Oracle OBIEE Reviews

• Dashboards - Thousands of users get the exact information that is relevant to them.
• Agents - The system automatically sends information when you need it.
• Answers - Power Users (aka Data Scientists) investigate the data.
• Integration - Analyse any data and present it in any format.

Implementation has led to a complete change in the way we create and consume information. People no longer spend hours creating spreadsheets; they now make informed decisions.

Right now, there's no ability to add comments to the dashboards. We'd like to be able to do that.

I've been using it for 16 years.

It's very easy to install.

The 12c version is much more stable than previous versions. We've had no real issues with instability.

The system will scale out easily to thousands of concurrent users. We've had no issues with the inability to scale.

Oracle provides good support, but the community is the place to go. Online experts, bloggers, conferences and the ACE program all contribute to a huge knowledge pool.

Microsoft Office products are great, but they don't scale to billions of rows.

You can go from download to fully-installed in just a couple of hours.

Negotiate hard! These products are not cheap.

I also looked at Power BI and Cognos.

Bring in an expert -- someone with real experience and who's independent.

It's just drag-and-drop, versatile, very user-friendly, and intuitive. OBIEE makes data analytics easy.

It's provided versatility to both the user and developer sides. It can present data in various way to the end user. With it, we have options on what to do and how to present information, such as in graphical form. There are several graphics, in fact, such as pie charts or any other kind of data illustration.

The Oracle installation instructions tell you to install the product and give it a name, a skimmer name would be dev. That way it's called dev because you’re doing the operation in dev. Call it dev BI platform, but even that is just a skimmer name. The best thing would be to just call it BI platform and leave it at that. That way, to move to any environment, from dev to test to prod without changing anything. In dev, it's great, but if your test environment is called test something, your users would be test something. Now your guys on the dev BI platform suddenly don't work here because it's dev. In production, you have to call it prod something. The bookshelf says call it dev, but you really shouldn't do that. Really it should be just BI platform.

If you have a lot of Oracle products, they would conflict if they are running the same box due to code names, code numbers, and pretty much use the same numbers. So, if you have Oracle Data Integrator and OBIEE in the same box, they would conflict. They would want to be in their own separate boxes to be able to work together. They don't work together, but they do help each other. ODI just makes the data available to how you want it. You need separate boxes, and once again, that means space and there's obligations with Oracle where you cannot have "something something" on the VirtualBox. There are licensing issues there, too.

The issues we've had with deployment are with the naming conventions described in the Areas for Improvement section. Other than that, we've had no deployment issues.

It's a stable product, but Oracle products generally conflict when they're deployed in the same box.

We've had no issues with scalability.

Tableau is visualization, and OBIEE is not as visual. It's a visualization tool, but Tableau's got more bells and whistles, a more "wow" factor. OBIEE is more data driven. Also depending on the user's capability, it presents data in a way in which you can make your own reports.

The upgrade from version 10 to 11 drastically changed the perspective of our company's users from the perspective of the data analysis they can do. It's now much easier for our developers to mash up their repositories from different data sources, create new dashboards, create graphs, and send emails via agents.

I think OBIEE is going to go away and I don't see new things to be added to it. If anything, it needs a diagnostic tool for looking at logs.

Also, Oracle needs to make WebLogic much simpler to use. With WebLogic you have a vast number of things in there. If you're not an OBIEE admin, then you don't know what you're doing. You can't have developers do the admin stuff and it needs to be a little simpler to navigate between. Also, you have an enterprise manager and then you have a console manager. Combining those two in one place would make it simpler.

I don't recall for sure, but I've used it for a number of years now, from version 10 to the current version 12.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had issues with stability, both hiccups and large. One issue we had was difficulty with error logs. We've had to dive really deep in order to find error logs. If someone asks for them, you really have to know where to look.

We run a homogenous data set and OBIEE has been scalable.

Technical support has been nice. When we create a ticket, Oracle reps get back to us via email or phone depending on the severity of the incident. Some tickets take a while, and some don't take long at all.

The setup was challenging because we were upgrading from version 10. We had challenges with services and cores, especially with Java memory. It kept running out, particularly with the WebLogic implementation. We really didn't know where to go from there because it change the Java memory.

