Oracle OBIEE Reviews

The client required the ability to produce the same reports that they currently produce in Excel (replicating as close as possible to the format as the users were used to this), but distributed via a dashboard/mobile front-end rather than relying on emailing Excel files.

For them, the most important features were the ability to build complex and highly formatted analytic reports, to publish them on dashboards, to build mobile apps to allow access whilst out and about, but still be able to email reports out for those users who still wanted them that way. Including the report in the body of the email to avoid having to open attachments was also desired.

The ability to directly access data in their warehouse rather than downloading into an Excel file was also an important consideration. This is a small company, but growing fast and the amount of data was becoming unwieldy in Excel and would just get worse.

These reports are used all day by the company’s sales representatives as they travel between regional outlets, customers and suppliers. Having access to this data quickly via a tablet/mobile phone meant spending less time at a desk and could ensure that they have up-to-date information during their meetings. It has therefore greatly increased the time the sales reps can spend out on the road and positively impacted on the deals they are making. Their managers can also monitor during the day what the sales reps are up to and provide better guidance.

The IT developers for this client have struggled in two areas, setting up the repository and fine tuning the report formatting.

The repository in OBIEE provides a huge capability for bringing in table structures from a database, linking them together, mapping hierarchies, adding custom calculations and so on. However, to do much of the complex mapping they needed is very difficult without considerable experience. There is very little within the repository administration tool to guide you on how to achieve complex tasks and the documentation is quite brief. Improvements in this area would certainly help.

For the reports, the requirement was to replicate highly formatted reports in Excel and despite the cell-level formatting in Excel that obviously cannot be replicated within a reporting tool, we’ve gotten extremely close. However, as with the repository, experience has been key – the analytic report-building screen provides a wide range of functionality, but without someone with experience on hand to provide ‘tricks of the trade’, they would have struggled. Simplifying the interface to provide easier access to all of the functions would help greatly here.

For this client, it was their first foray into professional business intelligence reporting products. Until now, they’ve merely been using Excel for all of their reporting needs.

There were some issues in the first few weeks with the services crashing with little or no meaningful messages in the log files, but these seemed to clear up and no issues have been encountered since. They have been put down to the developers being a little over enthusiastic with what they were trying as they were learning the product. Now they know what they are doing, all is ok.

This has not been an issue so far for this client, they are still in the early days of building their BI estate.

No technical support has been requested so far from the vendor.

Excel was the original solution. As the company was young and the quantity of data still relatively small, Excel was the obvious, easy and cheap choice. The growth of the company has now reached the point where the use of Excel is becoming problematic – the quantity of data needed to be downloaded, the size of the Excel file, maintenance of the VBA/Macro code in the sheets and access to the files by users out on the road were all issues that needed to be addressed.

The initial installation and configuration was relatively straightforward. Installing the software is a little complex for someone doing it for the first time; there are quite a few steps, but it was just a case of slowly working through them.

The big boon for this client was that they already had a data warehouse containing the data required for reporting; it was currently being assembled by an overnight process and then manually downloaded into Excel. OBIEE was able to directly connect to this warehouse and access the table/view objects within. The client was quickly able to start producing some of the simpler reports.

For this client, the licensing requirements where initially quite simple; they knew how many users they intended to provide the reports to, so they only purchased the licenses for them. The long-term intention is to incorporate more reports and, hence, service more users within the company, but they know they can extend the licenses as and when required. In this scenario the advice is quite simple – start small and grow as you need to; there is no point buying enterprise-wide licenses until you need to.

The client was already an Oracle database user, so Oracle’s Business Intelligence product was the obvious first port of call when looking for a better reporting solution. I do not know how seriously they looked at other products.

For a company just starting out in the world of BI reporting, this product, along with most other BI reporting products, is an expensive tool to buy, if you just want to play around and see what BI can do. It contains so many features, you can easily get caught up trying them all out and never actually deliver anything meaningful.

To get the most out of the product, you need to know what it is you are trying to achieve – what reports you want to produce, where the data comes from, how you want to provide those reports to the users. You can then quickly start to deliver benefit from the product just using the features you actually need. Later on, you can start looking at additional features to see what else it can do for you.

The product has a huge range of features as well as script/API interfaces to plug in others. However, many of the features are a little too complex to simply use ‘out of the box’. It is a product that Oracle are constantly developing and each release is better than the last, but each release also adds more features that make it even more complex. It is a comprehensive reporting solution, not a simple reporting solution!

The most valuable feature for us is that it gives us the ability to provide our business users with daily real-time reporting on sales and inventory. This is obviously important for them to keep their finger on the pulse of what's being sold and how much of it.

Having up-to-date, current data for the executives and the managers that make decisions allows them to make more accurate decisions and helps us leverage our business. It's an advantage. It allows our management teams to make the right decisions with the right data. It provides our reporting visually. Some people like to see the bar charts versus the numbers and they like to see a trend. It's easy for them to read and to use.

