Oracle OBIEE Reviews

We are a solution provider and Oracle OBIEE is one of the products that we implement for our clients. We do not use it in our company. Our clients use it for management and business intelligence.

The most valuable feature is the user-friendly set of tools that the customer can use to develop their own business dashboards.

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.

Performance-wise, there may be some room for improvement.

We have been dealing with Oracle OBIEE for the past three years.

The OBIEE  tool can only be used in enterprise-level companies. It is not suitable for small and medium-sized companies because of the cost. Also, the complexity of it means that you need a technical team to install it and develop the reports. 

We are satisfied with the support we are getting from Oracle.

We have experience with several solutions including Zoho and Microsoft BI.

The initial setup is not easy, although it is not very complex either.

The average deployment will take a week, although this will increase depending on the complexity of the environment.

The cost of this solution is a little bit high compared with other products like Zoho, so reducing it would make OBIEE more competitive.

The suitability of this product depends on the client's objective and the complexity of the business. We also have to consider their budget.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

First Of I am an Administrator of OBIEE more than a developer or User, so my review will be more from that perspective. OBIEE is now not a big focus area for Oracle given that they now have various cloud PaaS solutions available such as Oracle Analytics cloud that does a similar job. However, OBIEE has always been a complex beast with a lot of not well-integrated moving parts.

Oracle OBIEE has improved our organization by providing business intelligence tools and solutions as advertised. We get the dashboard reports, email blasts, and dynamic access as needed. However, to get the best performance you need to understand and tune the system appropriately. 

The most valuable feature is the ability to run it in Exalytics with in-memory caching coupled to a Repository on Exadata is where it flies. So it's not meant for mom and pop shops, but if you are a global 500 fortune 1000 company, this is a tool that can get you what you need on time and even in real time.Previously we only had the option of using times ten caching bunt now we have the otion of using DBIM facility. We were one of the first SIs to adopt this technology in one of our customer implementations.

One significant improvement is the need for simplification. The set up could be more intuitive. An enterprise setup with HA and DR are pretty complex and to get a robust solution one has to play around with Real Application Cluster data sources and FAN notifications as well as WebLogic clustering and external load balancers. SSO also is not that simple to set up especially if you want all your Oracle systems to use the same SSO solution, i.e., no cheating with direct LDAP connectivity.

So there is no simple setup for HA deployment. you need to manually create a cluster deploy into the cluster , reconfigure the datasources to high availability data sources etc. Unlike hyperion for example which has automated configurator scripts that do a lot of the under covers work for the administrator and hence simplifies the ha installation.

More than five years.

This is a pretty stable solution. There is also good help from Oracle.

OBIEE is an ultra-scalable solution as long as you are willing to pay the price. Exadata, Exalytics and in memory allow this to scale to any enterprise,  and we have global 500 companies who are using this solution today.

Oracle's Technical support is knowledgeable and able to help with issues. We faced some challenging problems when upgrading very old versions of OBIEE to 1c but got some excellent support for the same.

No we mostly concentrate on the Oracle technology stack though there are other groups within my company that look at other vendor solutons. Oracle Analytics cloud now provides similar functionality in a PaaS like platform. Going forward this may be the future path for obiee users.

Setup can be quite complex for this system,.

We do these kinds of implementations ourselves. We are an Oracle SI.

We implement this for our customers who have seen multifold speedup in reporting and better visibility into their organizations. It's challenging to put a dollar value, but they have recouped their investments as compared to the systems that were replaced.

Setup cost, pricing, and licensing for OBIEE are all geared towards more substantial enterprises. A full blown HA - Dr setup can have many moving parts.

We evaluate solutions on a case by case basis based on the specific implementation as we implement BI solutions for different clients.

OBIEE is a powerful BI tool, but it is not as agile as some of the newer PaaS based solutions, eg, Oracle Analytics Cloud. 

On a scale of one to ten with ten being the best, I'd give Oracle OBIEE a rating of 7 out of 10.

We primarily use the solution to take reports and for its dashboards.

The visualization is very good.

From an end-user perspective, it's a very user-friendly environment.

There are pages about its limitations in Gartner documents. My understanding is they are working to improve themselves. There aren't any really big issues and they're already in the cloud, therefore, largely there isn't too much that's lacking.

The pricing model could be improved. Right now, it's quite confusing. Many customers have this feeling that it's a super-expensive option.

Currently, the solution is based on three pillars. The first is the BI publisher and it used to be a single product. The second is Oracle and Oracle Business Intelligence, the core component. It used to be a CBO product. Then, thirdly, you have this new Oracle visual analyzer. Now, all of these are wrapped into one Oracle analytics product. However, the integration between (or among) these three products is not 100% complete. This is the area where improvements can be made.

I've been using the solution for more than ten years at this point. It's been a while.

It's pretty stable. Now that it's the cloud era, the company is supporting it 24/7. If there is any issue, it's very well supported. It's very stable in our eyes. 

The support is quite good. You do pay for it, however, it's available when you need it. We're quite satisfied with the level of service provided.

