BI Publisher 11.1.1.3 introduced the ability to connect your data model to an Excel spreadsheet, directly via a JDBC driver rather through external tables, CSV files or other workarounds. The connection to the Excel file was set up by the administrator, in the BI Publisher Administration screen, and then you could select it when adding data sets to a data model. This previous blog post written last September explains the basics.

BI Publisher 11.1.1.5 extends this capability by allowing data model editors to browse to Excel files on their own PCs, and then upload them from the data model editor up to the BI Publisher server. To use this new feature, within the Data Model editor select Microsoft Excel as a data source, like this:

Then, when the Create Data Set – Excel dialog is shown, there’s a new Workbook option called Local. Click the radio button for this option and then the File Name icon becomes available, like this:

Click on the File Name icon and then use the Browse button to locate the Excel file on your PC. Once you select the file, the data model editor then uploads it to the BI Publisher server, so it’s available for use in reports.

Another nice new feature is the List component in the Online Layout Editor. This new editor was introduced with BI Publisher 11.1.1.3, and allows you to create a new “.xpt” template type using a DHTML editor, within your browser. The previous release introduced a bunch of components such as pivot tables, charts, gauges and text boxes that you could add to the template, but 11.1.1.5 introduces a Qlikview-style List component that’s also now available from the ribbon menu.

To add the List component, drag and drop it onto your online template, and then drag a data item onto the list to give it values.

Adding the list component gives you the ability to create vertical, or horizontal lists of values that when clicked on, filter other components in the report.

Apart from these two new features, 11.1.1.5 sees the welcome return of web services and Java APIs, which disappeared from the previous release whilst they were being rewritten. Other than that though, one thing that doesn’t appear to have changed is that you still need Firefox (or more correctly, not Internet Explorer 7/8) to create data models, as the save function still doesn’t seem to work. Oh, and online layouts are a lot snappier now, so it’s all a bit more of a responsive environment. Give it a try if you’ve wondered what the “Published Reporting” options are on the OBIEE 11g Home Page.

As a quick recap, BI Publisher up until now uses either Microsoft Word (through the BI Publisher Desktop plug-in), Microsoft Excel or Adobe Acrobat to lay out report layouts (or “templates”), which are then paired with a data query to give you a report with some data in it. Whilst Word is a useful environment for defining report layout, it does require you to have Word installed (obviously), but more importantly it requires you to come out of the online BI Publisher Enterprise environment to finish your report definition.

The online layout builder made available in preview form in the 10.1.3.4.1 release, and in supported form from the 11g release, will allow you to define all aspects of the report in the one web-based environment, removing any third-party tool dependency and any need for a client-side install.

You can access the online layout builder in a number of places, the most obvious being through a button labelled Layout Builder in the Layouts area of the BI Publisher Enterprise report definition page.

You can also access the online layout builder from the main toolbar in the BI Publisher report viewer, like this:

Taking as the data source a simple query against the EMPLOYEE table in the OE schema, when you press the Layout Builder button you are first presented with a set of predefined “boilerplate” layouts, such as “Empty”, “Header and Footer”, “Dashboard” and even “Mobile Apple iPhone”.

These boilerplate layouts define the size of the report page, what elements are already placed on the page (a blank chart definition, for example), whether headers and footers are defined, and so on. Presumably you can define new boilerplate templates by taking a layour definition and saving it somewhere, as the boilerplates appear to be just normal templates with the item placings defined, page setting set and so on, and then just saved in a special place.

I chose the “Header and Footer” boilerplate and then took a look at the layout builder interface.

On the left hand-side of the screen is a concertina-style area that initially lets me select a data item to put on the layout. Across the rest of the top of the screen is a ribbon-style dialog that lets me choose between report components to add to the layout, and also add page breaks, page numbers and total pages elements. Clicking on the Page Layout tab on the ribbon shows another set of options, this time for setting the orientation of the page, whether a footer or header are included, the size of the page and so on.

I start off then by adding a Data Table report component to my layout, onto which I then drag and drop various data items from the Data Source view on the left.

Notice how both the Employee ID and Salary columns have both been totalled, as their data type is numeric, and how the table headers and footers have automatically been formatted. To delete the totalling on the Employee ID field I just click on the total and press delete; to set the Salary total aggregation to “Average” rather than “Sum” I first click on the total to select it, and then click on the Properties entry in the left-hand concertina interface to display a list of the cell properties.

Using this dialog I set the Formula for the cell to average, and then return back to the layout to change the label property for the Grand Total to read “Average Salary”.

I then return to the ribbon and this time, add a chart underneath the data table. This presents me with a chart definition framework together with options to change the chart type, chart style, effect and filters.

