Oracle OBIEE Reviews

In respect of the rates comparison, the client uses the solution to generate BI reports around relevant data. 

I like the solution's stability. 

I have encountered certain performance issues which have required us to play around with and streamline the data. The performance could be better. 

Regarding the announcements, the data integration should be simplified, as the work is also with the clients. Since we have our different sources of data, those integrations must be maintained, which translates into a cost for our clients. Simplifying the process would save them a lot. 

As one of our clients is using Oracle OBIEE, we have been with the solution for ten years now. 

A great feature of the solution is its stability. 

I have not had experience with technical support. 

I was not involved in the installation process. 

The technical team is actually divided between us and our clients. Some of the reports are being built by the client engineering team, so I am not aware of the relevant account. There are around five to ten people who manage the auxiliary activities concerning the reports or donate any data entry forms to them. This is the type of working we have been undertaking. 

Simplifying the data integration process would save our clients considerable costs. 

Our clients would be in a position to address any licensing costs. I cannot comment on the account, since we only make use of it. 

The solution is also cloud-based. 

I have been using the solution for quite awhile and, in line with what is reported in the media, I would recommend it to others. While each business scenario should be examined independently, I feel the solution definitely warrants use. 

I like the scheduling feature. It has an inbuilt scheduler which is very good, and it allows us to create agents, and those agents can be scheduled. It's quite flexible in that respect and goes into our IT infrastructure. The outputs are sent encrypted to various endpoints. Some are internal, and some are our clients, and it's encrypted at a high level.

I do find Oracle OBIEE flexible. If there is stuff that's not in your model or schema, it's very flexible to create SQL scripts and create the data you want. It's quite nice to create a dashboard in OBIEE, and that's pretty straightforward in the way you drag and drop everything. You can create sections, and you can add elements to your page. That bit of the interface is relatively straightforward.

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. 

I have been using Oracle OBIEE for about four years, but I don't use it a lot.

Oracle OBIEE is very stable. The only issue have is scheduling too much at the same time. It can get overloaded, and unfortunately, like most things, there are always bottlenecks. 

You're actually pushing it down a tunnel in effect, and if that tunnel's not large enough, it can't cope with the load. Some of the files and some reports are a lot bigger, and OBIEE has a limited 64,000 rows of output. It's not suitable for really extracting large amounts of data.

If I wanted to extract all the transactions on a report for one particular day, then that would blow the 64,000 rows of output. This means that we have to run it separately, and we can't schedule it. It has to be a manual task, or we have to get work done by our development people to provide that report as a standard report. This can be quite difficult at times.

Oracle OBIEE is scalable because you can cluster them and have multiple servers. You can spread the load up to a point. You can have multiple environments running under the same cluster. In our production space, we have two environments. We have a test environment, and we have a production environment. Being clustered, you can cluster those together.

When I used Cognos, it seemed as though it didn't cater to telling stories. It's like you've got to get the data out into something like Excel or another tool to do the visualizations. It can be done, but it's quite fiddly.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Oracle OBIEE a seven.

• Primarily for traditional data warehouse reporting
• Also giving end users the flexibility of ad-hoc reporting.

The tabular and pivot reports with generic graphs and charts are helpful in representing summarized reports on dashboards.

• Union reports, pivot views, column selectors, action frameworks and write back reports.
• The RPD is also very useful in changing and creating models as per requirements.

• Visualization of OBIEE needs a boost. 
• The data mashup functionality and ease of use for end users also need to be improved a lot.

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.

The solution is robust and it's so easy to understand, use, and visualize the data. Even a newbie can understand reporting. However, when it comes to coding in the back-end, you need some knowledge.

I like its capability of utilizing big data volume.

It definitely improves all organizations that use it for reporting their analytics. However, it’s not just about reporting. It provides analytics based upon different fields, such as sales, booking, or leads.

The knowledge it provides helps us make decisions about how our business is growing, where to stop, where to start, and where to accelerate. It has a huge impact.

The big data visualization can be improved.

It's a pretty stable product.

It scales well. It has a robust way in which it manages the humongous amount of data and reporting while recording. It’s phenomenal.

Technical support is good, but you don’t get immediate response from them. If you follow up with them, then they will help you out.

I was involved in the installation multiple times. It was straightforward, at least with the earlier versions. With the new versions, there are some issues you might face. If you have the proper documentation, then you won't have any issues.

We evaluated a couple of other products, such as SAP BusinessObjects, but they had limitations. We decided on this solution because it fits our business needs.

I like this solution. It is a robust product and it was suitable for the needs of the industry that I work in.