Before using it, make sure you really understand the product. It also helps to know Java. You also need to know how WebLogic works, as well as how the integration between EM and OMB works.

Visual Analyzer is a nice feature that gives us options on how to view our data.

Once fully used, the Visual Analyzer has great promise. However, you're allowing end users to upload spreadsheets that can mash with your existing data. This is a great idea (Tableau attack on Oracle's part), but it can be dangerous if the end-user data is wrong. In that case, the great report will be wrong. It still needs a data manager's blessing to check it, IMO.

Installing it is quite different now with the steps. Once the product becomes more mainstream with lots of blogs, the installation process will be easier to follow, but even with existing documentation it was quite a chore. Then, there's the issue of using it within a virtual server and the loop back challenge you have to hunt for on the internet to get it working correctly.

I've been using it about a week or so.

Mainly just the change in install process and virtual server 'challenge'.

It's Oracle - you get what you pay for service-wise, and even then it's the person you work with that dictates whether it's a good or not so good service.

8/10 in general, but don't be afraid to raise severity if you're being essentially ignored.

We previously used v11.x.

It's pretty good, but as with all things Oracle you have to read the install notes first.

We did it ourselves.

OBIEE 11c is pretty slick these days, and it has a new look so that's nice. Everything's pretty darn good now with the following 2 caveats.

1. Allow more than one RPD. I don't know how or when, but one RPD for an entire production environment is brutal.
2. What's with BI Publisher? It seems everyone states that it's just for pixel perfect reports but the IMO shows that's just not true. There are a large number of standard reports that can, and should, be created in BIP. Daily Orders report bursts to various departments? That's not pixel perfect and it's one of a huge number that should be BIP. Sure there should be lots of analysis reports but BIP is still very important. So why has it not changed in this release? I'd swear Oracle's setting it up for removal like they did Discoverer, Hyperion, etc.

• Reporting
• System & data security
• Web services
• Scalability

This tool has helped us bring organizational data together on a single platform and query the organisational data in a pre-defined as well as Ad-hoc fashion. The results to these queries have led to important discoveries in terms of trends and predictions which has helped focus the direction in which the business has to be led.

Reporting. While a novice or average user cannot see behind the scenes, a seasoned OBIEE developer can. A seasoned report writer would want the capability to over-ride the default query system to write complicated queries that can then be fired against the database to run more efficiently. Currently the tool does not have this ability.

I've used it for three years.

No issues encountered.

Yes, but not with the tool. It’s important to decide the kind of hardware you want to run your BI installation on. If the hardware is not up to the task of handling a 100 users at a time, the BI system won’t throw alarms at you, instead the BI system gets stuck. In ideal situations, you should have a standalone server with a dedicated file system for a BI installation.

The horizontal scalability {adding new servers to the same system} needs to be simplified in terms of catalogue sharing.

6/10.

6/10.

No solution had been used previously.

It’s a straightforward setup initially. A simple Windows style - Next... Next... etc. - installation to start a BI server. It’s when you want to add roles and users when things starts getting interesting and complex.

Through a vendor team. 7/10.

Read the licensing documents carefully.

No other options evaluated.

This is a highly scalable and well integrated BI system with possibilities of deep rooted integration into future products by Oracle. If you are going to join the Oracle stack for your financial needs, you might as well start using OBIEE for the Business Intelligence solution.

Always remember, a BI developer does not automatically know your business. You need a Business Analyst to drive a BI project not a BI developer.

Interactive dashboards are fantastic (business users love them) and BI Publisher – it creates great 'pixel perfect' reports which have a lovely professional look (compared to some other BI products out there), and it is also a very efficient way of delivering CMS data to the user while hiding the complexity from them.

The OBIEE interactive dashboards delivered trend information to end users, but also enabled them to drill down into the detail themselves when they saw anomalies. This meant that they could investigate the data themselves immediately, without the need for more than basic technical expertise, rather than submitting requests for data and going through iterative versions until they found what they were looking for (which I happen know can take weeks in other organizations, by which time the trend is 'stale').

BI Publisher can be a little unstable.

The mapping functionality in OBIEE is still quite immature. We started using it, but it doesn't really hold up compared to other GIS tools (although is very convenient as is packaged with OBIEE so would be great to have all the data visualisation/interrogation available on one tool).