The chart styles are the standard BI Beans/Discoverer-type styles (“Executive”,”Autumn”,”Regatta” etc), whilst the list of chart types includes categories for bar, line, pie and other chart types.

Returning back to the chart definition, I drag and drop the Salary data field onto the Drop Value Here area, the Job Title field onto the Drop Label Here area, and the chart is then immediately previewed.

Now that the report is ready, the toolbar on the top-right hand side of the screen can be used for previewing the report in HTML, PDF, RTF or other formats, or we can save the report if it’s ready for use with the report.

I first preview the report in HTML form, and then press the Save button to save the report to the BI Publisher repository.

WIth the online report builder, you don’t save the layout/template to an RTF file; instead, the layouts are saved in XML format with the extension “.xpt”, and are converted to XSL-FO by BI Publisher when the report is run. This XML format is of course extensible by Oracle and presumably will give them more flexibility in introducing new features into BI Publisher post-11g.

Running a report using the new layout is the same as with RTF templates, however a lot of formatting is introduced by default which makes simple reports look more professional.

It’s possible also to layout more complicated templates using the layout builder. For example, I might want to create a report that groups employees by job title, adds a page break between jobs and adds some narrative text around the job title name.

To add a grouping section to a layout, you select the Repeating Section item from the Components area in the ribbon, and then select the item to repeat on, in my case, “Job Title”.

This then adds a repeating section area to the layout, into which I add a data table item showing the staff with this job title.

I now want to add a bit of text above the data table, to display the job title with some text around it. I start by adding a Text Item to the repeating section above the data table, and add some text to it, like this:

As I want the job title to be displayed on the same line as this text, I switch to the Properties area in the left-hand concertina menu and set the Display property for the text item area from Block to Inline.

I then switch to the Data Source area in the concertina menu, and drag and drop the Job Title data item onto the layout, next to the text block that I just created.

Finally, I add a Page Break item below the data table in the repeating group, and the preview the layout as a PDF.

So there you have it. Bear in mind that this is just a preview release, and it’ll be featured properly in the 11g version of BI Publisher, which is likely to have additional features and of course be a bit more polished. It’s a good preview of what’s coming though, if you’re interested in seeing how the template creation process is likely to develop as future releases of the product come along.

Bear in mind also that if you do decide to use it now, it’s not supported, there may well be bugs, and there’s no guarantee that your layouts will transfer to the 11g release when it comes out (so treat it as a preview rather than a production feature.)

Another requirement within the same organization was to send reports that are generated directly to the printer, without the intermediate step of displaying them, say, in the Adobe Acrobat browser plug-in. In this case, BI Publisher was due to be invoked from an ApEx application, and whilst they could put a button or a link on the page that when clicked, invoked a BI Publisher report via the user’s default Web browser, the user would then have to click on the Adobe Acrobat plug-in’s “Print” button, select the print destination and initiate the printing themselves. In their ideal world, the button on the ApEx page would just call out to BI Publisher and have the report sent straight to the printer. Again on the face of it this wasn’t going to be easy, as BI Publisher, unlike Oracle Reports, only lets you specify the report format and the report template, not the report destination, when you invoke a report. Also, BI Publisher, unlike Reports, doesn’t have a tag or a function that you can include in a report definition to switch printer trays mid-way through the report generation, so again we were at a bit of a loss how to meet these requirements.

Thinking about it for a while though, I did remember that when you schedule a BI Publisher report, you can specify the report destination, the tray if it’s a printer, and you can specify a time of “immediate” for the scheduled execution.

Now this looks promising. If we broke the report up into several separate reports, one for each printer tray, and submitted them all at the same, we could select the printer tray to print to and they’d all arrive at more or less the same time, such that the end user wouldn’t really know that they had been delivered separately. Moreover, as the report invocation would come from an application, the user would just run the report as normal, in the background several report components to several printer trays would be scheduled, and the user would just think they’d requested a single report that printed to several trays. The only thing missing from this, compared to the Microsoft Word mail-merge approach, is that the report couldn’t be sent to the user’s “default printer” – BI Publisher has no concept of a default printer, all it can do is either send the report as a PDF to the user’s Web Browser, whereapon the user could use the Adobe Acrobat browser plug-in to print to their default printer, or in the solution we were going to use, we’d need to replicate this functionality by maintaining a list of available printers within ApEx and BI Publisher, and allow the user to specify which printer was their “default”, ensuring we printed to that one in future.

