OBIEE 11.1.1.6 - less buggy than 11.1.1.5?

Question

Hi, we've been waiting to implement 11.1.1.5 for months now, but it's been so buggy and the patches so nonexistent that we haven't been able to go live. I'm just now starting to evaluate 11.1.1.6 - but curious to hear from others if you've had a chance to play with it, and if it seems more stable and error free than 11.1.1.5?
Thanks,
Scott

Answer 1

Here are just a few of the issues I'm having:
1) Admin tool: no objects available to select from when importing metadata
I raised this issue on this forum first, and then raised an SR with Oracle. Eventually, Oracle gave a workaround. See this thread: No objects displayed when importing metadata
2) Prompts based on "SQL Results" do not work.
I want a prompt which presents to the user some radio buttons, such as "Today", "Month to Date" and "Year to Date".
Therefore, I set up a dashboard prompt, where the choice list values are "SQL Results", and then specified the SQL as:
"select 'Today', valueof(today_date) from dw32 union select 'Month to date',valueof(current_month_date) from dw32 union select 'Year to date' , valueof (current_year_date) from dw32"
As you can see, this uses the "today_date" etc repository variables to return the actual dates. It also selects 2 columns, the first column being the display value, the second being the underlying code value returned (as described in the Oracle documentation).
Although when run, the prompt looks ok, the BI Server then uses the display value (i.e. the first column - e.g. 'Today') in the underlying database SQL select, instead of the corresponding valueof(today_date), so resulting in an invalid query.
3) Prompts based on the "* Prompt User" operator do not work.
I want to simply provide the user with the ability to decide which range of dates to produce a report on.
In the prompt editor, the "is between" operator is available. This works ok if I use this in a prompt on its own. However, if I select the "* Prompt User" option, the following happens when the user runs the prompt:
- there's no "is between" operator available
- there are lots of extra operators available that I don't want the user to see. E.g. "is like", "is ranked first", etc, which don't make a lot of sense when specifying a date.
- if the user selects e.g. "is greater than or equal to", then the underlying SQL is not correct anyway.
All I'm trying to do is to produce a (what I thought would be) simple prompt that allows the user to select either a date range, a single date, or options of "today", "month to date", "year to date". It seems it's just not possible.
4) It's not possible to format a seconds value as HH:MM:SS
I tried this when I was doing some prototyping in Oracle BI 11.1.1.5 - not yet tried in 11.1.1.6 but I can't imagine it will have been changed.
I simply need to be able to use the "Custom Format" option in an analysis's column properties to be able to format a seconds value as HH:MM:SS, where HH can be more than 24 hours. E.g. this value could be the total number seconds worked in a week, but we need to show as hours, minutes and seconds. However, it's just not possible - Oracle allows the [FMT:time] option, but this only displays up to 24 hours.
5) Re-branding
I need to be able to re-brand the analytics user interface with our own company logo - and preferably with a logo that's dependant on who logs in.
I followed this tutorial:
http://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/obe/fmw/bi/bi1113/customizing_obiee11g/customizing_obiee11g.htm
My first attempt, several hours later, produced variable results. It kind of worked (although it's obviously going to rerquire a lot of effort to get it to look right), but the editing of analyses then only used half the screen width for some reason. And it looks like it's going to be quite a job getting it show a different logo for each user who logs in - maybe using the SKIN session variable? Why is everything so difficult to do!
6) Application of data filter doesn't work.
As this will be a multi-tenanted implementation, I need data-level security. I created a data filter in the metadata repository, and then applied to an application role.
However, it didn't work - BI server still returned all data. Some googling later I discovered other people had had the same problem. After several hours trying to get this working I gave up on it for the time being, to come back to later.
It seems that nearly everything I try to do involves:
a) ploughing through acres of Oracle documentation, as it's not immediately obvious from the user interface how to do the less obvious things
b) hours spent trying to get it working
c) hours spent googling trying to figure out whether it's just me that's not doing something right or whether other people have had the same issue
d) either giving up and trying to do it a different way, or raising an SR with Oracle, which can take many days to follow through.
It's interesting to see that Gartner's latest Magic Quadrant for BI (dated February 2012) backs up my own experiences:
"References rate OBIEE as difficult to implement, with only SAS Institute considered more difficult. Also, the product was rated as having lower than average ease of use scores."