Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) is a traditional Business Intelligence (BI) platform used by enterprises for over a decade now.

In recent years, many advanced data visualization tools such as Tableau made analytics possible with simple point-and-click and drag-and-drop actions. Hence, self-service analytics has become the new normal, but that’s absent in OBIEE.

The organizations using OBIEE are moving to Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) or Oracle Analytics Server (OAS) or migrating entirely to a non-oracle data visualization tool.

Some organizations, despite moving from OBIEE to OAC or OAS, still prefer connecting another data visualization tool to OAC/OAS as well, as a significant number of the users are already well-acquainted with that tool.

If your organization is using OBIEE and your users prefer Tableau, you’re most likely facing a dilemma to make a choice between migration and Integration.

In this post, we’ll quickly analyze both the choices, to help you choose the best for your organization’s unique needs.

OBIEE to Tableau Migration

There are no known tools to automate the migration from OBIEE to Tableau. The entire process is manual, and involves the steps below:

1. Reconnecting Tableau to the different data sources
2. Recreating joins and aggregations
3. Reimplementing the data governance policies
4. Redeveloping reports

The average cost estimated for migrating 1 Subject Area from OBIEE to Tableau is $250,000, and the duration it takes is about 6 months.

The time and cost estimations clearly indicate the migration is a high-risk project. Therefore, a careful risk assessment is inevitable before starting the project.

In short, if your organization can meet the budgetary demands, and willing to take big risks, migration could be the right choice.

We have covered more information about the migration from OBIEE to Tableau in this post.

Tableau OBIEE Integration

Most organizations using OBIEE see it as a robust single source of truth.

Hence, these organizations avoid BI migration projects, despite OBIEE’s self-service data visualization limitations. Instead, they complement OBIEE’s limitations with Tableau in a bimodal approach.

Tableau OBIEE Integration is a good choice as it is risk-aversive.

Currently, the following 3 options are available to connect Tableau to OBIEE:

1. Oracle BI Server ODBC Driver
2. BI Connector
3. Web Data connectors

You can evaluate these connectors based on the 5 mandatory requirements of a Tableau OBIEE Connector mentioned in this infographic.

We have also analyzed each of the connectors’ pros and cons in the post – 3 ways to connect Tableau to OBIEE, to help you make the best choice that meets your needs.