Following this then, my first thought was to try and invoke the scheduling of a report via a URL, as you can with Oracle Reports. Looking through the documentation though, there’s no programmatic way (at least based on my short investigation) to invoke the scheduling of a report, at least through a URL or through the command line. One thing I did remember reading about recently though was a Web Services interface for BI Publisher, which if it was anything like the Web Services interface for OBIEE, would potentially give me a way to schedule a report from a ApEx via a Web Services method invocation. Before I could try this out though, I needed a way to set up a set of “virtual” printers, FTP servers and email servers on my laptop so that I could check that scheduling itself worked correctly. To do this I downloaded and installed Bullzip PDF Printer to create a virtual printer for my laptop, configured Microsoft IIS to provide the access to this virtual printer via a URL, installed FileZilla Server as an FTP server and ArgoSoft Mail Server as a local email server. Once all of these were installed and configured and I proved that I could schedule a report and sent it to these three destinations, I was ready to start working with the BI Publisher Web Services interface.

Now in reality I hit on a bit of luck with the setting up of BI Publisher Web Service access for ApEx as I came across this excellent article by Tyler Muth that documents the whole process. In the article, Tyler uses a tool called soapUI to do the initial Web Service test, which you can use initially to check out the various parameters you send to BI Publisher via this method. Sure enough, the section on invoking a report includes a parameter for the printer tray.

Now unfortunately the one thing I can’t do at this stage is actually test it with a printer with multiple print trays, as our printers back in the office only have a single tray and the Bullzip PDF Printer software only simulates a single tray. But if we work on the assumption that the tray parameter in the BI Publisher Scheduler request method actually works, if we can get the Web Service call working this should prove a solution, at least one we can take back to the client in a week or so’s time to try and implement.

I used soapUI to put together a proper Web Service request to BI Publisher as a test, requesting that the report be delivered to the email server, FTP server and printer, leaving out the tray parameter at this stage. This is what the request XML looked like:

Executing the Web Service call using soapUI caused the report to “print” via the virtual printer, get delivered as a PDF to the FTP site and emailed to my local email server as an attachment, so it looks like it worked. So now to ApEx to see if I could invoke the report from an application page, again following the instructions on Tyler’s blog page.

The first step within ApEx was to set up the Web Service request as a manually-defined Web Service reference reference, which allowed me to add all of the optional parameters around delivery destinations and so forth. The service description URL I determined by taking a look through the WSDL file for the BI Publisher Web Service.

One this was done, the next step was to set up a button on an application page that invoked the web service. In reality, the button on the real customer application will actually need to call several web services, one for each of the report elements, and as this would be a fairly common process it would make sense to create some sort of shared procedure that would take a report name and any report parameters as inputs, and then actually call out to BI Publisher for all of the individual report elements, with that procedure then being tied to a button on a page. For now though I just wanted to check that it worked, so I set up a simple button and process on my ApEx page and told them to invoke the Web Service reference that I just set up.

And it worked. Clicking on the button I created led shortly afterwards to the report arriving via email, via the printer and via the FTP site, and it shouldn’t be too tricky to extend the page so that multiple processes, one for each report, get fired off when the button is pressed, or we use a procedure or something like that.

So what we’ve done here (or potentially, as I haven’t yet got my hands on a multi-tray printer to test it out) is a way of taking a report that requires printing to multiple trays, and instead splitting it into one report section per tray and then scheduling it, for immediate delivery, via the BI Publisher Web Services interface. I’m due back there in a week or so’s time, so I’ll get the chance then to integrate it into their ApEx application and check that the tray support in the Web Services API actually works as advertised. The client is also interested in integrating BI Publisher with Oracle Forms as well, and this other document on OTN sets out how this process works, it’s not quite as straightforward as with ApEx but the principal is still the same.

1. Log in to the Enterprise Manager for the Application server. If you are running a locally installed OC4J, the URL is most likely http://localhost:9704/em/
2. Navigate to the Administration tab of the OC4J instance and find the Shared Libraries link.
3. Proceed to create a new Shared Library by clicking on the Create button.
4. Call the new shared library mysql.jdbc and give it version number 5.1.5
   and click on Next
5. Now add the newly downloaded driver archive to the shared library
   
6. Once the file has been uploaded to the Application Server instance, click on Finish.
   
7. On the Application Server machine, find the file called orion-application.xml for the xmlpserver application (on my machine the file is located in C:\oracle\BI\OracleBI\oc4j_bi\j2ee\home\application-deployments\xmlpserver)
8. Add the following code to the file: <imported-shared-libraries> <import-shared-library name=”mysql.jdbc”/> </imported-shared-libraries> within the <orion-application> tags.
9. Restart the xmlpserver application.

Now that the JDBC driver has been registered with the Application Server and the BIPublisher application has been modified to include the library in it’s application launcher, we can go ahead and create a BIPublisher data source that uses this newly registered driver

1. Log in to the BIPublisher as a user with Administration privileges.
2. Add a new JDBC Data Source via the Admin tab (here I have a special created a special bip user in the mySQL database):
   
3. Make sure your connection works by hitting the Test Connection button.
4. Now you can move on and create your reports, using the newly created Data Source
   

And that’s that.

