Oracle Open World Day 5 - Discoverer Futures, and Wrap-Up
Yesterday was the Business Intelligence CAB meeting, which consisted of a number of presentations to BI customers and partners on Oracle's ongoing product direction. As it's all under an NDA I can't go in to most of it, but one presentation that I can report back on what Mike Durran's "Discoverer - Protect, Extend, Evolve" on as it was also given later that day in the main conference.
Mike is the PM for Discoverer and has worked with it for even longer than I have, first as a consultant and then in the PM role based out of Bristol, UK. We also agreed yesterday that Mike would do a short bit on Discoverer futures at the end of my UKOUG Presentation, so if you're looking to see where Discoverer is going and how it's going to integrate in with BI Publisher, come along to the talk on the Tuesday.
Anyway, here's the highlights of Mike's talk:
- There are three releases for Discoverer, part of BI Suite Standard Edition, on the horizon; the 10.1.2.2 release which should be out soon, the 10.1.2.3 release sometime next year, and the 11g release in FY2008. This is one more release than Enterprise Edition, which'll have a 10.1.2.3 release in the next twelve months, and an 11g release some time after that (with the usual disclaimers, i.e. don't base purchasing decisions on what is just information)
- The 10.1.2.2 release will introduce the concept of custom members in Discoverer Plus OLAP (custom aggregates in Express/OSA terms), and will allow the addition and subtraction of custom members from a grouping.
- The 10.1.2.3 release will extend the custom members feature to make the process of creating them more flexible, with an interface where you can divide, multiple and carry out other calcuations on the members within the group
- The 11g release will support publishing of Discoverer portlets to JSR168-compliant portals such as Oracle Portal and Plumtree, and will sport integration with Oracle BI Publisher, the new name for XML Publisher.
Mike walked us through the process of publishing a workbook using BI Publisher. Unfortunately I haven't got screenshots but the process went like this:
- Start up Microsoft Word, log in to BI Publisher (there's now a login to the server, rather than just a disconnected toolbar for loading up XML documents), select Discoverer as the catalog source rather than the BI Publisher reports and folders catalog.
- Select a Discoverer connection - this can be to either Discoverer relational or OLAP
- Pick a workbook and then a worksheet
- BI Publisher then uploads details of the worksheet - a reference to the worksheet, not the worksheet details or the resultset - to it's own catalog, so that it now has a native BIP object to work with
- BI Publisher then grabs a sample set of data from the worksheet, so that you can lay out the template
- You then lay the template out as before, and publish it as a native BI Publisher report
When you create the BI Publisher report, it maintains a reference to the Discoverer worksheet, and gets the list of columns to work with from Discoverer, i.e. you still need the Discoverer worksheet to be there to run the BI Publisher report in future. As such, it's another publishing option for Discoverer, rather than a standalone reporting solution that works independently off the Discoverer End User Layer. What you can do though is pick and choose the exact set of columns you want to take from the Discoverer worksheet, so if you create a worksheet with a superset of the columns you want for a set of reports, you can selectively pick off a subset of these columns for each of your reports, with the same Discoverer worksheet providing all the data.
Under the covers, the way this works is that the Discoverer worksheet is made available by a private Web Services API that will also be used when Discoverer is integrated with OracleBI Delivers, the alerting and distribution part of BI Suite EE. This whole interoperability thing was a central part of the BI proposition going forward - come 11g, OracleBI Interactive Dashboards will be able publish Discoverer, as well as Answers reports, Delivers will be able to schedule and base alerts of of Discoverer worksheets, Oracle Portal will be able to host Answers requests (this may even be a 10.1.3.2 feature), and presumably in the future Discoverer will even be able to run off of the BI Server as well as direct against the Oracle database. Interesting times indeed.
Anyway, I'm about to check out of my hotel and start the long journey back to the UK. For me, the highlights of the week included:
- Spending a bit of time with Tim Hall, Andrew Clarke, Lewis Cunningham, Laurent Schnieder, Lucas Jellema and Michael Siebert
- Spending four out of five nights in the Thirsty Bear - now my official bar and brewery for Open World
- Meeting up with the Oracle BI PMs, including Mike Durran, Mike Donahoe, Osama Elkady and Phil Bates
- The Blogger Meetup
- Getting to see Sunopsis for the first time
- Getting a handle on the Maui release and the Discoverer/BI Publisher integration
- The ACEs dinner, the Oracle Press event and the ST Beta Program - a chance to meet some very smart people
- The weather - about 25 degrees most of the week, certainly better than the UK so I hear
That's it for now though, I'm off to check out and get my ride to the airport. Bye for now, San Francisco.