News on the Book
A year or so ago I mentioned that I'd started work on a book for Oracle Press entitled "Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Developers Guide" with a projected release date of the first part of this year. Whilst the book is still in the pipeline, we've revised the plans a bit and I thought this would be a good opportunity to bring everyone up to speed.
Our original plan was to cover Oracle BI Suite Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition, together with Oracle Warehouse Builder, and base the book on the 10g releases of the various products. The idea here was to take readers through the various tools in OBISE (Discoverer, Reports, Discoverer Portlets) and show how they could link in with the new tools (OBIEE, ODI and so forth). As we started writing the chapters though, it became more and more apparent that all of this would come together much more coherently in the 11g timeframe, with for example OWB being able to create OBIEE metadata, OBIEE Dashboards being able to incorporate Discoverer worksheets, Essbase coming in to the frame, OWB orchestrating the Oracle database bit and ODI having a more obvious role in bringing in non-Oracle data. There's also a whole bunch of new functionality coming in around process integration (the "Action Framework") that'll be so central to OBIEE 11g and it's integration with Fusion Middleware that we just didn't want to leave this out.
In short, it made a lot more sense for us to wait for the 11g release of Oracle's BI tools rather than write the book for what is obviously a "work in progress" in terms of integration and functionality. Coupled with the fact that, with publishing schedules as they are, the book would probably only be out for a few months before OBIEE11g and OWB11gR2 would start becoming available, holding fire and writing for these new versions made a lot of sense.
So the plan right now is to resume writing the book once the beta releases of OBIEE 11g and OWB11gR2 become available, and aim for handover of the manuscripts to the publishers towards the end of 2008, which gives us a publication date around the second calendar quarter of 2009. With a bit of luck this will coincide with the public release of the software, which means the book will be spot on in terms of topicality and should hopefully be something that'll be of a lot of interest to readers of this blog. Whilst you can pre-order the book on Amazon (and I do appreciate the support here), in reality nothing will ship now until that time, and I'll certainly keep you all posted on progress on the blog. In the meantime, thanks for the enquiries and interest and I promise it'll be worth the wait.