Oracle OBIEE Reviews

Most of the use cases were related to financial reporting, project management, and operations.

One of its main features, which is a feature in pretty much every enterprise product these days, is the ability to see a single source of truth (SSOT). It means that of all the different pieces of information in today's contemporary enterprise, you can identify one set of financials, one set of production data, one set of sales, and one set of marketing data, and you can call that the truth or the gold standard. Everybody who accesses the application can refer to the same truth. This is a major benefit of not only OBIEE but many other products, but OBIEE has been doing that for a long time. Being able to access multiple data sources, being able to pull them all together, and being able to establish the same information that everybody can refer to are some of its benefits.

Its robustness is most valuable. It can handle massive amounts of data quickly. If it's properly configured and tuned, it can handle massive amounts of data very quickly to produce results. That to me is the number one feature. Everything else after 10 years becomes like second nature. 

I find it user-friendly, but some people would argue this point. It's user-friendly in the sense that if you have someone who's properly trained, then it has a user-friendly interface for self-service BI. I used to do training on that product. For someone who is not properly trained, it's difficult. 

When they converted to OAC, they made some changes that were good and some that were not so good. In terms of room for improvement, there is nothing that's perfect. One of the things that have been difficult with OBIEE during all the time that I've known it is that when something goes wrong, many times, the error messages are not specific, and you've got to spend a lot of time digging and digging and digging before you say, "Oh, okay. I figured out what it was." There should be more detailed error messages or troubleshooting messages.

I have been using this solution for 10 years.

It's generally rock solid. In fact, when I used to teach people, I used to say, "Don't worry, experiment. You can't break it." It can be broken, but most people with the access that they are given are not going to break it. I would rate it a 10 out of 10 in terms of stability.

Its scalability is very good. It's definitely one of its features for the last several versions. In the last project, there were about a hundred users. I'm probably estimating high.

I definitely have plans to increase its usage because I'm getting certified and that's my experience. So, I would like more people to use it.

I would rate them a 4 out of 5.

Positive

I primarily worked with Crystal Reports.

It's complex to set up an entire installation, especially if someone has never done it before. You've got to know a lot of other things. You can't approach it cold and be easily or quickly successful.

You can deploy it with one person. I've deployed an entire OBIEE installation entirely by myself. It's not recommended, and it's not the best way, but it can be done. I know, I've done it. To administer or manage it once it's in place, the ideal team would be at a minimum a three to four-person team. Some companies, when they say, "We need to put in BI, and we need people to do that," they're also, without saying it, asking for someone to set up a data warehouse, run ETL, build and maintain that, run the BI, build the interface, do the reports, and teach or train the employees, which is something I've done. In that kind of situation, you need a three or four-person team at minimum to distribute everything from the data warehouse work, ETL, report development, training, and so on. If the person you're asking to maintain the BI system is not asked to train users, you don't need that skill either. So, it can be done by one person. It depends on what the client desires and is expecting.

There is absolutely a return on investment with this.

I have looked at its price, but I don't remember it. I would rate it a 4 out of 5 in terms of pricing.

Before going with OBIEE, I didn't evaluate other options. While using OBIEE over the last 10 years, I've evaluated several but not beforehand. The clients that engaged me already had made the choice and did the installation, or I did the installation for them.

Talk to another company that had to put it in place and maintain it. Get the straight story from the people who deal with it every single day—not the CEO who signed the contract, not the vice president or CIO or CTO, not the people who signed the contract and then gave it to somebody else. You should talk to the actual people who put it in place and did it every day. 

If you want to put it in place, do not believe that you must hire someone who has used this product before. What I mean by that is that if someone has used similar tools and knows the basics of BI, SQL language, and so on, with a little bit of time and training, they can become proficient in OBIEE. It's complex but it's not impossible. You don't have to find someone who has used it before. People who have used other things can learn OBIEE. I do training on that product, and I can train them.

I would rate it a 9 out of 10.

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.

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 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. 

I have been using Oracle OBIEE for about four years, but I don't use it a lot.

Oracle OBIEE is very stable. The only issue have is scheduling too much at the same time. It can get overloaded, and unfortunately, like most things, there are always bottlenecks. 

You're actually pushing it down a tunnel in effect, and if that tunnel's not large enough, it can't cope with the load. Some of the files and some reports are a lot bigger, and OBIEE has a limited 64,000 rows of output. It's not suitable for really extracting large amounts of data.

