Oracle Release Statement of Direction for Discoverer

Oracle have just made available a Statement of Direction for Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer, which makes interesting reading if you're wondering what's going to happen now that Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition is out.

The statement of direction starts off by saying that Discoverer will still be continued and developed as Oracle's user-friendly ad-hoc query tool, and will continue to be made available as part of Oracle Application Server. It then goes on to talk about what's in the current, 10.1.2 release of Discoverer, and then looks at what's coming with the 10.1.2.2 release (which I think is often referred to as the "Armstrong Release"). Interestingly, according to the timeline put forward by Thomas Kurian at the BI Strategy Meeting in New York last month, the next release of Application Server is 10.1.3.3 and is scheduled for Summer 2006, so I don't know if this 10.1.3.3 release will contain the 10.1.2.2 version of Discoverer, or whether there's going to be an interim release of the BI tier of Application Server before then. We'll have to wait and see.

Anyway, the 10.1.2.2 version of Discoverer will come with three interesting new features, the first of which is support for Custom Members in Discoverer Plus OLAP, something that used to be referred to as Custom Aggregates back in the Oracle Sales Analyzer days. With custom members, you can for example create a time dimension member known as "Last Half of 2005", which will be made up of the last two quarters of 2005.

Having the ability to create custom members means that you can include arbitrary levels of aggregation into your report, and these levels can be defined by the end-user as well as the report administrator or DBA. Being able to create these custom aggregations is pretty much a prerequisite for sales analysis, giving you the ability to create custom cohorts of customers or products and should mean that OSA customers can start moving across to the new 10g technology. The document doesn't say whether the wizard that creates these custom members will also be present in a corresponding release of Analytic Workspace Manager, but I'd imagine it would be as that's the way things currently work with calculations - you can create them as part of the analytic workspace definition, or as part of the definition of a particular worksheet.

The other two new features in the 10.1.2.2 release are firstly, that the custom members that you create using Discoverer Plus OLAP will also be visible in the Spreadsheet Add-in, Discoverer Portlets and Discoverer Viewer (which would seem to suggest that there won't be a Custom Member administration feature in AWM, and that the only place you'll create them will be Discoverer Plus OLAP), and secondly, a new templating system that allows you to alter the style of a graph, of which there's a few examples in the document.

The statement of direction then goes on to talk about an Oracle Business Intelligence Add-in for Microsoft Word.

I assume that, like the Excel add-in, it's for accessing OLAP data, not data provided via an End User Layer, and the document then goes on to say that it uses XML Publisher technology to provide the hook into Microsoft Word. Should be interesting to see when it comes out, and presumably it now gives us the ability to produce formatted reports, and briefing books, off of Oracle OLAP (though not relational) data.

The next part of the document looks at what's coming with Oracle BI Discoverer 11g. It says that Discoverer will still be integrated with Application Server, and some of the new features include:

• Supporting JSR-168 for Integrating Discoverer Portlets into JSR-168 compliant portals - presumably you'll still need to license and install Oracle Application Server, but the portlets themselves will be deliverable through any JSR-168 compliant portal, such as JBoss, Tomcat or WebSphere.
• Integration with Application Server 11g identity management and security, presumably all the new identity management stuff they've recently bought (Oblix etc)
• Integration with Application Server 11g enhanced clustering, presumably we'll hear more about that at the time Application Server 11g is launched, and
• Integration with the Oracle Database Server 11g (is this the planned name for the 11g database, as opposed to just Oracle Database 11g?) to exploit new OLAP analytic functions being build into the Oracle Database such as enhancements to Analytic Workspaces (wonder what they'll be?), statistical and mathematical functions, extensions to the SQL Model Clause (wonder if Discoverer will have a GUI front-end for the Model Clause?), simplified metadata creation and management using Oracle Warehouse Builder, and other enhancements.

The document then goes on to say that more details will be made available in the next 2 months, as the technical designs are finalized - which probably means we're looking at least 12-18 months before we see this available for download.

After the bit about Discoverer however, the statement of direction then starts to talk about the BI Suite Enterprise Edition, that I covered a few weeks ago after Oracle's New York presentation. The statement says that Discoverer will continue to be developed, you should move to versions 10.1.2 if you can, and customers will be able to stay with Discoverer as there are no plans to desupport it; however...

