Oracle OBIEE Reviews

Oracle OBIEE came out very early, compared to the other BI products, the other competitors’ products. It was pretty much the first in the market. It grabbed a good portion of the market. That's one important feature: They have been there forever.

We do have ad-hoc reporting. A few thousand users run ad-hoc reports. They run SQLs for data, extract the data and use the data. Some users use the dashboards.

Stability-wise, they still have a lot to improve, especially when you have a lot of data coming out of SQL. For example, if I have to see a million requests, most of the time it crashes.

Scalability is fine. I don't see any issues. Scalability-wise, most of the time, they depend on the underlying WebLogic server. The WebLogic server scales fine.

We always have problems with Oracle support. When they cannot solve an issue, they always go around and around with it. Time passes and users get frustrated - the customer gets frustrated – getting the ticket closed.

If there is an easy solution or they have come across the issue already, that’s when they are responsive. However, if they don’t know the answer right away, or if you don’t quickly hear back from Oracle, or if you don’t like the answer you get from Oracle, that’s when you can go through this; you might never get the solution. It’s better to just close the ticket and not waste that time.

I did not previously use a different solution. We kind of started this project from scratch. We use all Oracle products and Oracle support. We thought, OK, why use a different product if we can get a good product from Oracle?

Setup is good; easy and simple.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

If someone asked me for advice, I would throw out a few options and let them pick which one is better. I’d provide whatever I know about this product and also other products, not just those from Oracle.

I don't know if Oracle wants to hear this, but there are other products in the analytical field that are pretty good. For example, Tableau.

For example, dashboard-wise, other products are way better than OBIEE. Oracle still has to improve some of these issues, especially when there is a huge amount of data.

When I’m choosing a vendor such as Oracle, the most important criteria are that they are big; everything is integrated. For example, if I have to use Oracle Identity Management, it is integrated with OBIEE, including single sign-on. Everything is integrated.

The ability for users to generate analytics without developer involvement is valuable. The best feature of the Virtual C, of course, is data visualization.

The self-service BI and the dashboards for high-level management have brought improvements. We develop and produce insights with these dashboards, and make management take actions according to the knowledge we find there. The dashboards are also the power users, so the analytics build themselves. They create reports about the subject area that is relevant to them.

They could improve the connection with the ASCP base. The integration is not so good. There are a lot of bugs, hangs and freezes. If the ASCP base goes down or hangs, the OBIEE server is down, and we have to restart the VI server for the whole company.

I have used the product for 5 years.

Other than the integration with the ASCP base, there are some issues with exporting big Excel files. Oracle support says we should expect this though, because there is a limitation on the size of export files. Everything else is quite stable.

Response times are good and some of the support staff is good, but not everyone. They ask for a lot of logs that are not related to the issue and it takes time for them to understand the problem. In some cases, we beg to do a WebEx just to show them the problem so they can figure it out and proceed.

It is not that simple and requires a lot of configuration. The 12c version is supposed to be much easier.

It’s a very good application, but it’s not straightforward in the traditional BI. Take Oracle’s advice in best practices and how to implement it. I would rate it an 8 out of 10.

The way we are able to send data out to users and the ability for them to do acquiring themselves are valuable features.

I'd like to see easier paths for upgrades. We also have some technical difficulties that we are trying to work around.

I’ve used the solution for two-and-a-half years.

It has been consistently stable for us, and we have not had any downtime. We haven’t pushed it that much.

We haven’t scaled the product yet. Our size has grown, but we did not have to scale the servers. Since we are managed on the cloud, though, scalability would be pretty straightforward. Oracle manages the product on the back end.

They are knowledgeable. Reaction times can take a while, but once you find the right people, they can solve any issue.

Initial setup was relatively average in terms of difficulty. We had an Oracle consultant come in and help us. It ended up being pretty quick, and the consultant was good. We had it stood up in six months.

Make sure the product meets your needs and that your enterprise is able to use it for a long period of time. You should also look at the evaluation and the support. I would rate OBIEE an 8 or a 9 out of 10, since most other products are not as user friendly. From a user perspective it’s good, but from a maintenance perspective it needs a little work.

• Reporting
• System & data security
• Web services
• Scalability

This tool has helped us bring organizational data together on a single platform and query the organisational data in a pre-defined as well as Ad-hoc fashion. The results to these queries have led to important discoveries in terms of trends and predictions which has helped focus the direction in which the business has to be led.

