Analytics Software

Hi everyone,

I've got an unusual question. I'm a big fan of OBIEE as a reporting tool and I've been working with it for years now. It's never let me down when I've used it to build Business Intelligence style reports. But now I've been ask to support something that isn't what I would call "true" business intelligence. It's more of an on-demand raw data dump request.

The business case is this:
-- Typically users look at our analytical reports for high level order trends and analysis
-- When ever there is a strange anomaly in some of our power users want to download hundreds of thousands of order records with all associated details (maybe 100+columns) in order to do an Excel based deep dive
-- Other users just want raw data to stick into their own Access DB and run some analysis on it

The Issue:
-- OBIEE is great for analytics, but the performance tanks when doing these massive data dumps

I don't see this as a flaw in the tool. It's not really meant to be used as a data pump like this.

Ideally we would build some drills and detail reports that allow people to do the analysis within the BI tool without the Excel deep dive. But I know that we have some users that will not abandon the Excel side so I will need to continue to support the data dump.

What do other people do in this situation? Is there a way to improve the data dump performance of OBIEE? Do people use other tools for this?

I'm kind of curious what solutions other people with similar problems came up with.

thanks for your input.

-=Joe