It seems to be a little bit complex for an everyday user to grasp and get ahold of if they want to build their own reports. I think it takes a little bit more training for the users to get on board. It's not as intuitive as I think they would expect it to be. A lot of users like spreadsheets. I think if you give them a fancy tool, it will give them a little bit to adapt to that.

We've had no issues with deployment.

It's been pretty stable. We've had no issues with stability.

Operationally, it's been great. It doesn't need a lot of hand-holding. We run into a space issue every now and then. ETL to get the data into the data warehouse where it's reporting off of works great, but that's just a normal part of growth, I think. I don't know that I'd even call it an issue.

OBIEE was installed with our partner. We're a hosted environment so we have an important staff there, including DBA's and staff like that, that will do our installing. I don't think we ran into any issues with getting it configured and up and running. Again, it seems to be fairly stable and we've got a pretty good DI staff that can work with it. It's probably in between straightforward and complex.

Look at where you're going for your reporting. Are you getting your reports today? Are they going to grow? Are you going to add into it? What are you looking to achieve with reporting? Those are questions that I would ask, so think about them before choosing a solution.

The most valuable features of OBIEE for me are definitely the graphs and reporting that it provides. The data it displays look really great and they're easily customized.

Sales people have a different kind of mindset and they want to see different varieties of reports. If somebody wants to see data by store, or by store in a particular ad, and their district managers want to see something with the region specifically, OBIEE can provide them that detailed data.  Also, through BI Answers, we can get data that's time-specific, holiday-specific, weekday-specific, or weekend-specific. We can easily configure and manage pretty much any metric we want across our retail business.

Some of the main disadvantages of Oracle would be they don't give the whole privilege for the end user to customize the way they want. Some things can only be done by an admin or a business analyst, and then really only someone familiar with OBIEE would be able to do it. But unlike other product, like Domo or Tableau, irrespective of the database, you can write run-time reports by an end user. The interface is going to take care of it and, depending on the variables that they change, they would get the data. Data remains the same, but you are giving more to the end user to handle.

We have no issues with deployment.

We've had some stability pain points with OBIEE. Operationally it's fine, but cloning causes big stability problems.

It has a Repository Creation Utility that has its own schema. It's on a production database so when you clone them, they're going to come with the same schemas where you won't be able to run those well for the test database. You'll need to export or import so that before the clone you drop and recreate the whole BI suite.

Setting it up or even upgrading it is definitely not for someone within the first year of their career. You really need to to be experienced and to know a lot of things, such as integration, how it behaves, its parts, and a million other things before you start to get the hang of it.

We implemented it ourselves with our in-house team.

I did a demo with Domo, but those guys were right behind me for more than a year. We didn't have any plans with Tableau, but it may be a solution that we could eventually migrate to.

I wouldn't recommend it as there are many other product out there, as long as your database is covered with RDBMS or other warehousing database. If you're freshly implementing, there is no reason in going with a 90's-style solution in 2016.

It provides our customers the ability to build simple or complex reports effortlessly. The existence of the Business Model and Mapping (BMM) layer is critical in providing numerous ways to model our data to fit a given project/set of requirements.

It has allowed us to provide our external users the ability to create custom reports while adding a complex object security framework not found when dealing with internal users.

Cross-dimensional reporting was a must and although this tool does not easily implement this, it still allowed us to model our data as necessary in order to deliver this requirement.

The UI needs to be updated. We had some people reference it as “1995” in ways of looks. The application itself does not work well with cross-dimensional reporting out of the box (there are no official documentation on how this can be implemented but unofficial online user blogs have provided us with some work-around solutions).

I've used it for three and a half years.

There were no significant issues.

No issues encountered.

We had some issues with not being compatible with some “compatible” servers.

8/10.

8/10.

There are some cheaper options in the market. We are currently planning on using another platform outside our US market due to cost. However, some platform options are not as robust as OBIEE.

Careful consideration has to be given when evaluating cost over features/performance just like any other ROI project.

if your project involves a lot of cross-dimensional reporting, you will encounter some pain points along the way setting up the RPD but solutions are available online.

If you are looking for a quick visualization solution, then look for Tableau, but if you want a deep, proven reporting tool (with relatively weak visualization features), OBIEE is actually pretty good.

I use different servers in OBIEE that are reflected as different subject areas on the application, and I can use one of them. For example, I have one subject area for marketing, the second for finance, so I have two subject areas available. I can use one of them that's not available for designing each function. Each file has or also contains mobile options. If the best model is a different file, I have to import it.

I like that Oracle OBIEE comes with more options. For example, more options with data security, user security, and other security. It's more complicated than Microsoft, but it gives you more options. They also added the part for machine learning, which is good.