I have some experience with Microsoft Power BI.

Power BI is more self-service BI oriented. It originated in the era of self-service BI. That's both a plus and minus, depending on what you are looking for. For example, if you prefer more self-service oriented solutions, you get more freedom with Power BI. You provide your business users with more freedom and that could be good or bad. It depends on the situation. 

Oracle Business Intelligence comes from the era of more IT-driven business intelligence solutions. It's more metadata-driven. You can establish stronger governance with Oracle BI in terms of implementing policies and data, data filtering, data governance, and user rights, etc. Ironically, Power BI wants to have more options to be tightly governed, and Oracle is trying to be more self-service oriented. 

The initial setup is not complex. It's pretty straightforward. Deployment typically takes three days or so.

The solution has a reputation for being expensive and has a confusing pricing model. There aren't extra fees on top of the main licensing costs, however.

We're an Oracle partner.

Overall, I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

The solution is better suited for medium or large organizations, mostly due to the high price tag. A smaller company would be hard-pressed to afford it.

That said, I would recommend it to others to use.

I like the architecture of this solution. RPV is a powerful feature in Oracle OBIEE. It lets us design as per the needs of the organization. I can have multiple presentation folders and presentation layers. I can have customization in a single node in VMware, which is a very good feature of Oracle OBIEE. It helps customers in designing as per their requirements.

Even though we have a feature to enable the physical query to be seen in the log, in case of any issues, it is challenging to debug and see or identify where is the issue. For example, we designed the OBIEE repository and deployed it into the server, and we are now accessing and creating a report. For some reason, if the report is not working as expected, it is very difficult to identify the issue. 

We have a feature to see the physical query that is being generated in the central OBIEE server. I feel that this feature should have been available at the repository level so that while designing the repository, we can select the presentation columns and the query it is going to create. This will avoid the additional task of deploying a feature into the server and then testing the report. It will also make the implementation process friendly if, while designing the repository, we can see:

• How is a feature working?
• Are any of the presentation columns selected?
• How is the query being generated?
• Which query is being generated?
• Are any joints used?
• What kind of joints are used?

Having this kind of information will make Oracle OBIEE more powerful and developer-friendly.

I have been working with Oracle OBIEE for more than seven years.

It is very stable.

The architecture of Oracle OBIEE is defined, and within the architecture, it is definitely scalable. You extend the repository and the data model layer. In the server setting, you have the flexibility to include the security aspects that Oracle supports. I feel it is extremely extendable. Our clients are enterprise-level companies.

There are challenges in getting a response from Oracle. We have faced challenges with Oracle technical support. Whenever we raise a request, the response comes very late. There is some delay.

I have been working with this solution for over seven years in an implementation role. By using the features and tools available in Oracle OBIEE, I am able to identify the cause and debug and validate it.

The initial setup is straightforward. It doesn't take much time. If you do the setup and implementation, it will take two to three days.

It is a nice tool that can be modeled for each and every requirement. To be able to develop and deploy it quickly as per the customer needs, you should have the right implementation person who understands the customer's requirements and has a total understanding of the product. 

I would rate Oracle OBIEE an eight out of ten.

We primarily use this product for company-wide data warehouse reporting.

The most valuable feature is the ability to set up the automated delivery of reports. It is a feature that is nice, as well as easy to do.

It takes a lot of maintenance to support the architecture, which is something that should be improved. Having a more simplified architecture would be better.

It should be easier to make changes or enhancements, as it is a long process to make a change in the system.

We have been using Oracle OBIEE for about ten years.

I don't find the stability of this product to be great.

Scalability is something that could be improved.

The initial setup was complex.

We used a consulted to assist us with deployment.

Oracle products are extremely expensive. However, the version that we have is older and we no longer pay licensing fees.

I would rate this solution a five out of ten.

Implementations were focused on reporting and centralizing all data delivery and access to the Business.

End-users can cross the data from dimensional models with external Excel spreadsheets, while from a BI strategy point of view this is not ideal since that Excel data should be incorporated in the DW, but from the end-user perspective, they gain some empowerment to explore and integrate the data

OBIEE is an enterprise Business Intelligence tool, the semantic layer is very organized which helps to provide the subject areas and how the end-user visualize the data.

The WebLogic administration could be more intuitive or simplified especially when you are focused on OBIEE

More than five years.

OBIEE requires a whole ecosystem to run smoothly, it requires a stable infrastructure with minimum compute power standards, and  Besides of having the right infrastructure(for the OBIEE application), the database setup (init params) is also important.

 It is as stable as the knowledge the team has about the product and how to manage that,

Every project is has its own challenges, sometimes technical, sometimes acceptance, different environments , different approaches, different perceptions .

From a infrastructure perspective, from 11g version onwards OBIEE runs under weblogic where we have the DOMAIN concept, by default, after installation OBIEE runs under one node which represents the server where it is installed, and you have an option to scale up to other nodes, thus increasing the compute power .

The installation and initial setup requires specialist knowledge .

