Oracle OBIEE Reviews

We are a solution provider and Oracle OBIEE is one of the products that we implement for our clients. We do not use it in our company. Our clients use it for management and business intelligence.

The most valuable feature is the user-friendly set of tools that the customer can use to develop their own business dashboards.

The complexity of this product means that you need to have a technical team to develop the reports, although this is also true for products like Microsoft BI and Zoho.

Performance-wise, there may be some room for improvement.

We have been dealing with Oracle OBIEE for the past three years.

The OBIEE  tool can only be used in enterprise-level companies. It is not suitable for small and medium-sized companies because of the cost. Also, the complexity of it means that you need a technical team to install it and develop the reports. 

We are satisfied with the support we are getting from Oracle.

We have experience with several solutions including Zoho and Microsoft BI.

The initial setup is not easy, although it is not very complex either.

The average deployment will take a week, although this will increase depending on the complexity of the environment.

The cost of this solution is a little bit high compared with other products like Zoho, so reducing it would make OBIEE more competitive.

The suitability of this product depends on the client's objective and the complexity of the business. We also have to consider their budget.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

• 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.

OBIEE is used to generate data reports and send to users' emails. The company leaders use its summary report to overview the KPIs of the company. Department operators use its detailed report to monitor daily sales. 

• A detailed data report is generated for business operators.
• Summary and aggregated data for leaders.

• It's easy to use for business analysts.

• Can utilize SQL queries to generate reports directly.

• Access and permission management.

Metadata management function: Sometimes, our business requirements need to load reference data into the data model.

OBIEE crashes when many people login at the same time.

When a large number of queries are running at the same time, the report fails.

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 scheduling function is the most valuable feature. We can schedule at specific times to generate specific reports and email them to the mailbox of the end users.

The user interface is rather clumsy, so to speak, compared to other reporting tools on the market where you have drag and drop, drilldown and all these nice user interface features. This product is more textual based.

I used it for six years.

We have had several downtimes. I'm not in IT, so I don't know the infrastructure behind it, but we have quite a lot of downtime. That means we only realize it when the report doesn't appear in the inbox at a certain time.

It has met my company’s scalability needs but I don’t think it will moving forward. I don’t think it is flexible enough for our future requirements.

I have no idea about Oracle technical support because we have our own internal IT support for report writing. We just ask them and they solve it.

My company has been using it as long as I have been with the company. I think we chose it because it was part of the Oracle implementation we did.

Initial setup was straightforward; I don't know if it was simple. They sent people to us and we also had an in-house team.

We have trained OBIEE users writing their own reports, and we have our internal IT department for more complex reports, and for scheduling.

This product does not provide value for money. We have since replaced it; not in the entire company, but in my area. We created our own data mine, and do our own reporting based on that.

When I’m selecting a vendor such as Oracle or IBM to work with I look at functionality, first of all, and then I look at cost. That's also a big one.

The most valuable feature of OBIEE, for me, is the speed with which we can get a solution to the customer. It takes a lot of work upfront on our side, but once that's done, it's a matter of clicking here, there, and we've pretty much got a solution for them.

Users can create their own ad hoc analyses and reports, so that's definitely a big plus. Also, another way its improved our functioning is the speed that it gives us to provide solutions to the customer. That's important to our company so that we can meet contract requirements, particularly ones that are time sensitive.

When we went from version 10 to 11, Oracle changed some of the functionality for us, and ultimately for those few customers that use it. For example, with filters, it was like, "Okay, give me a filter. I want this and I want this." Now it's more like five or six clicks to do the same thing to get to where you're actually defining what the filter is going to do. In my opinion, we lost a little functionality there. We lost some of the streamlining, efficiency, and speed.

We've had some issues with one of the subject areas, in particular, where somehow, somewhere this analysis was built off of this subject area. That subject area got removed. The result was that this analysis still runs properly as it should, but we can't make any changes to it because it says I have an invalid subject area. You can create a new one with the same name, but the internal workings of OBIEE, it knows that it didn't come from here. I've asked several of the experts, and even Oracle, the product manager, and the technical side, they're like, "Wow, really?" That's an unsolved problem.

We deployed it just fine, and implemented it just fine, as everything was squeaky clean, except for what we did wrong, which was essentially user error.

It's rock solid. We've had absolutely no issues with instability.

We can add users without issues. We're able to scale just fine.

Setting up all the metadata and the RPD takes a lot of work. Then, of course, it migrates through the physical layer, the business model layer, and the presentation layer. At that point, we can turn OBIEE loose to some of our customers. Some of them are quite skilled, and they like the hands-on. Some of them are not.

We had an Oracle consultant come in to help us. The DBAs actually installed OBIEE and set up the RPD. I'm not sure that, even now, that was set up optimally. We learned a lot as we went along. It's like, "Now we're this far down the road, and it sure would have been nice to know this back here," because I found that going back and trying to really change some of the structure is difficult.

Every Oracle product is expensive, so OBIEE was expensive as well.

Depending on the skill level of the people who are actually going to be the BI administrators and developers, I would suggest a consultant, someone who is well-versed and knows the in's and out's, to help implement OBIEE. As I said, we had an Oracle consultant. When he came in, one of the first things we did was sent him to some training for OBIEE. I'm not sure how that came about, but it seemed a little strange to me. The way I look at it, when you hire a consultant to come in and help you, I'm expecting that person to have the background and the knowledge.

The guy did a great job, but there was the training thing that just didn't register. He was a great help to those of us who now develop the solutions for the customer. It was good experience having him there. It was a collaborative effort. I was sitting over his shoulder until I couldn't take it anymore. I said, "No, I have to touch it." You've got to just jump in there and do it. That foundation, seeing some of the stuff he did, and the way he went about it, I think, is invaluable.

It has easy integration with Oracle DB for clients who run an Oracle Warehouse.

It has given clients visibility into their operations from a holistic viewpoint. In my current project, we are using the tool to track movement of cases, managements, and clients are able to trace where their cases are and how long they have been in the different stations in the organization. This has improved on the overall performance of the organization as there is accountability.

There is a need to improve on meta data definition, for instance we should have one Dat Dimension that allows heterogeneous definitions. At the moment, every subject area has a copy, this is repetitive effort. There is a need to easily report from different facts without having to circumvent the system's normal design.

Metadata management, more visualizations as there aren't many, i.e. heat maps. The Dashboard layout area could be enhanced to allow more intuitive designs, as the limitations of having Sections and Columns in the sort of order they can in can inhibit exciting designs. Exporting of related Physical Joins without having to go to each join to extract.

I've used it for eight years.

Yes, at one client we upgraded versions and lost functionality due to the fact that Oracle had stopped supporting Office 2007. In the newer versions, we had to go through a lot of trouble to get the functionality to work, it was a very simple thing. In the newer version, when we exported graphs it ignored the lines and the tables were merged into a single line, and you can imagine why the management were not happy with that.

5/10 - I really believe that they can improve in customer service.

6/10

We did use something previously, and we changed as we wanted better functionality and stability.

I have not dealt with implementations a lot.

We used a mixed team. The vendor had guys that knew what they were doing, even at some point, better than the Oracle team.

Pricing of the training should be lowered to allow more new entrants into the the field. If the price is too high, mainly existing partners can afford it, and the market does not grow. The licensing is fair, but they should try and bundle the licensing cost as licensing as almost every component tends to hike the overall price.

I have worked on Microstrategy a lot and the Microsoft platform. I find that Microstrategy is advanced in the Mobile and Visual display and is easy to use, but Microsoft is also easy to use but still has a lot of things they need to improve on.

It's a very good platform provided you have a good strategy and a strong team around.

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.