If I wanted to extract all the transactions on a report for one particular day, then that would blow the 64,000 rows of output. This means that we have to run it separately, and we can't schedule it. It has to be a manual task, or we have to get work done by our development people to provide that report as a standard report. This can be quite difficult at times.

Oracle OBIEE is scalable because you can cluster them and have multiple servers. You can spread the load up to a point. You can have multiple environments running under the same cluster. In our production space, we have two environments. We have a test environment, and we have a production environment. Being clustered, you can cluster those together.

When I used Cognos, it seemed as though it didn't cater to telling stories. It's like you've got to get the data out into something like Excel or another tool to do the visualizations. It can be done, but it's quite fiddly.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Oracle OBIEE a seven.

The centralized metadata model component is most valuable. 

We do like Oracle Visual Analyzer, but we do feel that it's quite immature in comparison to its competitors. There is still quite a lot of catch-up to be done, but it does still have some unique value add.

It is not very stable, and it is not consistently improved. There are a lot of gaps when it comes to design. The documentation and support from Oracle on the vision have been pretty bad over the last six years.

It is very biased towards Oracle infrastructure. One of the major red flags we have at the moment against Oracle is that it doesn't support deployment on other cloud providers. We're quite heavily vested in AWS as our infrastructure, and Oracle is yet to formally support deploying on those virtual infrastructure instances. That's quite disappointing, and it also cuts them out of over 70% of the market.

Its deployment is complicated in comparison to other solutions.

I have probably been using it since 2005. 

We're using Oracle Analytics Server, which is the latest version of the solution on site. We have a trial OAC which is the cloud version, but we're primarily on 12.2.1.4 which is the previous release on site.

The platform could definitely be more stable.

It is scalable, but it is very biased towards Oracle infrastructure. The biggest pain point is the alternative cloud support. They're very Oracle cloud-centric. If I need to do anything on our infrastructure that is AWS-centric or Azure-centric, there are loads of issues.

There are thousands of users, but right now, it's suffering from losing its users to Tableau and Power BI because of its various shortcomings.

The documentation from Oracle and the support have been pretty bad over the last six years. We also use Power BI and Tableau. Oracle is very poor in comparison to Power BI and Tableau with regard to user engagement, documentation, and roadmap.

They've got a lot of gaps in the community, support, and documentation. If I try and look up how to do something complicated in Oracle Analytics, I'd surely find it hard to find the information, whereas if I look up the equivalent in Tableau or Power BI, I'll find solutions pretty quickly.

I find their support model very outdated. In order to get support, I have to raise a ticket, and then I have to talk to someone who may or may not very quickly understand the problem, whereas quite often with the other products, the solution is in the community. That's where Oracle is falling behind. Their community is very poor when it comes to finding solutions, and their support is quite traditional. It's very old-fashioned.

The deployment can be done in a day. Once you understand it, the deployment isn't too bad, but the deployment complexity is still very high in comparison to other solutions. 

We did it ourselves. For its deployment and maintenance, we need a whole team of people. We probably have about three or four managers, and we've probably got 15 to 20 technical personnel or developers because many different business units are using it.

Its licensing is yearly.

I can recommend it under certain circumstances. It depends on your deployment, and whether you are starting from scratch. It is heavily dependent on what infrastructure you have and what your current people have. I would recommend it if you're a fully Oracle house. If you're not a fully Oracle house and you're heavily based on Azure or AWS, then I'd be hesitant. I'd need to do an architectural review.

As an end-user, I would rate it a seven out of 10. For an Oracle house, it would be a seven out of 10, and for a non-Oracle house, it would be a five out of 10.

Very large and complexes environments implementation, 10000+ users with 24x7 global operation and multiple EPM tools working in sync.

With a good model implemented, businesses can easily take decisions to improve anything they want.

An example I like to give is a retail company for which we developed online BI for sales. With this model, the managers follow the sales in real-time and can make decision like when, how much, and where to start a sales campaign during the day. This helps all managers to fulfill their quotas easily.

It's a great tool for the businesses as it's easy to manipulate and to create new dashboards. For the development side, it requires a good datamart to make things easier. It's very robust with a lot of resources.

It needs better parent-child dimension options that don't need to pass through OBIEE to build it. It's an easier way to update the model in case of a change of dimension size or sources.

Also, it needs better and more dynamic graphics. There are a lot of tools with better graphics and big part of BI is about this.

More than 12 years.

There were issues mainly because of a Java memory leak.

