Hyperion vs. Cognos vs. Business Objects? Oracle Database Tips by Donald Burleson

Oracle data warehouse professionals use a host of third-party tools and products to provide OLAP, hypothesis testing and data mining.

Several of the most popular products are Hyperion, Business Objects and Cognos.  Each product has it's own strengths and weaknesses and some functionality of Hyperion, Cognos and Business Objects overlap the Oracle tools, namely Discoverer and Oracle OLAP.  Oracle OLAP and Siebel perform many of the same functions as Hyperion and Cognos.  Also Oracle Discoverer competes in the same market as Business Objects.

Features, according to the experts

According to noted OLAP expert Michael Armstrong-Smith, these are the distinguishing characteristics of each:

• Business Objects - Armstrong-Smith notes the nice Interface and easy the client-side OLAP.  "The end user side of BO has an interesting mechanism that allows users to download data to a local client version thus allowing them to execute their queries from a laptop without being connected to the database. This is particularly useful for executives when traveling on a plane as they can continue working. The data can also be filtered during the download thus ensuring the execs only see what they are supposed to see. This is something that has been standard in Business Objects for years."
   

• Oracle Discoverer - Huge improvement on interface layer in 10g, now a strong competitor to Business Objects.
   

• Hyperion - Patented cube technology - "Somehow they manage to index their cubes and only generate those cube entries which actually have a value. The rest never get generated which makes for a) low disk usage, and b) great performance. "  "Hyperion runs on a proprietary database, Essbase, which is incompatible with any of the Oracle stack".

 

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