"Discoverer customers who choose to migrate to the next generation BI offering will be able to take advantage of a platform that is planned to offer:

• Support for multiple, simultaneous heterogeneous data sources. Customers will be able to leverage Oracle BI against the Oracle database (relational as well as OLAP Option), Teradata, IBM DB/2, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft OLAP Services, Oracle e-Business Suite (including Peoplesoft and Siebel Analytic Applications) and SAP B/W
• A unified semantic business view of all the above data sources. Your enterprise can now present a single definition for "customer" or "product" that applies to and is mapped from all the above disparate data sources, meaning business users will have access to a single coherent view of the business. Metadata can also be translated, so this single semantic view supports multiple presentation languages.
• Powerful metadata design tool offers a visual layout tool of your data source schemas as well as support for multiple administrators. Utility wizards simplify creation of common standards, such as time series, item renaming and other data quality tasks. Multiple levels of folders will also be supported.
• A full feature ad-hoc query and reporting tool that is 100% thin client and provides multple views of the same data. For example you could have two different versions of a pivot table, a funnel graph and filter definitions to create a compound view for complete analysis.
• A built-in integrated dashboard for quickly publishing and sharing reports."

This new next-generation BI suite is based on Siebel Analytics and Oracle's Fusion Middleware family of products, so that it runs on Oracle Application Server, brings in some Oracle technologies such as Business Activity Monitoring but is largely based on Siebel's range of Analyic applications, which themselves were based on technology Siebel acquired from nQuire.

Going through the points, the first one about multiple heterogeneous data sources is interesting. Although technically you can bring non-Oracle data into Discoverer, it's through the Oracle database's Heterogeneous Services feature and it only works against relational data that's either accessed via ODBC (if your database server is running on Windows) or via an Oracle Gateway (if your server is running on Unix). That said, it's a pain to setup and I don't know of anyone who does this. The support for heterogeneous data sources in Siebel Analytics is pretty impressive though, with the standard relational connectors plus support for Analysis Services and SAP B/W, accomplished through it's support for MDX. Indeed it's ironic that at this stage, Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition will have better support for Microsoft's OLAP Server than Oracle's own, although I've heard that they've got it running against Oracle OLAP through SQL Views and OLAP_TABLE, and proper OLAP API support is on the way.

The semantic layer is however where the real value in this technology lies. It's similar to what Microsoft have done with their Unified Dimensional Model, and unlike standard Discoverer EULs which have two levels of metadata (business terms and table names) the Siebel Analytics Semantic Layer has three levels of metadata, the physical layer, the business model/mapping layer, and the presentation layer, which provides an additional layer of abstraction for end users. It allows the administrator to represent columns as dimensions and so on, although in the initial release it won't have the same sort of "dimensionally aware" UI that you get with Discoverer Plus OLAP. Indeed in these initial releases, whilst it can bring in OLAP data into the cache, it's not really an OLAP server, it's much more "relational", and so I guess Oracle will be putting a lot of effort into the product in the next year or so to give it more of the characteristics of an OLAP Server. Certainly one advantage of this new approach will be that it will truly allow us to integrate OLAP and relational data into one unified view of the data - with the Oracle Database and indeed Oracle Discoverer 10g there's still a delineation between OLAP data and relational data, OLAP worksheets and relational worksheets, and this new approach holds out the possibility of providing access at a more consistent, abstract level without worrying about how the data is stored - something that's been promised since the initial release of Oracle OLAP back with version 9i of the database, but with the added bonus of accessing Oracle and non-Oracle datasources.

Indeed the Siebel (now to be Oracle) Analytic Server is quite a different beast to the OLAP Option to Oracle Database 10g. The Analytic Server is more like an analytic "application server", which acts as a mid-tier between the database and the user, provides semantics, metadata, a cache and a query engine. Administrators can set up simple calculations in this analytic server but it's not (currently) a substitute for the OLAP Option, and whilst I was thinking, when the product was announced, it was "game over" for Oracle OLAP, I've been thinking more these past few weeks that there's still a well defined and valuable role for the OLAP Option in providing OLAP analysis for data in the Oracle Database. In time this functionality might migrate to the Oracle Analytic Server, but for the time being they're addressing different needs.

The same goes for Discoverer as well. Although Oracle Answers (the ad-hoc query tool that was mentioned in the above quote from the statement of direction) is a good query tool, it's not nearly as functionally rich as Discoverer, and it's not as if "upgrading" to the BI Suite Enterprise Edition is automatically an "upgrade" on Discoverer. Again in time this may change, as there's certainly features in the BI Suite Enterprise Edition - pro-active alerting, dashboards, support for MDX data sources and so on - that are never going to make it into Discoverer. I also wouldn't mind betting that Discoverer itself will be further evolved over time; if you read my posting from Oracle Open World last year you'd have heard me mention a prototype they were showing called "Report Center", and it wouldn't surprise me if something along these lines came along for the Discoverer family post-Oracle 11g. Also, Oracle have said that Discoverer will become a data source for the Analytic Server by the time of Application Server 10.1.3.4, due at the end of calendar year 2006.

Anyway, the statement of direction is here if you want to take a look.