The scalability is limited because of WebLogic.

The technical support for EPM is bad. I don't remember anytime that the service support help me in something. The problem is bigger when you have a environment with more than one product like Hyperion Planning and ODI. This happens because the products have different owners within Oracle and then different supports and because this if, you open a trouble ticket of loading data to planning and you say the words ODI, you'll be pushed around the two separate support teams indefinitely, even if your company has an Oracle support director just for you.

Neutral

EPM is an enterprise suit that is made of some independent tools and to have all working together it makes it complex no matter your level of knowledge. The bigger the environment the bigger is the challenge you need to face. Maybe one day Oracle will integrate all their tools. It'll be easier and the good thing is that I saw a lot of improvements over the years.

Always talk with a Oracle representative and negotiate a discount. I already saw 99% of discounts and a free licence once.

Some times is cheaper if you get a hardware together (helps to negotiate a discount)

I'm a consultant and my only evaluation was on the database. I decided on Oracle because of the database and, during my career, their other tools are starting to come naturally.

Because Oracle products are development frameworks, your final results are as good as the people who implemented it. Make sure that your implementation team is the best it could be, at least for the first implementation. If something is implemented incorrectly at the start, it'll cost you a lot more to fix than to build a new system from scratch. Sometimes it can be so badly designed that it is impossible to fix.

I've been working on implementation for 20 years and I have seen bad implementations everywhere. In fact, I have seen the same tools implemented in the same team by two different people, with one being a success and the other a failure. In the same company, one department says that the tool does not work for them and another says that the tool is the best. The only difference was the implementer. Make sure you get a good team to implement it. The tool has its flaws, but most of time (99%) it is the implementer's fault that you have a bad or slow model.

My company utilizes Oracle OBIEE, and we have a dedicated local development team responsible for preparing various cases. The data sources we use are locally based, and while we are unsure of their exact nature, they are primarily used for analytics and monitoring purposes. It's important to note that our monitoring is not in real-time but rather involves analyzing past data.

Oracle seems to be a better-developed and well-created tool than Microsoft Power BI. However, Oracle is a bit complicated, especially for its users. So. I'm a part of the IT team that is involved in the configuration of these BI tools. As a member of the IT team responsible for configuring these BI tools, we aim to cater to both management and KPI areas where users only need to view data on their screens and those who require BI solutions like Oracle OBIEE for their daily tasks. While Microsoft's tool is comparatively easier to use, we are struggling to train or show users how to use the Oracle tool. Nonetheless, Oracle is a tool closer to our company's management.

Training is needed to be provided to Oracle OBIEE's potential users since it is a complicated tool. The potential users of Oracle OBIEE need to possess some IT awareness to be able to operate it. The drawback with the tool is that though it is well-created, its users are under-trained to use it.

Since Oracle OBIEE is an on-premise solution, I face many limitations, and this is also one of the issues that Oracle needs to address in the future. Moving to the cloud is a decision that would make the solution much more efficient than it is currently.

I have experience with Oracle OBIEE for more than a year. I am not sure about the version of the solution I use. I am a customer who uses the solution.

Oracle OBIEE is a scary and stable product since it is a strong and well-created tool, but it can be heavy on our company's systems compared to Microsoft's tools. In short, the solution is stable since it works properly every day.

The solution seems to be more suitable for enterprise-sized companies that are involved in serious businesses. At the same time, Oracle OBIEE is not a solution for users not used to working with such tools.

Our company has not been able to make any enhancements to Oracle OBIEE. However, the process would be relatively easy as we can easily add data sources. The reports are also simple to create. While I am unsure whether we have any servers for balancing at this moment, scaling up seems like a realistic and easy option for Oracle OBIEE.

Our company has a local support team, and in the past, we have only contacted the official Oracle support team for the solution's setup process. We haven't needed to reach out to them for anything beyond that. Even though we don't ask for any technical help from the solution's support team, they are always available to attend to all our queries.

The initial setup process for the solution was done for us by one of the local vendors, and they were able to do it quickly as they were professionals.

Before I recommend Oracle OBIEE to another person, I would ask them about their IT background since it is very crucial for the person planning to use the solution to possess knowledge of IT systems, how data is transferred, and what data types are to be able to use the tool. I would definitely recommend the solution to others if they are well-versed in the technicalities of the IT industry. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

In my company, they use Oracle ERP. So they build reports based on ERP tables. So, basically, my job is to create subject areas for the client so that they can play around with the subject areas. And sometimes, we develop reports based on the subject areas.

