Oracle OBIEE Reviews

We use this solution as a BI tool for data analysis.

The most valuable feature is the reporting.

The performance could improve and in a future release, they could provide more virtualization options.

I have been using Oracle OBIEE for approximately two years.

The solution is stable.

Oracle OBIEE is difficult to scale.

We have approximately 20 people using this solution in my organization.

The installation is complex and they could improve by making it straightforward.

I would not recommend this solution.

I rate Oracle OBIEE a five out of ten.

Our primary use is as an enterprise reporting solution.

The ability to do cross-applications reporting.

The most valuable features are the logical datawarehouse (business model) and distribution.

Migration on premisses should be easier (but is easier if you migrate to the cloud).

More self-services should be available for the users.

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

It was a little bit tedious to install a new release.

We have not had any trouble with scalability.

I would rate the technical support a seven out of ten. Not all of the support people are as performant with respect to the issues that we've encountered.

No

The initial setup was not really complex. Our deployment tooks approximately six months.

This was not an expensive product for us, although the price varies depending on conditions for each company.

Business Objects and SAS.

We plan on transitioning to the cloud version and I recommend the same for other people. It is the same as Oracle OBIEE but named Oracle Analytics Cloud.

I would rate this solution an eight 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

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.

The most valuable features are what you can do with it. It's the insight of the data that really gives the management the capability of looking beyond what they probably currently have within the transaction system.

Now with 12c, there’s also data mash-up, which gives them the capability to look at different data, join them on the fly and look at the key indicators, which can probably give them insight into the business.

Performance is a key point, but it's always a give and take with performance: What do you really want to achieve versus what you can really get, and what does that cost? That's the key, I think, from a performance perspective.

I have been using it for 10 years.

It is a stable solution. We have been using it since it was Siebel; since before Oracle acquired Siebel. It has been almost 15-16 years. It's pretty old. Now, with the new release, they're adding on more and more capabilities.

It's pretty scalable. You can scale it differently; you can scale it horizontally or vertically. With the new upgrades, it's pretty amazing the things that you can do with it.

Technical support are very knowledgeable because this product has matured a lot from where it was initially.

With every release, the setup is getting easier and easier. When we started out, it was more complex; now it's getting more and more easy.

Based on what I have seen, based on different implementations, it's one of the tools that is pretty reliable in the market, that is pretty stable. As long as it meets your requirements, you should be fine. I don't see any issues with it.

When I’m deciding to work with a vendor like Oracle, I think about how much they are willing to collaborate and make their product succeed. It's more about partnership; it's more about reliability, but it's also about dependency. You often get stuck with products you're implementing and the solution might not be available onboard, so you have to go and reach out and get the solution.

The most valuable features of OBIEE for me are definitely the graphs and reporting that it provides. The data it displays look really great and they're easily customized.

Sales people have a different kind of mindset and they want to see different varieties of reports. If somebody wants to see data by store, or by store in a particular ad, and their district managers want to see something with the region specifically, OBIEE can provide them that detailed data.  Also, through BI Answers, we can get data that's time-specific, holiday-specific, weekday-specific, or weekend-specific. We can easily configure and manage pretty much any metric we want across our retail business.

Some of the main disadvantages of Oracle would be they don't give the whole privilege for the end user to customize the way they want. Some things can only be done by an admin or a business analyst, and then really only someone familiar with OBIEE would be able to do it. But unlike other product, like Domo or Tableau, irrespective of the database, you can write run-time reports by an end user. The interface is going to take care of it and, depending on the variables that they change, they would get the data. Data remains the same, but you are giving more to the end user to handle.

We have no issues with deployment.

We've had some stability pain points with OBIEE. Operationally it's fine, but cloning causes big stability problems.

It has a Repository Creation Utility that has its own schema. It's on a production database so when you clone them, they're going to come with the same schemas where you won't be able to run those well for the test database. You'll need to export or import so that before the clone you drop and recreate the whole BI suite.

Setting it up or even upgrading it is definitely not for someone within the first year of their career. You really need to to be experienced and to know a lot of things, such as integration, how it behaves, its parts, and a million other things before you start to get the hang of it.

We implemented it ourselves with our in-house team.

I did a demo with Domo, but those guys were right behind me for more than a year. We didn't have any plans with Tableau, but it may be a solution that we could eventually migrate to.

I wouldn't recommend it as there are many other product out there, as long as your database is covered with RDBMS or other warehousing database. If you're freshly implementing, there is no reason in going with a 90's-style solution in 2016.

I like the scheduling feature. It has an inbuilt scheduler which is very good, and it allows us to create agents, and those agents can be scheduled. It's quite flexible in that respect and goes into our IT infrastructure. The outputs are sent encrypted to various endpoints. Some are internal, and some are our clients, and it's encrypted at a high level.

