, they are releasing another product called OAS, Oracle Analytics Server, which might include a few more utilizations.

I have been working with Oracle OBIEE for almost 11 years.

This is a very stable product.

Oracle OBIEE is a very scalable solution.

I also use Microsoft BI, although I have more experience with Oracle.

With Oracle, we can implement column-level security whereas, with Microsoft BI, it cannot be done. However, Microsoft BI is more cost-effective.

Oracle OBIEE is easy to implement.

This is a very costly product.

My advice for anybody looking into implementing Oracle OBIEE is that product-wise, it has a few limitations but it is good. The primary drawback is that it's very costly compared to Microsoft BI.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use this solution as a BI tool for data analysis.

The most valuable feature is the reporting.

The performance could improve and in a future release, they could provide more virtualization options.

I have been using Oracle OBIEE for approximately two years.

The solution is stable.

Oracle OBIEE is difficult to scale.

We have approximately 20 people using this solution in my organization.

The installation is complex and they could improve by making it straightforward.

I would not recommend this solution.

I rate Oracle OBIEE a five out of ten.

My first challenge with OBIEE was to create a set of Dashboards to monitor sales performance in real time.

Before using OBIEE, my customer had difficulties building Dashboards and usine visual components to show information. Now they can do it fast and easily selecting the data and organizing the physical model, they just have to connect to the source. The solution has some limitations, but there's always a way to adapt and show a good work.

The easy integration with different database sources and the strength when working with complex data. It’s possible to integrate different data sources and show the information in the same place with a very good performance.

I think there are some issues to be solved, and it needs some visual improvements, especially on the charts, but it is still the best solution in my opinion.

No issues encountered.

When the number of projects on the repository increases, updates and new deployments get slower.

Customer Service:

I have never used it.

Technical Support:

I have never used it.

I had aready used Microsoft reporting services. I migrated to OBIEE  because my customer doesn´t use Microsoft tools for BI.

It was straightforward in the begining, but became complex later.

I evaluated other solutions like Tableau, Cognos, MicroStrategy. They are more attractive visually, but in my opinion OBIEE has a stronger platform.

My customers want a solution that connects any data source, and does all the jobs for them. It doesn´t exist. People have to know their data, and know what they want to do with it. My customer had the illusion that OBIEE would do everything for them, and they became frustrated, so we had to learn to work together in the right way. It’s very important to guide the user in the right direction to take all the advantages of OBIEE.

The “Business Model & Mapping” layer in the Administration Tool, because the maintenance and evolution processes are greatly facilitated.

Now, we can better and rapidly answer the user’s reporting needs, even if it involves different sources of information (different applications, different databases, external sources, etc.).

Our actual needs are covered.

10 years.

Since 11g, no issues.

No, but no real experience.

Five out of 10. Sometimes good, sometimes bad.

Relatively straightforward.

Don’t hesitate, if you need this for enterprise reporting and BI needs.