My advice to others depends on the data volume and what kind of data you want to represent. If the volume is very high and you want an enterprise solution where there are a number of concurrent users, I would suggest this solution.

If you have a different data set and the number of concurrent users is less, then I would suggest a different solution, such as SAP BusinessObjects.

When looking for a vendor, support is the most important thing. The second thing is reliability with a promise that it will be a stable product and you will get 24/7 service.

We use it as our primary system for passing information and data through Oracle E-Business Suite, and for pulling in data from other platforms. In this way, it's our information and data hub.

Interacting with other non-Oracle applications and sources is a little difficult right now. It needs to be easier, such as interactions with cloud resources.

I've used it probably for up to 10 years now.

We've had no issues with deployment other than the interactions between it and non-Oracle apps.

We run an older version right now, so we haven't made any changes to it. It's stable in its current state, and we haven't had any issues with instability.

There have been times where we probably could use an initial processing power, but we're constrained around the licensing that we're in.

We just dropped our maintenance with Oracle last year and have gone to a third-party service provider. It was less than half of the cost, and we didn't see the value of the money that we were spending at the time with Oracle.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward, but I wasn't around when the implementation was done.

The re-licensing is a large cost proposition so we may be looking at alternatives, I think, in the next couple of years.

We are using it just because we have other tools we've retired. I'm not really excited about it nor am I ready to kick it to the curb.

Interactive dashboards are fantastic (business users love them) and BI Publisher – it creates great 'pixel perfect' reports which have a lovely professional look (compared to some other BI products out there), and it is also a very efficient way of delivering CMS data to the user while hiding the complexity from them.

The OBIEE interactive dashboards delivered trend information to end users, but also enabled them to drill down into the detail themselves when they saw anomalies. This meant that they could investigate the data themselves immediately, without the need for more than basic technical expertise, rather than submitting requests for data and going through iterative versions until they found what they were looking for (which I happen know can take weeks in other organizations, by which time the trend is 'stale').

BI Publisher can be a little unstable.

The mapping functionality in OBIEE is still quite immature. We started using it, but it doesn't really hold up compared to other GIS tools (although is very convenient as is packaged with OBIEE so would be great to have all the data visualisation/interrogation available on one tool).

A better searching/cataloguing system would be good. When you have too many reports/dashboards discoverability becomes an issue. Of course, good planning and documentation can get you around this, but it would be nice if the tool had some functionality to make this easy to do (the search function can be very slow and is not that user friendly).

I've used OBIEE for six years, this version for four years, and the previous one for two.

Performance drops right down with high levels of users (esp when we have on Oracle RAC – improved when we moved to ODA)

Good - but sometimes would take a while to get assistance with trickier issues.

Yes – SAS. We shifted to Oracle as the SAS BI tools were not as slick (several other options were evaluated, but Oracle was chosen). SAS now has Visual Analytics – but it still looks a little clunky compared to OBIEE. And the business users love OBIEE look and feel.

We did an in-house implementation, but had experienced ex–Oracle contractors on the team. I would say a good set up of your RPD and a well planned design of your dashboards/reporting framework is essential – and that takes experience.

The business users love it! To use successfully it pays to plan out your approach – underlying data, RPD, dashboard navigation and layout standards before hand – planning and following best practice are the key to a successful implementation and getting the most out of the product.

I'm mostly using OBIEE in the context of regulation by the national central bank. The regulatory authority floats many reports required daily, monthly, weekly, and yearly. So, for example, there'll be a stream of reports at the end of the year, and the banking regulator requires banks to comply. It's challenging for banks to develop these reports constantly, so we develop these regulatory or statutory reports for the regulatory authority and put them in the BI.

I like the data analyzer introduced in OBIEE version 10. Previously, there was no data analytics tool, but the data analyzer allows you to visualize your data on the fly. I also like the voice recognition tool. With voice recognition, the data visualization tool will flip the charts and diagrams left, right, center.

Warehouse and business intelligence are two different things, but OBIEE also has some warehouse features in it. I would like to see some of those capabilities improved.

I've been using OBIEE for five or six years.

Oracle products are all stable. We deployed Oracle OBIEE version 11 at the national revenue authority four years ago, and since then we've run more than 400 reports on an Oracle X5 server. It still runs smoothly with no issues.

The customer wanted Valtix, an internet BI system, but couldn't afford it. We advised him to go with OBIEE and the X5-4. I'm also fully certified in BGIF, and part of my job in that deployment was to deploy BGIF was challenging because it's an arm of the government. Still, we finally got some of the data into BGIF that wasn't mission-critical for the government. The rest of the data sat inside OBIEE.

I rate OBIEE 12 out of 10. For me, OBIEE is king.