I do find Oracle OBIEE flexible. If there is stuff that's not in your model or schema, it's very flexible to create SQL scripts and create the data you want. It's quite nice to create a dashboard in OBIEE, and that's pretty straightforward in the way you drag and drop everything. You can create sections, and you can add elements to your page. That bit of the interface is relatively straightforward.

The graphical capabilities could be better. They are also cumbersome, and they are limited compared to Tableau, Power BI, or even Business Objects to a certain extent and Cognos. The error logging isn't great either. The errors that come out when you schedule aren't easy to understand.

I find how they filter within a query quite cumbersome and difficult to debug if somebody else has done it. You can see as you build, and I think that's where the problem is. It doesn't lend itself to debug something. For example, if you create a formula that's quite complicated, it's not easy to understand what goes with what. 

It becomes spaghetti, and it's very difficult to unpick. That's really my gripe about it, and in some ways, it's too flexible. It tries to be a Jack of all trades when it's not. I think a lot of these products, if they concentrate on trying to produce your reports, then that's fine. But when they're trying to do all sorts of other things as well, then it isn't very easy.

We get lots of support from Oracle, but I think the problem is that we get many invalid file operations. Nobody understands why. It can be a multitude of reasons, but no one reason could cause it. That's just one of the issues we've had in the last year. But the scope of reporting has gone through the roof over the previous 12 to 18 months.

We want an end-of-life OBIEE in our environment because some of the infrastructure runs unclustered. We weren't allowed to go clustered for some reason, and we never knew why. Unfortunately, going down that route means that the platform we run it on, WebLogic, has now become non-standard within our organization.

Everything's been moved off it and onto other platforms. Unfortunately, our OBIEE runs on that platform, and we're being pushed down different routes, and we don't know where we're going at the moment. Within the next two years, I don't think we'll have OBIEE in our part of the business.

In the next release, I think having the capability of being able to develop and then promote to a production environment rather than having to have separate environments will help. I know that Tableau and Power BI can be created on a desktop application, and then when it's ready to go live, you can promote it. 

I have been using Oracle OBIEE for about four years, but I don't use it a lot.

Oracle OBIEE is very stable. The only issue have is scheduling too much at the same time. It can get overloaded, and unfortunately, like most things, there are always bottlenecks. 

You're actually pushing it down a tunnel in effect, and if that tunnel's not large enough, it can't cope with the load. Some of the files and some reports are a lot bigger, and OBIEE has a limited 64,000 rows of output. It's not suitable for really extracting large amounts of data.

If I wanted to extract all the transactions on a report for one particular day, then that would blow the 64,000 rows of output. This means that we have to run it separately, and we can't schedule it. It has to be a manual task, or we have to get work done by our development people to provide that report as a standard report. This can be quite difficult at times.

Oracle OBIEE is scalable because you can cluster them and have multiple servers. You can spread the load up to a point. You can have multiple environments running under the same cluster. In our production space, we have two environments. We have a test environment, and we have a production environment. Being clustered, you can cluster those together.

When I used Cognos, it seemed as though it didn't cater to telling stories. It's like you've got to get the data out into something like Excel or another tool to do the visualizations. It can be done, but it's quite fiddly.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Oracle OBIEE a seven.

We are using it for analysis purposes for different areas, such as sales, production. We are also using it for the financial data and quality module. We have customer complaint dashboards and all sorts of things.

It helps our senior management in reviewing the performance of sales, production, and customer complaints and taking decisions accordingly. These are the areas for which we have designed custom warehouses. All the data is available on a daily basis. They can see the performance on a daily basis. They can look at the performance of the Sales site, pending dispatches, and inventory status. All these things are available in custom dashboards, which helps them in making decisions easily.

The primary reason for using OBIEE is connectivity with Oracle E-Business Suite. It makes it easy to connect with our Oracle E-Business Suite. There are the standard dashboards available, which we sometimes use, and now we are looking for customized dashboards.

In the on-premises version, the feature for connecting and selecting the data between the databases looks a bit cumbersome, but I am not sure. The person who is using it takes a lot of time to design a data warehouse. When I ask him why is it taking this long, I get a response that this is something that he has to design, and there are different tools that are available. He has to write the ETL and design the warehouse according to the customer's requirement, which takes a lot of time.

Its visualization should be enhanced, and there should be a feature where you can easily create your custom data warehouse.

I have been using this solution for approximately seven years.

It is very stable. It is much stronger than any other solution that I've seen till now. I have heard that Microsoft's solution goes down, but Oracle is very stable.

Scalability is available. It depends on how you want to scale. Right now, we want to define our custom databases and custom warehouse. Therefore, we are creating customer data warehouses, and accordingly, we are designing our dashboards in a custom application. You can also connect it with any third-party software.

They are very good. We are on support right now, and they are providing support whenever we need it. They provide prompt support through their portal.

It is straightforward. Basically, if you look at the technical part of it, it is very simple. You can just follow a step-by-step process, and you can easily finish it.

It is reasonable, but it depends on how you're going to use it. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

I would rate Oracle OBIEE an eight out of ten.