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 capability to implement business and data manipulation logic in the RPD provides a very powerful interface for the developers to work on.

We've had a situation where we had data residing in different databases and we wanted to have a robust reporting solution for one of our verticals. OBIEE helped us in achieving that and we were able to build a solution around it which is now widely used throughout the organization.

The ease of building reports can be improved in the product. In an era where strong visualization tools like Tableau and QlikView are becoming popular, it is very important that Oracle looks into this aspect.

I've been using OBIEE for over four years now. During this time, I've seen the evolution of the product from 10g to 11g.

I would rate the level of customer service to be very high. The support was extensive and timely. I would rate it 8 out of 10.

We were able to get answers to our technical queries fairly quickly. I would rate the level of technical support at 8 out of 10.

The earlier scenario of data reporting was mainly based out of Excel, which was neither robust nor stable. There was no security setup and since everyone had his/her own copy of the Excel sheet, there was no single source of truth.

These issues prompted us to move towards OBIEE as a solution.

The initial setup and configuration of the product was complex as it involved a lot of steps. We also encountered a few errors during installation, but with the help of technical support, we were able to resolve those.

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.

We have been using Essbase. We run a lot of smart view reports, which have been valuable to our business.

There should be additional features like planning and budgeting. It is pretty complex without having to run any additional ad hoc reports, so having built in reports like that would be nice.

We have been using the product for more than a year.

We have some stability issues. We periodically refresh the data from the Oracle EBS to OBIEE. Sometimes you can’t see the data and we have to run ad hoc reports to push us through that confusion.

It is going to meet our needs for the future. We are planning to implement EPM as well.

They are good. We go to Oracle support when we have critical issues, otherwise we go to the community.

Initially, we were using all Oracle products and a program called GL1. GL1 is an external plug-in that we used with Excel to run reports with the database. It was not robust like the work we have with OBIEE, which led us to transition.

The initial setup was straightforward. We had an issue with the servers, but other than that it was smooth.

Go with OBIEE with smart view. If you are in planning and budgeting, also get EPM. I would rate it a nine out of ten.

We do all of our reporting out of OBIEE, and the analysis is valuable. Moving clients over has been a big step for us. Coming into web, we segregated our web interface data entry as opposed to just reporting to OBIEE Analysis. We also have publishers on great front-end tools for the presentation side of it.

They can always improve on the user interface, and the publisher could get some new features.

We have used it for four years now.

It has consistently been stable.

We foresee it meeting our needs for the future. Financials and advancement to our team was big. It has been able to handle everything so far.

Tech support is knowledgeable. We use the community, which is helpful.

It’s a nice stable tool. All the dashboards, iPad support and other features have been great for us, and we totally rely on it. I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We got OBIEE for its dashboard reporting and for getting mining data out. OBIEE was a good fit with the Hyperion products we already had. We love it.

Dashboard reporting could be more dynamic and easier to drill down into.

We have used it for about three years.

It has been pretty stable.

It has been scalable.

We use partners for Oracle, so when we ask for support, we are forwarded to the partner that works with the solution in question. They are really good. If there is an issue where I can just drill down or look into the online forums, I do that as well.

OBIEE is amazing in its integration with Hyperion and dashboard reporting. I would give it a nine out of ten, because there are still changes happening to the platform.

Self service analytics is an amazing feature with OBIEE. Users are empowered to get at the information they need without the need to ask for new views from IT. Through the development of the application, the data is arranged using business terms that those users can understand. 

We have used OBIEE at several clients and the feedback has been fantastic on the dashboards, scorecards, and reporting that we have created. Clients love that OBIEE is a central location to view data from multiple sources in terms that make sense to the business user.

There is some room for improvement on the development side, older versions use a 32-bit administration studio. Some of the controls in this older studio are a little clunky and it can be easy to get lost as a new developer in the various wizards and windows.

4 years

Clustering and Single-Sign on can be difficult.

The initial setup of OBIEE depends on the data sources and their complexity. There is a great community with tons of blogs and the OTN Forums where professionals are willing to share and help out with any setup questions.