Oracle OBIEE Reviews

I use this primarily for our passports. 

The most valuable feature is the openness of the solution. It helps us integrate some of our clients. 

The functionality is in need of improvement. We find the graphs need to be upgraded. 

The stability is good. But, we are a small team. We have not yet tested it in a larger setting.

In terms of tech support, we have our own technicians. But, we did register for their help. When we register a call, it takes time for them to respond to us.

We used Microsoft BI in the past.

The pricing we negotiated with Oracle. But, I do not have details.

The primary use case of this solution is RPD.

I think having the conformed structures makes it a lot easier for end users and pulling reports together.

I find the most valuable feature of the solution is the RPD, so the BI Server component, and the building conformed structures across unconformed data.

I think there is a lot of room for improvement. This solution is weak in the data science perspective. I have past data science experience. And, I find that there is a lot of room for improvement in terms of incorporating more advanced statistical modeling into the product. 

I come from a data science background. I find that there is a lot of room for improvement to incorporate more advanced statistical modeling into the product.

I have not been using it long enough to pass judgment on the stability of the product.

I think to spread this across an enterprise will be a significant investment. Be prepared to spend a lot of time and money.

I have past experience with QlikView, Tableau and Sisense.

We primarily use this solution for making tables and working with data.

It is not a good product for data visualization. And, its functionality is lacking.

The scalability of the product is good.

We have an in-house tech support, so we do not use the tech support from the solution.

The other options we considered are: Tableau, Qlik Sense, and Splunk.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor are:

• Visibility
• Data Visualization
• Price

OBIEE is used to generate data reports and send to users' emails. The company leaders use its summary report to overview the KPIs of the company. Department operators use its detailed report to monitor daily sales. 

• A detailed data report is generated for business operators.
• Summary and aggregated data for leaders.

• It's easy to use for business analysts.

• Can utilize SQL queries to generate reports directly.

• Access and permission management.

Metadata management function: Sometimes, our business requirements need to load reference data into the data model.

OBIEE crashes when many people login at the same time.

When a large number of queries are running at the same time, the report fails.

My first challenge with OBIEE was to create a set of Dashboards to monitor sales performance in real time.

Before using OBIEE, my customer had difficulties building Dashboards and usine visual components to show information. Now they can do it fast and easily selecting the data and organizing the physical model, they just have to connect to the source. The solution has some limitations, but there's always a way to adapt and show a good work.

The easy integration with different database sources and the strength when working with complex data. It’s possible to integrate different data sources and show the information in the same place with a very good performance.

I think there are some issues to be solved, and it needs some visual improvements, especially on the charts, but it is still the best solution in my opinion.

No issues encountered.

When the number of projects on the repository increases, updates and new deployments get slower.

Customer Service:

I have never used it.

Technical Support:

I have never used it.

I had aready used Microsoft reporting services. I migrated to OBIEE  because my customer doesn´t use Microsoft tools for BI.

It was straightforward in the begining, but became complex later.

I evaluated other solutions like Tableau, Cognos, MicroStrategy. They are more attractive visually, but in my opinion OBIEE has a stronger platform.

My customers want a solution that connects any data source, and does all the jobs for them. It doesn´t exist. People have to know their data, and know what they want to do with it. My customer had the illusion that OBIEE would do everything for them, and they became frustrated, so we had to learn to work together in the right way. It’s very important to guide the user in the right direction to take all the advantages of OBIEE.

We use the product to bring reports to the dealers. It is performing well.

We recently upgraded to version 12c.

It mostly supports enterprise level data. We have millions of records on a daily basis.

I would like more graphical charts.

While it is a user-friendly, data-driven tool, the data modeling should be easier to use. 

The stability is good.

It is good. I can use it with any type of data models, such as relational lines and dimensional lines.

The technical support is not as good as before. They used to have very good support five to six years ago. The support is now hectic and takes too much time to resolve issues. We often can resolve issues on our own before they can.

I would recommend the OBIEE over any other tool. Look at OBIEE and compare it with the competition.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: more technical features, technical support, and performance.

Primary use case, we use it for slicing and dicing service reporting. Our business is using Oracle BI to deliver business, marketing, and financial reports. Technology mainly does the modeling, and the business is creating the reports. We don't have any problems with the enterprise reporting.

It performs very well, because we are using Oracle Exadata. Oracle BI accesses Oracle Exadata, and it performs very well since Oracle Exadata has great performance. 

We have been using the Oracle stack for a long time. So, it was a natural choice to use Oracle BI.

The performance can issue queries to work in the Oracle database in Oracle's native language. There are a lot of visualizations which suit our business.

It shares quite a lot of features which suit us. For example, we have scheduled reports delivered automatically to our business users using enterprise features.

It is easy to create a report quickly. It does not take much time to create an ad hoc report.

Now, we have more demands to load data somewhere quickly, not seeped into a model, like data warehouse model. We need to load it somewhere like a data lake and have a tool which can analyze the information very quickly without creating a model. So, our business has a need to have a sandbox, or something similar to it analyze unstructured data that does not fit into the data warehouse model, along with joining unstructured data with structured data from the data warehouse. However, I am not sure that the BI tool is the right tool to do this, it is more of a data discovery tool. 

With Oracle BI, we need technology to create the model, then the business uses this model to create reports. If they wanted to analyze data quickly which is not in the data warehouse model, then we cannot use Oracle BI for it, or it's not so suitable.

In the beginning, it was not so good. Now, with the version 11.7 and 12, we are satisfied and don't have any problems.