A better searching/cataloguing system would be good. When you have too many reports/dashboards discoverability becomes an issue. Of course, good planning and documentation can get you around this, but it would be nice if the tool had some functionality to make this easy to do (the search function can be very slow and is not that user friendly).

I've used OBIEE for six years, this version for four years, and the previous one for two.

Performance drops right down with high levels of users (esp when we have on Oracle RAC – improved when we moved to ODA)

Good - but sometimes would take a while to get assistance with trickier issues.

Yes – SAS. We shifted to Oracle as the SAS BI tools were not as slick (several other options were evaluated, but Oracle was chosen). SAS now has Visual Analytics – but it still looks a little clunky compared to OBIEE. And the business users love OBIEE look and feel.

We did an in-house implementation, but had experienced ex–Oracle contractors on the team. I would say a good set up of your RPD and a well planned design of your dashboards/reporting framework is essential – and that takes experience.

The business users love it! To use successfully it pays to plan out your approach – underlying data, RPD, dashboard navigation and layout standards before hand – planning and following best practice are the key to a successful implementation and getting the most out of the product.

• Oracle Analysis
• Dashboard
• Agents

Enhancements to existing OBI Components -

• Analysis
• Connectors
• Self-service BI
• Performance

I've used the tool for seven years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

It was already in place when I joined the company.

It's straightforward for installation and configuration. The complexity of the development varies depending on the business requirements. We have complex reports and dashboards being sourced from different data sources.

It was done in-house. Analyze the requirements do a POC to get the sign off of what is going to be delivered. Analyze the complexity and technical challenges, and look for workarounds to implement the solution if needed.

Evaluate the product before any implementation of any reporting tools.

Just as any business intelligence tool, the top five core expectations of any BI tool is to be able to:

1. Build adhoc reports (drag & drop) - for data discovery/exploration as well as to drive insight
2. Schedule set cadence reports - to avoid manual running of the report as well as including a broader audience to share with to further avoid any manual bottleneck processes, if this feature were not available
3. Visualization and Dashboards - basic & advanced (OBIEE offers both) - adhoc reports/data is great when one has enough time at hand to build great charts. What if the effort can be done just once and used many times? OBIEE out-of-the-box has a great selection of visualization choices, and others can be greatly customized with the right technical expertise
4. Offline data availability - OBIEE Briefing Book offers the data to be available even offline, and when connection is available can easily update to get the latest information; as suppose to the alternative of downloading PDF before going offline, and re-downloading when data refreshes
5. Customization - I simply cannot think of anything in OBIEE that cannot be customized, not to mention that APIs can also be built on-top for easy data communication with other tools

Taking top five features in mind:

1. Build adhoc reports (drag & drop) - our team and stakeholders build analysis everyday to find different ways to slice and dice the data to better analyze the business and produce actionable insight
2. Schedule set cadence reports - very heavily used feature across organization
3. Visualization and Dashboards (basic & advanced OBIEE offers both) - even executive dashboards are built using OBIEE given the flexibility of the tool
4. Offline data availability - used while traveling with peace of mind without having to worry about internet connection to stay connected with the data
5. Customization - we customized the tool to standardize to the corporate color pallet and to stay consistent.

Overall OBIEE is a great tool; however, the architecture of implementation for IT folks, and ease of use for a not-too-technical audience has room for improvement.

I have used OBIEE for the past five years.

Stability of OBIEE is very dependent on, and varies on, the hardware and Operating Systems of every organization. From experience, I have noticed OBIEE running on Linux has very few stability issues when compared to Windows.

The issue comes down to the learning curve of the product, and knowing exactly what to do as suppose to trial and error. Overall, OBIEE can scale with no issues.

It's great.

Overall, it's good as it can be improved.

My organization has been using OBIEE for the duration I have been employed.

The overall architecture of getting OBIEE up and running is complex and the sequence must be followed very attentively.

It was implemented in house.

I am sure the team has evaluated other products; and as a matter of fact, I am re-evaluating BI products as we speak, and OBIEE is one of the options on the table.

Be sure to know exactly what to do before doing anything, to save cycle time. And/or seek expertise in the field who have done it before and know the ins and outs of the product.