"Unlike relational, where you're linking together multiple tables, with Essbase, you basically define what the dimensions are beforehand, and you define the hierarchy, and then load the data. This allows you to do a pretty sophisticated analysis so that you can drill into it and slice and dice the data."
"The main features of this solution are that it is easy to use, intuitive, and user-friendly. When I retrieve the data from the database it is in a very raw form, then when I use the Oracle Report Builder it has advanced intelligence features to allow me to view and make changes to the data easily."
"The visualization is very good."
"The solution has great reporting and forecasting capabilities."
"I like the scheduling feature. It has an inbuilt scheduler which is very good, and it allows us to create agents, and those agents can be scheduled. It's quite flexible in that respect and goes into our IT infrastructure. The outputs are sent encrypted to various endpoints. Some are internal, and some are our clients, and it's encrypted at a high level. I do find Oracle OBIEE flexible. If there is stuff that's not in your model or schema, it's very flexible to create SQL scripts and create the data you want. It's quite nice to create a dashboard in OBIEE, and that's pretty straightforward in the way you drag and drop everything. You can create sections, and you can add elements to your page. That bit of the interface is relatively straightforward."
"The most valuable feature is the user-friendly set of tools that the customer can use to develop their own business dashboards."
"Provides good data visualization features, and provides a lot of visualization reports from various data sources."
"The dashboard and analysis are the most valuable features of this solution."
"The setup isn't too difficult."
"Essbase has a programming language, and it has a couple of functions to do forecasting, however, their feature set for that is not that good."
"I find I prefer Oracle OAC over OBIEE. It's more advanced, has artificial intelligence, and there's more that we can do with it in general. OBIEE is lacking features."
"I would like to see Machine Learning included in this solution."
"Managing the OB applications requires a high level of experience, and makes the solution quite heavy."
"The graphical capabilities could be better. They are also cumbersome, and they are limited compared to Tableau, Power BI, or even Business Objects to a certain extent and Cognos. The error logging isn't great either. The errors that come out when you schedule aren't easy to understand. I find how they filter within a query quite cumbersome and difficult to debug if somebody else has done it. You can see as you build, and I think that's where the problem is. It doesn't lend itself to debug something. For example, if you create a formula that's quite complicated, it's not easy to understand what goes with what. It becomes spaghetti, and it's very difficult to unpick. That's really my gripe about it, and in some ways, it's too flexible. It tries to be a Jack of all trades when it's not. I think a lot of these products, if they concentrate on trying to produce your reports, then that's fine. But when they're trying to do all sorts of other things as well, then it isn't very easy. We get lots of support from Oracle, but I think the problem is that we get many invalid file operations. Nobody understands why. It can be a multitude of reasons, but no one reason could cause it. That's just one of the issues we've had in the last year. But the scope of reporting has gone through the roof over the previous 12 to 18 months. We want an end-of-life OBIEE in our environment because some of the infrastructure runs unclustered. We weren't allowed to go clustered for some reason, and we never knew why. Unfortunately, going down that route means that the platform we run it on, WebLogic, has now become non-standard within our organization. Everything's been moved off it and onto other platforms. Unfortunately, our OBIEE runs on that platform, and we're being pushed down different routes, and we don't know where we're going at the moment. Within the next two years, I don't think we'll have OBIEE in our part of the business. In the next release, I think having the capability of being able to develop and then promote to a production environment rather than having to have separate environments will help. I know that Tableau and Power BI can be created on a desktop application, and then when it's ready to go live, you can promote it."
"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."
"The solution needs to be easier to scale."
"There could be better integration with other solutions, such as Microsoft Office."
"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."
Earn 20 points
Oracle Essbase is ranked 4th in Database Development and Management with 2 reviews while Oracle OBIEE is ranked 3rd in Business Intelligence (BI) Tools with 28 reviews. Oracle Essbase is rated 8.6, while Oracle OBIEE is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Oracle Essbase writes "Everybody uses it for financial purposes, but it can also be used for other analytic purposes, such as mathematical models, statistical models, and so on". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Oracle OBIEE writes "Great machine learning capabilities on the cloud with good security mechanisms for larger organizations". Oracle Essbase is most compared with Microsoft BI, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, IBM Cognos, Tableau and Oracle Analytics Cloud, whereas Oracle OBIEE is most compared with Oracle Analytics Cloud, Microsoft BI, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, Tableau and SAS Visual Analytics.
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