It would be better if it had a wide range of visualization options. For example, Microsoft Power BI has an extensive range of visualization options, but it's not available in OBIEE. There are also some conflicts because it's complicated, but the cloud application is easier. They added some features for ETL with the on-premises application, but we need a different or a separate application for ETL in the cloud. In the next release, I would like to have more AI features.

I've been dealing with Oracle OBIEE for about two years. 

The initial setup is complicated and time-consuming.

We are a very big organization with many different data sources. For large organizations like ours, I would recommend OBIEE. If we are speaking about a medium or small company with limited data sources, then I may recommend Power BI.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Oracle OBIEE a nine, especially for organizations using large datasets.

It has good dashboarding. Also, being an Oracle product, it's good for ETLing in and out. It has a very good ETL process to get the data in and out of the data warehouse system. Also, it does have very good integration points to different products, such as Big Data, Hyperion, or Financials. You can pull everything up, project it and dashboard it. It's a good business intelligence platform.

For advanced users, they can build their own custom reports. You can actually create a custom dashboard for your upper management, and for your middle management. You can provide required reports at all levels of management for decision making. You can get data from different systems into it. It works well with other products, where you can bring in data, and then project it. It's got a very good ETL process, which makes it easy for you to bring in data.

They should focus more on performance. Basically, no one has the time. They also have to compete with big data analytics. They ought to keep that in mind and see how this product could eventually, down the line, be replaced. They should take some measures to actually make it stay.

For stability, in the back end, you have the Oracle database. You can use In-Memory.

You can fund it well, scale it well and size it well; all of these things. It's a good product.

It's not distributed. You can’t do distributed scaling, per se. Whenever you use the algorithm, if that's the case, you can always use a RAC system or something like that. On the application side, you can use however many servers you want. You could redirect your traffic accordingly, based on different servers. You can cater to different customers or to different business end users, depending on their priority. It's pretty scalable, but not distributed in nature. For example, it’s not good for big data analytics and that kind of stuff.

I don’t know about technical support these days. Overall, Oracle support is not that impressive, which it used to be. We are living with it. If you have a stable product like Oracle, if it’s going good, most of the time, it's fine. The only challenges come whenever you try to upgrade, and then it'll be a little rocky for a while. You'll be okay, but during that rocky period, you don't get enough support. There isn’t enough documentation. It's a huge product. Those are some of the challenges.

We previously used a custom reporting solution, like Crystal Reports and so on, then we actually moved into this OBIEE a few years back, when OBIEE first came out. It's been a long journey with OBIEE.

Setting up is pretty easy in terms of infrastructure and so on. When customization comes along, that's when it's never easy. Any customization is never easy. It's always complex.

Look at big data and other open-stack solutions. See if that actually fits; otherwise, you might want this kind of solution, ready to install. Don't customize. If you have a lot of customizations, see if this product will work; do a PoC. I strongly recommend to check big data, and go from there.

When I’m choosing a vendor to work with, the most important criteria are scalability and how well it works with other products.

Another thing is that we shouldn't be locked in to a vendor. We should be able to move vendors in and out if we really want. I don't like vendor lock-in. That's another thing. It should be scalable in a distributed way.

My rating is because of the performance and scalability. We did scale it well and we did size it well, but there are still some limitations in achieving the kind of performance that we want. It's not always consistent in its performance.

My clients are using Oracle OBIEE to extract data from their applications and present it graphically to make decisions.

The most valuable feature of Oracle OBIEE is it's designed for Oracle. It works well in the Oracle environment and can sit on top of any application.

Oracle OBIEE could improve by having better integration and compatibility with other vendors.

I have been using Oracle OBIEE for approximately four years.

Oracle OBIEE is a stable solution.

Oracle OBIEE needed some improvement in scalability. Up until now, it wasn't very scalable, but this is something that they are working on by moving to Cloud BI.

The support from Oracle OBIEE can be painful because Oracle manages its support around the globe. There are times you need to repeat yourself for the agent to understand.

I rate the support from Oracle OBIEE a two out of five.

Neutral

I have used other solutions, such as Power BI.

The initial setup of Oracle OBIEE is easy.

I rate the initial setup of Oracle OBIEE a five out of five.

Power BI is less expensive than Oracle OBIEE. A benefit to Power BI is having the option to work with concurrent licensing.

I rate the price of Oracle OBIEE a one out of five.

I rate Oracle OBIEE an eight out of ten.

We use this solution as a BI tool for data analysis.

The most valuable feature is the reporting.

The performance could improve and in a future release, they could provide more virtualization options.

I have been using Oracle OBIEE for approximately two years.

The solution is stable.

Oracle OBIEE is difficult to scale.

We have approximately 20 people using this solution in my organization.

The installation is complex and they could improve by making it straightforward.

I would not recommend this solution.

I rate Oracle OBIEE a five out of ten.