Re: Success/Failure stories about Cognos/BusinessObjects/Oracle's Discoverer

In article <3341699e.5911382_at_netnews.worldnet.att.net>,   sean.kubovcik_at_worldnet.att.net (Sean Kubovcik) wrote:
>
> I am piloting a data mart on an Oracle 7.3 server and I am inquiring
> about experiences (good or bad) with any of the following products:
> Cognos Power Play
> Business Objects 4.0
> Oracle's Discoverer
> If there are any other OLAP tools that I should be evaluating please
> let me know. I would appreciate any input. Thanks in advance.
> Sean

I ranked PowerPlay ahead of Business Objects in terms of OLAP capability.  We tested both against a data mart containing about 10,000 records on an Oracle 7.3 database. We evaluated PowerPlay for about 2 months and BOI for about 1 month (in other words we did study Cognos's products harder than BOI's).

It takes less steps to drill-down/drill-up, slice-and-dice, and filter using PowerPlay. For example, I counted five steps to slice-and-dice in BOI versus 1 step in Cognos.

PowerPlay also seems to better handle date dimensions -- it will "automatically" roll-up data dimensions differently than say a location dimension. This often makes sense -- a total across regions may be a meaningful number but a total across years might not (say for employee headcount).

Additionally, PowerPlay has a GUI interface to developing EIS presentations (it's Portfolio utility). BOI has a scripting language which does not GUI interface.

BOI does have better data mining and Web-interface capability, but I believe Cognos's will come out with some competitive products in this area very soon. BOI also claims to combine the functionality of Cognos's Impromptu and PowerPlay (in other words you get two for the price of one). Since we didn't need an ad-hoc report writer we didn't investigate this functionality.

You could of course compare the two products on a whole slew of other features, but in a nutshell that's my opinion.

Bob Harford
IMC

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