FAQs on Tableau, Power BI, Qlik to OBIEE BI Connector

A specific number of BI Connector Desktop edition licenses will be provided for free based on the purchase of BI Connector Server edition licenses. If you require additional desktop licenses (beyond what’s freely provided with Server edition licenses) you can purchase the Desktop edition as stand-alone licenses at a separate cost.

No. Publishing and sharing of data sources and dashboards to Servers or Online requires BI Connector Server Edition license.

If the Tableau Server is setup on a 10-core (or more) machine, you need an enterprise license of BI Connector Server Edition which will offer you the flexibility to deploy BI Connector on all servers for all your users at an attractive cost.

If you have a department installation (8 CPU core license) of Tableau Server, then you need a 8-core server edition license of BI Connector. There is no restriction on the user count.

If your Tableau Server is licensed based on the number of users (instead of CPU cores), the BI Connector licensing is also based on that user count. Please note that all the Tableau Server users will be counted as BI Connector users.

The BI Connector licensing for Tableau Online is based on the number of Tableau Online users. Please note that all Tableau Online users will be accounted as BI Connector users.

For Power BI Service, the BI Connector licensing is a server-based (CPU core based) unlimited user license of BI Connector Server Edition. The number of CPU cores in the machine used for the On-Premise Gateway is considered. A minimum of 8 CPU cores must be licensed.

If you have an enterprise installation (10 or more CPU cores) of On-premise Gateway, then we recommend an enterprise license of BI Connector Server Edition which will offer you the flexibility to deploy BI Connector on all servers for all your users at an attractive cost.

Yes, the BI Connector Server Edition works seamlessly with the Power BI Report Server.

For the Report Server, the BI Connector licensing is a server-based (CPU core based) unlimited user license of BI Connector Server Edition. The number of CPU cores in the machine used for the Report Server is considered. A minimum of 8 CPU cores must be licensed.

If you have an enterprise installation (10 or more CPU cores) for the Report Server, then we recommend an enterprise license of BI Connector Server Edition which will offer you the flexibility to deploy BI Connector on all servers for all your users at an attractive cost.

BI Connector offers performance, cost savings, and time savings advantage over the ODBC driver which practically doesn’t work. To learn more, please refer to this article in Tableau website.

BI Connector is a purpose-built connector that offers both live and extract capability in addition to being battle-tested in several large customer deployments. Web data connectors such as Unify or EzDataMunch just extract data from OBIEE and are not proven to handle OBIEE complex queries/reports. Please refer to this article on the five areas where BI Connector is different from other connectors.

BI Connector supports custom integration with SSO modules such as Oracle Access Manager, Windows Native Authentication, SAML etc. BI Connector’s SSO integration will enable users to log in to OBIEE using their SSO credentials. Because of the limitations of Tableau Server, BI Connector does not support automatic login. Users should log in to OBIEE data sources using their SSO credentials after logging into Tableau server.

Since each SSO deployment is unique, SSO integration for BI Connector is offered as a Professional Services effort based on Statement of Work (SOW) at an additional cost. SSO integration starts at $4,995. Please contact us to learn more.

BI Connector Server Edition is installed on the same machine in which the Power BI On-premise Gateway or Report Server is installed.