Does anyone here use OBIEE?

[dave 911]

We're converting our legacy data analysis systems (Source One Analyzer) over to Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) at work. I was pretty good w/ Source One, but learning the in's and out's of OBIEE is challenging. I'm learning it slowly, but man there is a lot there.

And it's functionality is way different than S1 Analyzer....

Interested to see if anyone here has any experience with it.

[John Rogers]

Before I retired in 2009 I had been an Oracle DBA for over 13 years. I found that any Oracle product has huge amounts of "stuff" it can do, probably rivaled only by SAP. Combine the application rides on top of Oracle's database while being probably the best of the big 4, is also the most complicated to setup and run properly.

Having said that, I would suggest hiring an "implementer" to help do any conversions, setup reports and queries, tune the database and make sure that any new reports match exactly the old ones for results. While this is a $$$$$$$ issue, in the long run time and training are well worth it.

[dave 911]

You are absolutely correct about both the capability and the complexity. It's like transitioning from a Cessna 150 to F/A-18!

We do have folks available to help us convert our reports over, but I'm trying to learn how to do all of it myself vs. farm out my reports to someone else. I'm a 'key user', which means I'm both a heavy user and a trainer/'expert' for the rest of my group. Not feeling too 'expert' yet though

[John Rogers]

The last several years before retirement I worked at an aircraft maintenance software company named Avexus and the software we developed did lots of stuff, track repairs, training, budgets, payroll, NDT, parts, invoices and God knows what else. It finally got so we would not sell it unless a company had a very well rounded IT staff with a senior Oracle DBA and an experienced apps server administrator. There was the database with test and production versions, apps server with 1800+ forms and 1200+ reports! The price with the underlying Oracle database, Oracle Apps, reports software, etc was in the neighborhood of $250,000 to get started.

We have customers both in the US and overseas that bought it and floundered for some time, could not get it to work right so then we would have to send in the "installer/trainer" and it took them a week at most to get things humming, train the admins, hold classes for the users, etc. Their initial cost of $300/hour (2006 prices) seemed high until...............