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Are Web Data Connectors Reliable To Integrate Power BI And OBIEE?

Organizations are integrating modern visualization tools like Power BI with OBIEE for effectively complementing the self-service data visualization gaps in OBIEE.

Apart from ODBC Drivers, the other option available for connecting Power BI to OBIEE is Web Data Connectors.

In this blog post, we’ll see what is a Web Data Connector, and explore the pros and cons of connecting Power BI to OBIEE using Web Data Connectors.

What is a Web Data Connector?

From a technical standpoint, Web Data Connectors are usually an HTML file that includes JavaScript code for connecting two platforms (Power BI and OBIEE for example).

When connecting Power BI to OBIEE using Web Data Connectors like Unify, the users generally have to set up preconfigured queries of data they want for analysis via the web.

Let’s now take a brief look at the pros and cons of connecting Power BI to OBIEE using Web Data Connectors.

Pros and Cons of Web Data Connectors

The following are the pros of web data connectors:

The users get the ability to connect to the OBIEE data (for which they have to set up preconfigured queries) and visualize them successfully in Power BI.
The web data connectors retain the joins and aggregations in the OBIEE end, so the users don’t need to recreate them in Power BI.

And here are the cons of web data connectors:

Prone to Power BI/OBIEE version compatibility issues.
Direct query is not supported, and hence the users lose the ability to perform ad-hoc analysis of the live data.
Inability to handle union reports or complex reports with subqueries.

Taking a look at the pros and cons, it’s quite evident that Web Data Connectors aren’t as reliable as desired by the organizations using them.

⋙ Here’s our simplified guide to the comparison of Power BI Vs OBIEE.