Oracle OBIEE Reviews

The product has valuable reporting features.

The platform's interface needs improvement.

We have been using Oracle OBIEE for four years.

I rate the platform's stability a six out of ten.

We have three Oracle OBIEE users. I rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

The technical support services are good.

The initial setup takes two or three days to complete. I rate the process a seven out of ten.

We take assistance from a third-party vendor.

Oracle OBIEE provides efficient integration with other data sources in our environment. I rate it a seven out of ten.

I use the solution for its functionalities related to reports, analytics, dashboards, and other things.

It is easy to use. We have all the fields available to try and drop to create analytics.

I think the schedule option where we schedule the dashboards has to be improved. When we have to send the dashboard to the ADS personnel based on some conditions, then it is not feasible to add those conditions and send it to different email addresses. Suppose a person does not have access to Sales Cloud, but the business wants emails to be triggered. Then we have to put in static emails while scheduling the reports or documents. We do not have any conditions where we can, from the existing fields, add some conditions, like the ones based on certain conditions regarding a person and then based on some other conditions regarding another person. So that's where I think I have faced backlogs personally.

Though Oracle did support us, the resolution wasn't quick. Oracle can improve its support.

I have been using Oracle OBIEE for three years. Also, I don't remember the version of the solution I am using. I am a partner of Oracle OBIEE.

I rate the stability of the solution a seven out of ten. We have faced one issue with the solution. 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. Oracle can improve it. Even if the data set is more, the load time should be less so that the business can use it in hand and not wait for them to load.

I rate the scalability of the solution a nine out of ten. In my organization, around a hundred people use the solution.

Recently, my company connected with Oracle's technical team when we faced loading issues related to the dashboard. We did not receive a quick resolution since we were more involved in sharing logs every time.

The initial setup is easy.

I don't look into the solution's pricing because the upper management looks into it.

I would definitely suggest those planning to use the solution to use it, considering the easy-to-use features and since there is less complex coding involved. Moreover, it is understandable and can be used.

I rate the overall solution a seven out of ten.

The capability to implement business and data manipulation logic in the RPD provides a very powerful interface for the developers to work on.

We've had a situation where we had data residing in different databases and we wanted to have a robust reporting solution for one of our verticals. OBIEE helped us in achieving that and we were able to build a solution around it which is now widely used throughout the organization.

The ease of building reports can be improved in the product. In an era where strong visualization tools like Tableau and QlikView are becoming popular, it is very important that Oracle looks into this aspect.

I've been using OBIEE for over four years now. During this time, I've seen the evolution of the product from 10g to 11g.

I would rate the level of customer service to be very high. The support was extensive and timely. I would rate it 8 out of 10.

We were able to get answers to our technical queries fairly quickly. I would rate the level of technical support at 8 out of 10.

The earlier scenario of data reporting was mainly based out of Excel, which was neither robust nor stable. There was no security setup and since everyone had his/her own copy of the Excel sheet, there was no single source of truth.

These issues prompted us to move towards OBIEE as a solution.

The initial setup and configuration of the product was complex as it involved a lot of steps. We also encountered a few errors during installation, but with the help of technical support, we were able to resolve those.

We got OBIEE for its dashboard reporting and for getting mining data out. OBIEE was a good fit with the Hyperion products we already had. We love it.

Dashboard reporting could be more dynamic and easier to drill down into.

We have used it for about three years.

It has been pretty stable.

It has been scalable.

We use partners for Oracle, so when we ask for support, we are forwarded to the partner that works with the solution in question. They are really good. If there is an issue where I can just drill down or look into the online forums, I do that as well.

OBIEE is amazing in its integration with Hyperion and dashboard reporting. I would give it a nine out of ten, because there are still changes happening to the platform.

Self service analytics is an amazing feature with OBIEE. Users are empowered to get at the information they need without the need to ask for new views from IT. Through the development of the application, the data is arranged using business terms that those users can understand. 

We have used OBIEE at several clients and the feedback has been fantastic on the dashboards, scorecards, and reporting that we have created. Clients love that OBIEE is a central location to view data from multiple sources in terms that make sense to the business user.

There is some room for improvement on the development side, older versions use a 32-bit administration studio. Some of the controls in this older studio are a little clunky and it can be easy to get lost as a new developer in the various wizards and windows.

4 years

Clustering and Single-Sign on can be difficult.

The initial setup of OBIEE depends on the data sources and their complexity. There is a great community with tons of blogs and the OTN Forums where professionals are willing to share and help out with any setup questions.

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.

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.

• Integrated search options
• Oracle scorecards
• Pivot tables
• Map views

When reports are developed in a way that show the work done in time, work done but not in time, and work not done at all, they drive the customers to pay attention to the lagging areas. This encourages everyone to work positively towards achieving the fixed goal in hand.

Some of the legacy BI publisher features have been discarded in the newer versions. Having them would help the product. The ability to provide column description upon hovering on the header would be of real help.

I've used it for five years.

No major issues.

No major issues.

Some of the issues were in regards to the LDAP authentication setup, but it was resolved.

7/10.

7/10.

No previous solution was in place.

It was pretty straightforward and simple. All we had to do was follow the installation manual, which provides a UI to setup the tool.

It was done in-house.

All the ventures that were started based off of this product were successful. The users were actively using the dashboards and reports, while the executive level management were able to view the functioning of their respective organizations on high-level view.

Ensure you purchase a complete enterprise package from Oracle so you can get the full benefit of OBIEE.

• Crystal Reports
• SQR Reports

Ensure the application server and the web server are installed and configured as recommended.