Reporting. While a novice or average user cannot see behind the scenes, a seasoned OBIEE developer can. A seasoned report writer would want the capability to over-ride the default query system to write complicated queries that can then be fired against the database to run more efficiently. Currently the tool does not have this ability.

I've used it for three years.

No issues encountered.

Yes, but not with the tool. It’s important to decide the kind of hardware you want to run your BI installation on. If the hardware is not up to the task of handling a 100 users at a time, the BI system won’t throw alarms at you, instead the BI system gets stuck. In ideal situations, you should have a standalone server with a dedicated file system for a BI installation.

The horizontal scalability {adding new servers to the same system} needs to be simplified in terms of catalogue sharing.

Customer Service:

6/10.

Technical Support:

6/10.

No solution had been used previously.

It’s a straightforward setup initially. A simple Windows style - Next... Next... etc. - installation to start a BI server. It’s when you want to add roles and users when things starts getting interesting and complex.

Through a vendor team. 7/10.

Read the licensing documents carefully.

No other options evaluated.

This is a highly scalable and well integrated BI system with possibilities of deep rooted integration into future products by Oracle. If you are going to join the Oracle stack for your financial needs, you might as well start using OBIEE for the Business Intelligence solution.

Always remember, a BI developer does not automatically know your business. You need a Business Analyst to drive a BI project not a BI developer.

Oracle Business EE has a futuristic vision for BI Server capabilities with support for answers, flexible dynamic dashboard, intelligent untime query engine, web and mobile analytics and support for structured and unstructured data. OBIEE provides out of the box supports for Oracle ATG commerce catalogs and also have sample applications which enable users to come up with nice dashboards in relatively lesser time frames.

However, OBIEE lacks support for deploying multiple RPD on one BI server, direct access to RPD schema or model layers. Also the overall solution is heavier relative to other products.

Oracle OBIEE is used for financial reporting.

The most valuable feature of Oracle OBIEE is its ease of use.

Oracle OBIEE could improve the visualizations, such as diagrams, charts, and graphical user interface. Other tools on the market have better graphical visualizations this Oracle OBIEE.

I have been using Oracle OBIEE for approximately three years.

I have found Oracle OBIEE to be stable.

Oracle OBIEE is scalable.

We have three people using this solution in my organization.

I have not contacted the support because the solution was easy to use and the problems I faced were solved by our technical team in our enterprise.

I have evaluated Tableau and Microsoft Power BI and they have better charts and graphical visualizations than Oracle OBIEE.

My advice to others is they should explore other tools to get an idea of how they compare to one another. There are better solutions on the market, such as Tableau and Microsoft Power BI.

I rate Oracle OBIEE a seven out of ten.

On-premises

The front-end.

It has helped to consolidate data and report on a single version of the truth.

The development effort takes longer than other BI tools currently on the market.

Three years.

No.

No.

Good.

Great product despite the amount of development effort required.

The reporting capabilities are good. The other valuable features are the dashboard capability and the ease of report creation.

The main feature is the dashboard functionality. As I work for HR, we have several dashboards for the VPs and HR business users, so they are able to see all the integration and higher data; it's like a one-click option.

Data integration itself needs to be improved. We use ODI along with OBIEE for data integration. We find it very hard to go through this whole process. Once the data is there, it's very easy to report it on the OBIEE front end. However, just getting the data into data warehousing is difficult.

The other thing we have experienced is if the data load takes a long time, Oracle doesn't give any out-of-the-box solution to have the reports run out of a snapshot. Thus, if any data is being run/aggregated, then the report goes down. If it takes a very long time then your report goes down for even longer.

It is not fully scalable and there are performance issues that we see. It's not that bad. I would give it a 3/5 rating.

The support is not great. It keeps going back and forth. It would definitely help to improve the support provided.

We didn't look at other data warehousing solutions as such, but we were looking at various other reporting solutions. As a data warehouse, we use a lot of Oracle products and are on Oracle VBScript. We also possess high level of Oracle expertise in our organization. Thus, we decided it was best to go with this product.

It's a long implementation process; it took us a while to implement it. However, once you do implement this product and get the hang of it, it's easy. It has its issues just like a lot of other software products have issues.