Oracle OBIEE Reviews

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.

We use it for KPIs. It's quite good, but the content of Oracle OBIEE cannot accommodate all of our needs. Oracle OBIEE only displays KPIs, but it does not include strategic objectives or display risk in a strategic map.

Generally, with Oracle OBIEE we can see near real-time performance in our operations. When there is a problem, it is easy to escalate it to top management and the time for management to make a decision about it is much shorter than it would be using a manual process.

The most valuable feature of Oracle OBIEE is the reporting.

From the point of view of strategic management, I would like to have a feature, perhaps a form after we get to the KPI dashboard, to be used to note if something unusual happens in the operations. That way we could record extreme KPI situations, and track why a number is very low or too high.

Stability is okay. It meets our current requirements.

Its scalability also meet our current requirements.

We use in-house resources, since my IT team has the skills to develop in Oracle OBIEE.

I would recommend this solution but it depends on the needs of the company, of course.

Important criteria when selecting a vendor include local support and the most important is the capability of the solution to meet my requirements. It should also be compatible with our current system.

I would rate it an eight out of 10 because Oracle OBIEE is capable of providing me with fairly comprehensive real-time data. However, again, it doesn't provide me with the strategic view or map or objectives, or how an individual KPI affects the strategic objectives.

We use it for analyzing our sales, our processes. So far, it is good.

It has unified the reporting within the group. Previously, each business unit had its own report. Now we have the unified report, so everyone can look at the same picture at the same time.

I think the most valuable features are the ability to drill down, the graphs, and the scheduling for the reports to be received in Excel on a daily basis. Users like Excel, so it's good for them that they receive the reports by email, that they don't have to specify the schedule.

We are looking at Power BI and Data Visualization from Oracle, because it has more appealing graphics. This is going to be the next step, if we do move at all. 

It's very stable. 

It is scalable.

Technical support is good. I would give it a rating of seven out of 10.

We did not have a previous solution.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor include 

• support - that is one of the important things 
• availability of partners to help if we need anything
• integration with ERP systems and the other tools that each company would have.

It was straightforward.

We only evaluated Oracle at that time.

I would rate it at eight out of 10. It has very good features but it is missing going quickly into the cloud, and virtualization - unlike other vendors.

We have an enterprise type of environment, where we have 80 applications. We are using OBIEE for our data reporting.

Oracle OBIEE improves our day-to-day, but it is not a very user-friendly tool, according to some of our users. In my opinion it is very user-friendly.

There is an enterprise type of repository; you can make changes in the repository and it will affect the whole application. Other tools don't have a combined repository.

From a business perspective, it's not user-friendly.

No stability issues.

I think it is scalable. Whenever we have a new patch or update, the old functions are also available after applying it.

I have not used tech support.

It's a good tool, but its overall organization as an analytical tool, the layout of OBIEE, is not very good.

I would rate it a seven out of 10, overall. OBIEE doesn't have audit logs. Also because, in our own organization each department gets its user own ID, in OBIEE if we provide rights to them, they are the administrators of OBIEE. That means there is no distinguishing between user management and administration.

It's the connectors, the adapters. Built in connectors with different ERPs, you can plug in XL, other sources of data. It's very easy to configure. It's very easy to use.

It's so easy for us to see everything on a single dashboard, instead of looking for the information, and then compiling it in some sort of spreadsheet. We can just go on the dashboard and measure our success while looking at our financial data, even our HR data. 

It's great. We are able to do a lot of analytics. We can set goals, annual goals, using this tool. It's very easy to create our dimensions and our facts and see which metrics are being hit and which are not.

I think Oracle has already come up with a couple of data visualization pieces, instead of just reporting. Today, I saw from a couple of versions of what they are coming out with. I think it's pretty cool. I think it satisfies all the business needs that we have.

Super stable. In the initial phase, 10 years back when we started using it, at that point, it was a bit finicky, but it's been perfect.

I think it was scalable enough.

I think, especially with Oracle OBIEE, we have not created any service requests that I know of. Maybe once or twice. 

We have used their ERP as well and we had to create a lot of service requests, tickets. But with OBIEE, it's very easy to use, and we have not had that much trouble. The tool has been in the market for a while, it's very stable.

We were trying to use a custom based tool. That didn't work. Every time we had to make a minor change, a technical person had to be involved. A lot of different layers, and it was like product delivery. It was a continuous development. This was a big change for us. It was pretty much plug and play.

We needed some technical expertise, including me - I have some background in using different business value tools - so I knew. It was not that hard after reading their documentation. It was easy.

The most important criterion when looking at vendors is their experience with bigger clients. That helps a lot. Lessons learned, they put it out there. They tell in their white papers. There's a lot of information out there to help you before you even decide to use a tool. That's great.

It satisfies 99% of the business measures related to analytics, reporting, and dashboard views; it satisfies all of those.

I would say first, analyze your business requirements and see if this is the right tool for you. There might be cheaper options, looking at your business requirements. Oracle is a big company. That's the most important piece of the puzzle, you have to look at your own requirements and see if everything meets your needs. Other than that, I think if your requirements are to have a tool which has dashboard capabilities, and you have analytical needs, and reporting needs, I think this satisfies pretty well.

For me, it makes the difference is in terms of our users being able to take advantage of a product which allows you to get access to data, reports, make decisions quickly, and have better insights regarding operations.

We're using it since 2010 or 2011. From a functional point of view, as well as implementation, setting it up, configuring it, updating. We have gone through the entire lifecycle.

In the beginning it had it's stability issues, but it became stable. It's better now. I think we are in more of a "cruising" stage in our product lifecycle.

We did hire consulting services to help us implement. Then our superusers took it from there and went to a lot of sessions and user groups to better understand.

We think it will meet our needs moving forward. 

Oracle support can be tricky. I would rate it as, maybe, six or seven out of 10. It's not the best.

Response time can sometimes take a little while. Redundant questions. As an experienced user, you can kind of tell what the problem is, versus... It's like they have a pre-written script, "Okay, this is what I need to ask you."

Yeah, we were using an old product that Oracle sunsetted, I believe.

This product, OBIEE, they acquired, they didn't build it. This is now their choice of tools for reporting. Before, they were using an Oracle product which was not the greatest. It was Excel-type stuff.

Surprisingly, this was straightforward. If you follow the implementation guide or installation guide, it was very well written, so we were good.

I would recommend that you get your end-users ready, because a lot of information is transparent with this tool, which gives them better insight regarding how their operations are running. They might find something that was not visible to them. It may mean negativity around improvement but take that as an opportunity. That's what my suggestion is. It's a powerful tool.

We are happy with it. I think that Oracle tried to compete, but they realized that there was a better product. Buying them (the better product) was a better choice (for Oracle), because it really provided a lot of users access to data quickly, and Oracle's former solution sometimes wasn't the greatest, so good stuff.