Oracle OBIEE Reviews

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.

Customer Service:

Prompt but not always helpful.

Technical Support:

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.

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.

Public Cloud

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.

Basically reporting, and we have a couple of modules which we bought. OBIEE, which is used financial procurement and reporting purposes.

I think in the older version, 11g versus 12c, Oracle has thought through so many things. I think the installation is a lot simpler. I think they have improved a lot. If you asked about the older one, maybe I would have given you many reasons, but not with the new one.

It's close to four years now, or even more, maybe close to five years.

It is a stable product and I think we are on the latest and greatest. We are in the process of upgrading to 12c, and any product you take, it will have some issues, so it's not something we run into a lot of issues with.

I think the amount of reporting, the amount of users that we have, I think we are pretty solid and how we scaled it I think the end user is very happy.

When you open up SR Oracle has a list of things which they ask for. Being an end customer, when we open an SR, we give as much as information as we want and again the support person comes into the picture, and without reading what we have put through, they just has the same questions over and over. What version, what product, all that kind of things, which is not at all fair.

We used to have Interactive Reporting which is an Oracle product. Hyperion Interactive Reporting.

I would say if you want to make your financial reporting simpler and easier, and you can put it towards the end user, and the way you can control the things, and show the graphical use, or ease of use, and functionality, it's very simple for the financial user or end users. I think it's very good product.

Maybe not all products are up to the speed or like any product you take, there is space to improve. I think for our company, the way we use it, we are very happy with it and the end customer is very happy with it.

• Oracle Analysis
• Dashboard
• Agents

Enhancements to existing OBI Components -

• Analysis
• Connectors
• Self-service BI
• Performance

I've used the tool for seven years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

It was already in place when I joined the company.

It's straightforward for installation and configuration. The complexity of the development varies depending on the business requirements. We have complex reports and dashboards being sourced from different data sources.

It was done in-house. Analyze the requirements do a POC to get the sign off of what is going to be delivered. Analyze the complexity and technical challenges, and look for workarounds to implement the solution if needed.

Evaluate the product before any implementation of any reporting tools.

Exalytics combined with Exadata server makes it possible to query ~ 50TB of datamart data (uncompressed size), that's really great and ~ 1000 of simultaneous requests.

In the past it was not possible to join data from so many different sources due to the performance limitations imposed by the size of the data

Self service BI. It's clear that Endeca tends to be integrated into BIFS and probably self-service functionality will be covered by Endeca.

3 years

Sometime copy-paste of report metadata is quite complicated.

No

No, scalability is a big positive for the product.

We didn't get into contact with support. From previous projects I have very various experience with Oracle support. It happened to me to get very helpful solutions almost immediately, in other cases, we were just ping-ponging emails, but no breakthrough.

No

The initial setup was pretty complex due to the fact that very complicated aggregation rules were defined, but I think this would have even more complicated to be implemented with other BI tools.

I was part of a vendor team.

N/A

We are not involved in this phase.

Oracle BI combined with Exadata/Exalytics is a perfect tool for ROLAP/HOLAP type reports especially for extreme data sizes. I don't know any other tool suitable for that.

The flexibility to work with this on the cloud only if you would like is very helpful. There are fewer log-ins required. It's easy to connect to the live system.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The solution is stable.

We've found the technical support to be very helpful.

The solution has great reporting and forecasting capabilities.

If I want to develop a new repository, any new table, any new schema that I want to incorporate into the RPD, then in my local schema, can't directly connect to the cloud. I do not have complete end-to-end access to it. In such cases, I need to install some local DV. I don't know if that is the right path or not, however, as far as I'm concerned, I'm just creating some tables, some sample space in my local DB and from the DB I just try to import into my local RPD in order to publish to the cloud. It is double work. If I'm in a non-cloud environment and I need not connect to the local DB, I need not re-import everything into my local space. I can connect to the available on-premise DB and connecting to that on-premise DB I can create the RPD.

In terms of linking to the cloud, there are many restrictions. From a business standpoint, it is a great way to approach things. That said, from a developer's standpoint, it's a bit tough to develop the code and progress the code to the next environment like that. 

There's a lot of redundancy, especially in relation to creating the code. Developers, in fact, have to deal with many hurdles, including security restrictions and vendor communications.

I've been using the solution for the next nine years at this point. It's been almost a decade.

The solution is stable. In fact, we are working to build out capabilities so that users who might use Tableau or Power BI can handle reports and other tasks right on top of this product. We're working to make it even more flexible for future users. So far, it's going very well.