In the beginning, it was not so good. Now, with the version 11.7 and 12, we are satisfied and don't have any problems.

We used the technical support a few years ago. We were not satisfied with the support, because we could not obtain answers or solutions. The problems that we had were recognized as bugs, and they would say, "It will be fixed in the next releases," and it was fixed, but it took time. Basically, it was not a pleasant experience to work with My Oracle Support.

We had at our disposal updates, new features, and new releases, which was good. We downloaded and upgraded, but regarding the problems that we had, we were not satisfied. The last problem that we had was about four or five years ago, and we haven't had problems since.

We previously didn't have a BI solution.

We first used Oracle 10, then Oracle 11, and afterwards moving to 11.3 until we got to Oracle 12. The initial setup was not complex. Although, in the past, when we had to upgrade, we had to install another version, and move the reporting to it. Now, we can do an in-place update. So, it is not so complicated.

We had more than one quotation, then we chose the product based on a type of questionnaire with scoring. I think Oracle made the high score at that time (2010). It was between Oracle and Cognos at that time.

There are now tools like Tableau or Power BI that enable you to do BI analysis without any model in the background. You can just connect to the database, or any other unstructured data source and do whatever you like, probably with more fancy visualizations. Although I'm a technical person, these things are more important to our business people. 

Oracle is an Enterprise BI tool. You have to do the modeling based on that model, then you can do whatever you like. However, it's not easy. It's not so flexible to do BI reporting directly from the data source without models. It is not that agile.

It's a very good tool for plain Enterprise BI reporting and usual BI reporting. It's not a tool for data discovery. If you want to do old-fashioned plain BI reporting and have a large company where you want your business users to have the possibility to have reports delivered to them automatically, then Oracle BI is a good tool. If you want to be more agile and do more data discovery on unstructured data which is not well-known, then Oracle BI would not be the best choice.

The primary use case is for our various financial products. One is a trading platform called MarkitSERV. All the world-leading financial institutes are on-boarded to that client. They use the platform for trading. On the backend, we have the data warehouse of that trading platform, which helps produce quick analyses of the trading data and prepare reports on demand. For that purpose, we are using the OBIEE. We have defined a lot of trends in OBIEE so you can compare year-on-year and month-on-month data. We have various ways you can measure your numbers.

Performance is just okay. It doesn't have in-memory data. For every new analysis we prepare, it will go to the database and query the SQL. That takes a long time. That is the main challenge we are facing. People nowadays are very demanding. They want their analysis to come up very quickly, at the click of a button.

The most valuable feature of Oracle OBIEE, for me, would be the Web Catalog. From a development perspective, I do not need any client or any software to be installed on my laptop or desktop. Everything is browser-based, so I just open the browser and start development.

Similarly, for the end-user, it provides self-analytics services where the end user can drag and drop various fields, facts, and dimensions and prepare their reports. They can have them in the form of charts, etc. Then they can save them in the Web Catalog.

I have not seen this Web Catalog in any other tool. Web Catalog is kind of like Windows Explorer, where you can define your own folder and whatever analysis you are doing and you can save the analysis for future reference. 

One feature I would definitely like to see is the ability to provide the in-memory data. Oracle might have some plugins but, as of now, that feature isn't available out-of-the-box. You might have to purchase that feature. This is the feature that is most lacking, which we would like to have in the next release.

Also, the overall architecture. Currently, it comes in an Oracle suite. We want to have it come as a separate product and which is very easy to install, migrate, deploy etc.

I wouldn't say it's that stable. We are using it in production and we used to have one failure per month. When we're not able to figure out the reason, we just restart the services to sort it out. That might be an environmental issue, we're not sure. It could also be a tool issue. When we approached Oracle support, we could not find out exactly what caused the instability.

It's fairly scalable. It doesn't have its own engine, so everything depends on how much data your database can process.

We have used technical support. We didn't find it very useful. The responses are very slow. As the tool is very, very complex, there are a lot of scenarios that we need to go through with them. Most of the time we are not able to simulate the issues with them. Depending on the application-side logs that we provide to support, they start their investigation, but most of the time it is not that useful.

I wasn not involved in the initial setup. When I joined the organization, it was already set up. I would say that we're using only 20 to 25 percent of the features of OBI.

Setup and migration are very complex. Technically, Oracle accessory is extremely complex. These days, the industry demands a kind of Excel analysis, which is very easy to install, set up, and it's very developer-friendly as well as end-user friendly. OBIEE lacks all those features. We had to migrate from 11g to 12c and it took around six months because of the extreme complexity of the tool.

We are planning to move away from Oracle OBIEE, and to move to another tool that has in-memory data processing capabilities. Oracle doesn't provide that capability very easily, so we have performance challenges, etc. We are exploring Tableau and QlikView. They provide in-memory calculations and in-memory processing, which results in very fast throughput so that the data updates into the dashboard.

In terms of choosing a vendor, the most important criteria for me is the ability to create near real-time analysis, which OBIEE is lacking at the moment. Another is very good performance, which means it should have its own engine to process the data or even to do some small ETL operations on the data. In addition, it's the simplicity to develop and architect the solution.

All the drawbacks which I mentioned above, I would like to have all of those resolved in OBIEE. First of all, its installation, configuration, and setup should be very easy. It comes with its own application server and that creates a lot of conflict files on the server side. You have to be very careful while configuring all those files.

Technical support is another issue, where we generally do not get adequate support. And on Google, there is a lack of good material for OBIEE 12c. If you compare it with other tools like Tableau and QlikView, they have excellent community sites where you post your question and you'll immediately get a reply.