Oracle OBIEE Reviews

We primarily use this product for company-wide data warehouse reporting.

The most valuable feature is the ability to set up the automated delivery of reports. It is a feature that is nice, as well as easy to do.

It takes a lot of maintenance to support the architecture, which is something that should be improved. Having a more simplified architecture would be better.

It should be easier to make changes or enhancements, as it is a long process to make a change in the system.

We have been using Oracle OBIEE for about ten years.

I don't find the stability of this product to be great.

Scalability is something that could be improved.

The initial setup was complex.

We used a consulted to assist us with deployment.

Oracle products are extremely expensive. However, the version that we have is older and we no longer pay licensing fees.

I would rate this solution a five out of ten.

The most valuable feature is its stability to connect with other data sources, other than Oracle.

We basically are able to do better analytics, be able to make better decisions.

I would probably just like to see more integration with big data sources.

Stability is very good. We've had good success using the product.

Scalability has been good for us, because we have a large enterprise; it's state-wide. We scale it up to our state-wide enterprise system.

Technical support is excellent, very good.

We just needed to upgrade our current environment.

I guess we decided to go with this solution because we already had experience with the product. We felt pretty comfortable using it.

When choosing a vendor such as Oracle, support and good service are my most important criteria.

It worked out very well for our environment.

Initial setup was pretty complex, but we had help from the vendor, so that helped.

Really work with the vendor.

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.

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.

Dashboards, Alerts, BI Publisher. Together these 3 features make this product a great tool to present data. Users can also create ad hoc analyses easily. Integrates very well with a wide variety of data sources making it easy to present data from multiple sources in a single place.

One stop shop for all reporting, data integrity, and compliance with company standards.

Performance for large data sets.

12 years

Setting up SSL can be complex. Documentation is confusing. But other sources of information such as blogs really help.

Sometimes when lots of users get in and try to run the same report at the same time with different parameters.

Prompt but not always helpful.

Poor

Depends on the requirements and infrastructure, but proper planning makes it pretty straightforward.

In-house

Being rollover customers from a previously owned company there was confusion about licensing. Talking to an Oracle rep helped.

Excellent BI tool that is flexible and user-friendly, and getting better with each new release.

I like the architecture of this solution. RPV is a powerful feature in Oracle OBIEE. It lets us design as per the needs of the organization. I can have multiple presentation folders and presentation layers. I can have customization in a single node in VMware, which is a very good feature of Oracle OBIEE. It helps customers in designing as per their requirements.

Even though we have a feature to enable the physical query to be seen in the log, in case of any issues, it is challenging to debug and see or identify where is the issue. For example, we designed the OBIEE repository and deployed it into the server, and we are now accessing and creating a report. For some reason, if the report is not working as expected, it is very difficult to identify the issue. 

We have a feature to see the physical query that is being generated in the central OBIEE server. I feel that this feature should have been available at the repository level so that while designing the repository, we can select the presentation columns and the query it is going to create. This will avoid the additional task of deploying a feature into the server and then testing the report. It will also make the implementation process friendly if, while designing the repository, we can see:

• How is a feature working?
• Are any of the presentation columns selected?
• How is the query being generated?
• Which query is being generated?
• Are any joints used?
• What kind of joints are used?

Having this kind of information will make Oracle OBIEE more powerful and developer-friendly.

I have been working with Oracle OBIEE for more than seven years.

It is very stable.

The architecture of Oracle OBIEE is defined, and within the architecture, it is definitely scalable. You extend the repository and the data model layer. In the server setting, you have the flexibility to include the security aspects that Oracle supports. I feel it is extremely extendable. Our clients are enterprise-level companies.

There are challenges in getting a response from Oracle. We have faced challenges with Oracle technical support. Whenever we raise a request, the response comes very late. There is some delay.

I have been working with this solution for over seven years in an implementation role. By using the features and tools available in Oracle OBIEE, I am able to identify the cause and debug and validate it.

The initial setup is straightforward. It doesn't take much time. If you do the setup and implementation, it will take two to three days.

It is a nice tool that can be modeled for each and every requirement. To be able to develop and deploy it quickly as per the customer needs, you should have the right implementation person who understands the customer's requirements and has a total understanding of the product. 

I would rate Oracle OBIEE an eight out of ten.