Technical support is pretty good. I have no complaints as, whenever we raised any kind of tickets to them, within a short time, within a week, they have closed everything and solved the issue. We are pretty impressed. They have provided a wonderful solution as of now and whenever we've raised a new patch request, the upcoming patches have been fine. 

The initial setup is not overly complex or difficult. It's quite straightforward. A company shouldn't have too many issues with the process.

I typically handle the initial setup for clients. 

The solution is a bit expensive for a lot of clients. Many might not have the funds available for Oracle products. Most believe it to be a costly product. Nobody has compared it to the other reporting tools, however. They might not understand the costs involved. 

We are just Oracle customers. We handle several clients. We don't have any kind of owned Oracle products, however, we are giving support to Oracle clients.

We use multiple deployment models, including the cloud and on-premises. 

One thing from an Oracle standpoint is that we only concentrate on Oracle products - whatever the number of products you have in our chain. There are certainly other business users that also use Tableau as well as business objects and maybe Power BI. These are competitive reporting tools. The same users of Oracle might also have similar tools within one of those solutions.

My intention is let's migrate everybody to Oracle in order to connect certain scenarios on how to migrate those existing tools to Oracle. We're asking: what are the core competencies, what are the advantages of using this Oracle tool, and what are the flexibilities in order to migrate from these other solutions to Oracle. With Tableau, for our client, we have conducted several demonstrations on how to migrate the particular Tableau reports to OBIEE via the DV.

The way in which we have developed preferred reports has impressed them. They help play with their existing repositories as well. They can easily connect to their repository to an existing OBI repository to the direct source tables so they can easily use external additional sources. They can easily connect all their existing models and they can play here and there and experience all of that flexibility they have there in Tableau currently. We've written a custom SQL where they can create, they can dump everything in, and extract.

On the other hand, for particular business users, if they want to change the logic to Tableau it is not feasible for them. We are here for them to give support from Oracle and we need a lot of knowledge from business stakeholders to come up and check the flexibility by using this Oracle product on top of their other reporting areas.

I would 100% recommend Oracle, especially to people who on other platforms and want to adopt new typical areas specific to the cloud. If they want to enhance their reporting capabilities, Oracle is perfect for them. If they are looking for forecasting, this solution is great. There's a kind of flexibility you just won't typically see in other solutions. 

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten.

Public Cloud

We primarily use the solution to take reports and for its dashboards.

The visualization is very good.

From an end-user perspective, it's a very user-friendly environment.

There are pages about its limitations in Gartner documents. My understanding is they are working to improve themselves. There aren't any really big issues and they're already in the cloud, therefore, largely there isn't too much that's lacking.

The pricing model could be improved. Right now, it's quite confusing. Many customers have this feeling that it's a super-expensive option.

Currently, the solution is based on three pillars. The first is the BI publisher and it used to be a single product. The second is Oracle and Oracle Business Intelligence, the core component. It used to be a CBO product. Then, thirdly, you have this new Oracle visual analyzer. Now, all of these are wrapped into one Oracle analytics product. However, the integration between (or among) these three products is not 100% complete. This is the area where improvements can be made.

I've been using the solution for more than ten years at this point. It's been a while.

It's pretty stable. Now that it's the cloud era, the company is supporting it 24/7. If there is any issue, it's very well supported. It's very stable in our eyes. 

The support is quite good. You do pay for it, however, it's available when you need it. We're quite satisfied with the level of service provided.

I have some experience with Microsoft Power BI.

Power BI is more self-service BI oriented. It originated in the era of self-service BI. That's both a plus and minus, depending on what you are looking for. For example, if you prefer more self-service oriented solutions, you get more freedom with Power BI. You provide your business users with more freedom and that could be good or bad. It depends on the situation. 

Oracle Business Intelligence comes from the era of more IT-driven business intelligence solutions. It's more metadata-driven. You can establish stronger governance with Oracle BI in terms of implementing policies and data, data filtering, data governance, and user rights, etc. Ironically, Power BI wants to have more options to be tightly governed, and Oracle is trying to be more self-service oriented. 

The initial setup is not complex. It's pretty straightforward. Deployment typically takes three days or so.

The solution has a reputation for being expensive and has a confusing pricing model. There aren't extra fees on top of the main licensing costs, however.

We're an Oracle partner.

Overall, I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

The solution is better suited for medium or large organizations, mostly due to the high price tag. A smaller company would be hard-pressed to afford it.

That said, I would recommend it to others to use.

On-premises