Oracle OBIEE is very easy to use. Looking at analytics, I think they have come a long way by adding new features like visualization, which is really cool. Also, I don't have experience with really other products in the market.

Improvements are something I think they have pretty much done. They have improved many areas, like adding visualization and all that, by making it easy. So, any business analyst can play around with it without much knowledge. I think Oracle OBIEE is going step by step.

Oracle needs to improve its technical support. If they can improve in that area, it will be nice. Oracle products have a lot of complications. And sometimes what happens is, especially since I work on Oracle ERP. So when they release some modules, I don't know what kind of testing they do, but there are a lot of complications. And we break our heads and eventually end up with Oracle support because only Oracle support can solve those issues because it's software-related. So when you open a ticket, it depends on where that ticket goes. Sometimes it goes to a knowledgeable person, and then your life becomes easy. Generally, it won't end up there. So those are the things that Oracle has to improve in its support area. They have to improve significantly in that area because I see a lot of guys moving away because of that reason.

I have some experience with Oracle OBIEE. As of now, I have one year of experience. I am a customer, but sometimes we enter into partnerships with Oracle to develop certain ERP products. So, we developed Contract Lifecycle Management along with Oracle, and that product is in the market now, and a lot of government agencies are using it. We are not resellers since Oracle owns the products, but we help them develop the CLM module within ERP.

The stability of the solution depends on how much data. Right now, I don't have the scope to look into that kind of environment with a large data scale. Maybe people working in banks, like those who operate worldwide, with a lot of data, can speak on the solution's stability.

Scalability, especially considering its availability on the cloud, I think, is fine.

Oracle has a history of not really providing great support. I rate the technical support a five out of ten.

Neutral

I'm a developer, so I don't feel much complexity in the solution's initial setup. So, I will have to step into a user's shoes to see what complexity is involved in the setup phase. I think that there are three areas, in which one area is to connect to the database and create your own use and then drag that view into a middle layer. The middle layer is the data modeling layer, where you join different tables, and regarding such technicalities, if I look at them from a user perspective, it's a little difficult for them, which I think is solved with visualization by dragging, dropping and visualizing how the data looks and all that stuff. So Oracle OBIEE has tried its best to make the solution easier for users. Even though I try to look at the user's perspective, my mindset is that of a developer, so it is easy for me. I think Oracle OBIEE is doing a good job.

Since I am a bit impressed with Oracle OBIEE, I rate the overall solution a seven out of ten.

The solution is offered as a PaaS - a platform as a service.

The setup isn't too difficult.

While technical support used to be quite bad, it's my understanding that it has gotten better.

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.

The reporting could be better. We can only develop standard PDF reports. We don't have reports that show analytics. It doesn't generate barcodes at the top and it doesn't have the ability to show notes. The reporting system needs to introduce logic so that we can make the reporting more flexible.

Writing any code takes a long time. Merging data is also a long and tedious process. 

I've been working with the solution for 13 and a half years so far. It's been a while. 

The solution isn't exactly stable. There are some reports, for example, in relation to email compliance or other policies that are not working as they should. We're actually migrating off of OBIEE's reports to Crystal Reports as some functionality is just not possible.

The scalability of the solution is fine. It's arranged per user. However, you need to pay more if you add more. 

There are no plans to increase usage as the solution is limiting in the features on offer and the client is leaning more towards Oracle OAC. 

I haven't tried to contact technical support in a long while. The last time might have been 2017 or 2018. I recall support not being very good. At the time, the application was new and we had questions, and we did not really get any response. It took them a long, long time to say anything. At that time, we were installing the application and facing some issues and it was a frustrating process. 

That said, their support may have stabilized and gotten better, however, I haven't really dealt with them since. 

I've started working more with Oracle OAC.

The solution is a platform as a service. We pick and choose our requirements as we like. If we need more CPU or RAM or hardware, we make sure we have that in the setup. We decide how many users we want, et cetera, and the system is set up to accommodate for that.

Oracle can help set up the solution.

OAC has a more reasonable price point than OBIEE. OAC gives you more options and choices. It's more flexible.

I'm a consultant. I'm not a partner of Oracle. I have no business relationship with the company.

There is a lot of competition in the market right now and there are so many cloud applications that users can look at, including Power BI. Some have more features and are more user-friendly. This product needs to advance its technology and catch up. It needs more advanced features.

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