I have implemented through consulting companies . 

not cheap but it is worth it

• Primarily for traditional data warehouse reporting
• Also giving end users the flexibility of ad-hoc reporting.

The tabular and pivot reports with generic graphs and charts are helpful in representing summarized reports on dashboards.

• Union reports, pivot views, column selectors, action frameworks and write back reports.
• The RPD is also very useful in changing and creating models as per requirements.

• Visualization of OBIEE needs a boost. 
• The data mashup functionality and ease of use for end users also need to be improved a lot.

Our primary use case for this solution is to pull reports on different departments within the organization. It's very time consuming to find these reports within the IT team. Their team has also been limited to the number of people inside there, so the reports take a little bit longer. When the reports do come out, there are very little changes that can happen to these reports. You have to keep requesting changes to these reports. It is expensive and it doesn't give us the flexibility to do what the business needs. Sometimes we've got users that need to create their own reports and OBIEE needs to be developed from scratch. It's time-consuming and there are much better analytics programs out there that can do the job even better.

We use AWF and we can plug in various data into artificial intelligence. The benefit side of that is that you can actually start to predict trends, see things that you haven't ever seen before. We've been trialing a few solutions and I sat with our logistics department last week, and we can actually see which is the most cost efficient route because we are obviously a distributor of chemicals. There are various paths that the distribution channel takes and we can actually see and pull the data of which is the most cost efficient channel or delivery method that we can deliver these goods.

Flexibility, scalability, and the speed that you can pull these reports are the most valuable features. Accuracy is also a huge factor because if it's junk in, it's junk out. I'm leading a big data modeling project at the moment. We've been modeling the data properly into a data warehouse. Currently, we've just been using an ETL database and that doesn't really work. The data is not live, it's not instant. The tools plugging into the data warehouse need to produce the results quite quickly and I know the tool is only as good as your data warehouse.

They should develop greater visualization because their visualization isn't industry leading at the moment. The way you pull the data and see the data compared to other platforms, they're lagging a little bit behind. Also, their cost. I've got Oracle account managers trying to persuade me every day to purchase these licenses. Once you purchase OBIEE, then you have to purchase the virtualization and then you have to purchase the mobile license to operate on the mobile. It's really expensive. 

It is stable. Once you go through a long process and get everything working, it does work. There's a lot of time and effort that needs to go into the solution before you get the results that you want.

Scalability is limited. The scalability compared to other products that I've seen and tested, is quite far behind.

We do you use Oracle support. We've been paying for an Oracle support subscription for four or five years, and not one ticket has ever been logged. When I came in, I've encouraged the team to ask Oracle questions. They do get back quite quickly. Their support is good. Working with our account managers, if I need to escalate anything, I can speak to them and they escalate the call. I've got that ecosystem working quite well. That does work for us.

We switched to OBIEE because Discoverer was very old and outdated. We migrated from Oracle databases 11G to 12C, and they found that Discoverer was not compatible with the Oracle database 12C. They decided to move to another platform, and the previous IT manager was very Oracle focused and orientated, which I don't agree with because Oracle is very heavy resource intensive and there are much lighter applications that you can plug into. The way they structured it wasn't very conducive to the business because OBIEE and the data that you compile on that is used for OBIEE. Now what I'm trying to do is, we're busy modeling the data for a data warehouse where we can plug multiple connections to that data. You can have mobile apps for different business criteria, business objectives, and business goals, and once you're with OBIEE your limited to that. That's the problem, that lack of research and insights causes.

When choosing a new solution, the most important factor is understanding the business goals and objectives and understanding what the business needs from that product. Once I've got all that information I then look at the different products and see what they can do. I look at the product and see how much of the business criteria it ticks off and I measure and compare it to other platforms. I rate it on a scale and see which one best suits the business.

We also looked at IBM and SAP. 

It's a great product if the business requires it, but for our business and the environment that we're in, I'd give it a three out of ten because it just doesn't meet the criteria that we need. I'm very pro-cloud, a cloud platform would be really nice. I know Oracle does have a cloud analytics solution, and we've looked into them on how to move that over, but it's really expensive for the investment that they've already made into OBIEE. These days, IT leaders like myself, the new trend is a consumption model instead of an on-premise model. Using the cloud in consuming what you need, switching off what you don't need. I've done this whole exercise with our whole ERP, we moved that through to the cloud, we moved all our on-premise services through to the cloud. With that, I can predict cost. I know exactly what's happening. I trade capital expenses for variable expense. It makes life much easier.

I would advise someone considering this solution to, first of all, define your business goals and objectives. Define what the business needs, and then analyze all the products that you're considering and see which is best suited for you. There are much cheaper solutions to work with, much easier solutions to work with. We're here in Dubai though, it's a small country, and there are companies, massive companies, that have invested millions of dollars into Oracle OBIEE and it just crashed, it failed. It wasn't what they need. The main thing, if I could advise anybody, is, you need to see what the business goals, objectives and the needs of the business are first, and then you can choose your platform.