Best OLTP Reporting Tool

Question

Hi Gurus,
My company asked me to build a reporting framework to support their needs on OLTP, i am trying to do some research on which tool is the best tool to do reporting on OLTP..
Need help to find out a best reporting tool to make reports on OLTP data base
Right now we are using OBIEE for our OLAP reporting and we are open to implement any tools, need inputs and comparisons between all the available tools and pros and cons also.
Appreciate all your inputs/suggestion.
Thanks,
Seshu.

Answer 1

1) I guess you tried to pull thousands or report's rows on screen. Firstly OBIEE does pagination perfectly. Secondly human being cannot handle more than 30-50 lines physically. It is simple psychology. As soon as you've jumped on other couple pages you have no idea what was on the first pages. I've never seen such an idiot who would need report even with few hundred rows. Such reports are example of bad practice.I agree with that but you missed my point. Enterprises are large "beats" and as such they have many departments where they use different tools. In an ideal world you will have one and only one DWH with one an only one reporting tool on top. The thruth is that this never ever happens in reality. So in many cases users are asked to provide larde data extracts to use as sources for other reporting systems or external entities. OBIEE can not handle these data extracts properly as it not designed to work as an "extraction tool". This is what you missed. BO can handle them very well as it was designed as an extration tool in mind.
2) Here you are right if it is all about dimensional model. However here is the difference between OLTP and data warehouse. In data warehouse users should be educated to know conceptual and logical models. BTW you are getting requirements from them and you say they don't know which dims can be pulled with facts and which ones cannot? Wow )) Also OBIEE does allow to pull such dims ( not connected to facts ) using very simple OBIEE modeling technique (level-based measures). That makes OBIEE reporting/analytics very flexible. You are only thinking dimensional. That's very good for an OBIEE developer. But the world is more than just dimensional. You can't answer all reporting requirements with a dimensional model I am afraid. So keep this in mind. A DWH is not the solution to all report requirements just like saying "a truck is the best vehicle in the world because it's big and can transport big loads". BTW have you tried to implement cross-fact analysis in OBIEE? Do you know that you need to set the content level for each non-confirmed dimension in each measure individually or OBIEE will bring back the measure as "NULL"? It's non-sense really, it's too tricky and too flaky.
3) OBIEE has GUI object called PROMPT. There you have full power to force users to apply filters. And you can easily pre-defined your prompt's filter values.Again you missed a key word on my statement: "adhoc users". Prompts are fine but don't exist unless the OBIEE developer creates them in advance, typically in a dashboard. I am talking about ad-hoc here so you know that's Answers. Try to restrict Answers users and force them to put a filter on a column and you will know what I mean. BO can do this in the metadata very easily. OBIEE can't. Prompts are fine (*) but they need to be created in advance by the report developer. (*) Actually they are not that fine, you can't even force them OOTB to use a prompt or not run a dashboard without any values. Sure there are work arounds, but such a basic feature should be part of the product!
4) OBIEE has different concepts of dims hierarchies and visual presentations. Here you are mixing them together. Indeed OBIEE 10g has such a restriction on GUI to have maximum two embedded levels. But it is only visual presentation. In business model you can have N levels of hierarchy and multiple hierarchies in dim . My goodness !!!Do you really think that ORACLE does not follow dimensional modeling ABCs? BTW please check Gartner's magic quadrants. ............BTW did you see OBIEE 11g demo ??????Yes it's only visual presentation, but that's one of the most important things! It's a stupid restriction. If you can have N levels on the BMM why shouldn't you have the ability to prent the data in more levels. Yes, I have seen the magic quadrant and Microsoft is on top of OBIEE (see http://www.gartner.com/technology/media-products/reprints/microsoft/vol2/article15/article15.html). Yes I have seen OBIEE 11g and have running on one of our Dev boxes. It's one of the most buggy releases I have seen in years. Only last week the client tools were released for Windows. How can you have proper ecosystem without proper client tools? No Solaris or HPUX release so it's a partial release. No support for other J2EE web app servers. From our point of view OBIEE 11g is a beta release. We are seating and waiting for Oracle to clean it this mess and get the product stable. And if you think Oracle Support will help read this: http://searchoracle.techtarget.com/news/2240031826/Has-the-phrase-Oracle-Support-become-an-oxymoron
5) Inheritance...Hm, maybe it is simple dimensional modeling concept of supertype/subtype described in any BI/DW books? I am not arguing. maybe BO does it with one click. yeah, convenient enough, but no critical.Consider this problem. You have a large DWH that a large organisation wants to share with different departments which they would then extend adding they own data sources and customise to their own needs. How would you handle changes in the "core" model that need to feed to the different departments metadata stores? RPD merging and MUDE is a mess to be honest, it barely works and it's too prone to human error. Once you worked in a very large project with many OBIEE developers working in different parallel projects you will realise that inheritance is the only sensible solution. I wish Oracle would see this as well. If the metadata was in a database it would have been so much easier...
6) Again just lack of knowledge of dimensional modeling in OBIEE. The one support ALL types of models: snowflakes (3NF) and star. Only what OBIEE requires you cannot have standalone logical table without any relations to at least one another table. Heh...I cannot recall such an example even from Bill Inmon. Regarding 3 layers. This gives you tremendous advantage over BO )) Why? It is long story))You can support all models in dimensional, but should you be forced to use it? 3 layers is not advantage. It's an interesting aproach to solve how you need to model things in OBIEE. You have become too used to it and now think it's the best in the world. It's not, in a relational reporting solution 2 layers are more than enough (physical with all your joins and presentation with all your business names and hierarchies).
8) You I understood you correctly ))))))) None of BI tools today can beat OBIEE on number of supported data sources. I'm just wondering. When you add new column in dim/fact table you DO NOT change your metadata????? My assumption is that BO does always "select * from <table name>"? Yes, then you don't have to change your metadata. The what kind of query BO generates against database??? select d1.*,f1* from dim d1, fact f1...????OK consider this requirement. You work for a top US bank. You have invested $5m in the state-of-the-art DWH with OBIEE that covers every requirement you may even need. The US FED comes in and tells you that it wants one of your excellent reports but filtered for a number of companies. They give the user a spreadsheet with 20k companies that you need to filter you report on. Can any user in OBIEE perform the filtering without any changes in OBIEE? No. In BO you can. End of the argument.
9) That is not true AT ALLYou saying that OBIEE can "merge" two Answers reports and get attributes from both queries in an INNER/OUTER/FULL OUTER fashion? Please show me how, I love to learn from you! (BO indeed can).
10) You r kidding me )) have you forgotten in what time are we living??))) Do you read latest news? By 2016 most of businesses will be in social networks. Everyone wants to be power user holding mobile device in his hands!!!
AND.....OBIEE already DOES it !!!The web client works for 90% of the user population, as said in my comment for real "power users" a fat client approach works best. There browsers are still not powerful enough to handle large data sets. Going back to Gartner's 2011 Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, which you seem to love, I quote from it: "[...] it (Oracle) has lacked innovation around mobile, in-memory, consumerization, interactive visualization and search [...]".
Please forgive me to be so sarcastic. But today the only real advantage BO over OBIEE is PRICE. I would really advise you to look at OBIEE11g. It is almost different product then OBIEE10g.I love sarcasm. Sarcasm is my middle name. But you need to open your mind a bit. OBIEE has taken control of your brain! :-) One solution does not fit all. The world of IT is too big for that...