Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) is a traditional BI platform with strong data management capabilities but poor data visualization features.

Hence, organizations using OBIEE are connecting self-service data visualization tools such as Tableau to effectively complement OBIEE’s limitations in a bimodal approach.

One of the options to integrate Tableau to OBIEE or Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) is the Oracle BI Server ODBC Driver. In this blog post, we’ll take a quick look at the pros and cons of connecting Tableau to OBIEE using the Oracle BI Server ODBC Driver.

The Pros and Cons of Oracle BI Server ODBC Driver

Let’s start with the pros first.

The only advantage of connecting Tableau to OBIEE via the Oracle BI Server ODBC driver is that it enables users to connect to the OBIEE DSNs and create visualizations out of the OBIEE data.

However, the cons are many.

The key fields should be exposed in the business and presentation layers for each folder or table that is analyzed in Tableau. It is not a good solution from the security perspective if the users get access to data from Tableau that they are not authorized to access in OBIEE.

Further, the performance of the driver is poor, and the business users will frequently need technical assistance to connect to the data sources. This disadvantage defeats the purpose of self-service.

The Alternatives to Oracle BI Server ODBC Driver

Web Data Connectors (such as Unify), and BI Connector are the alternatives to Oracle BI Server ODBC Driver for connecting Tableau to OBIEE/OAC.

You can explore the pros and cons of each of these connectors in the article, 3 Ways to Connect Tableau to OBIEE.

The article on the topic 5 mandatory requirements of a Tableau to OBIEE Connector will help you choose the right Tableau OBIEE Connector, based on your organization’s and users’ needs.