The process starts off with a regular Discoverer worksheet, in this case from the Videostore Video Tutorial Workbook. Discoverer is at version 10.1.2.2.0 whilst BI Publisher is at 10.1.3.3 – see this previous posting on getting everything set up for Discoverer / BI Publisher integration.

Then it’s a case of starting up Microsoft Word, connecting to BI Publisher Enterprise as an OID user that has access to both Discoverer and BI Publisher, and then selecting the Discoverer workbook from the “New Template” dialog.

Once that’s done, the BI Publisher Desktop add-in grabs a sample dataset and presents me with a blank template to start working on. I use the Chart Wizard to create a simple bar chart using “Profit Sum” as the measure, “Deparment” as the label and “Year” as the series, like this:

Then I create a crosstab to accompany it, add a title and some commentary text, and drag and drop a logo onto the top right-hand part of the page, like this:

Now if I’m going to display this template in HTML format (as opposed to say, PDF) I need to make sure this image is available on a web server somewhere, so I copy it to the following location:

$ORACLE_BI_HOME\j2ee\home\applications\xmlpserver\xmlpserver\obi_logo.jpg

which makes it available at the URL:

http://winxpvm:7781/xmlpserver/obi_logo.jpg

and I double-click on the image in the Word document, select “Web” from the “Properties” tab, and enter the following code:

I then save the template as an RTF file, and preview it in HTML form. Everything looks fine.

Then, I use the BI Publisher Desktop menu to upload the template to the BI Publisher Enterprise server, and it’s now ready to run within Enterprise. Before I do that though, I log in as an administrator and set up the Scheduler. This involves creating a database schema then passing the connection details to the Scheduler setup wizard, which then creates all the scheduler tables for me.

After I restart BI Publisher so that the new settings can take effect, I go back in as the administrator and set up email delivery. For the purposes of the demo I’m using a freeware email server that installs on Windows called ArgoSoft Mail Server which lets me demo email integration without an internet connection; I enter the connection details into the BI Publisher Enterprise web page and my email connection is set up.

Now it’s a case of logging back in to BI Publisher Enterprise as the report owner, locating the report and then clicking on the link to schedule it.

This brings up a screen where I can set the frequency of report runs, provide an email address for the report to be sent to, and provide any other details relating to the running of the report and the different destinations it can go to, including FTP, WebDav and the filesystem.

Once the scheduled job is submitted, I can check back on the schedule details and see that the report has run correctly:

and then finally, I can start up my email application and see that the report has been delivered.

As well as BI-style reports, BI Publisher can also produce reports in any format, including mail-merge letters, a feature that’s often required by customers migrating off tools like Cognos Impromptu. Overall, this is a useful feature for customers who’ve got a lot of investment in Discoverer reports and metadata, but want a bit more flexibility in the way they can use the data.

Anyway, I was discussing this with Mike Durran, the Discoverer Product Manager, and Oracle have come up with a detailed setup document for BI Publisher and Discoverer integration, a collaborative effort between a few consultants, which they’ve kindly agreed to allow me to host on this site – you can download it here. It’s got lots of screenshots, explanations and so on, and whilst I’ve not gone through it myself (I’ve already got it up and running) it does seem to cover off all the required parts, including the BI Publisher / OID setup step. Anyway, download a copy if you’re getting this up and running, it should cover off all the steps you need.

To get this feature up and running, you need the following releases of Oracle Application Server and Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition

• Oracle Application Server 10.1.2.2.0
• Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.3

In addition, you’ll need a one-off patch, No. 5648158, which gets applied to your Discoverer mid-tier to install the Discoverer Web Service, which BI Publisher uses to get data from Discoverer worksheets.

Getting this all set up was quite tricky, as you’ve got to patch Discoverer to install the Web Service, but before that you need to make sure Application Server is patched up to 10.1.2.2.0, which if you’ve not done so already involves also upgrading the metadata repository database to 10.1.0.5. As well as that, you also need to integrate Discoverer with OID, which involves protecting the Discoverer Viewer and Plus URLs using SSO, and you also need to configure BI Publisher so that it uses the OID (LDAP) security model, something that’s not mentioned in the docs. Starting off with the original requirement to link BI Publisher and Discoverer, this all causes a domino effect of having to upgrade various bits of your BI infrastructure to bring them up the right levels, although of course if you’ve already patched up Application Server and Discoverer to the latest levels, turned on SSO and so on, you’re probably mostly there anyway. Where it did get particularly tricky for me was trying to get all of this running in a VM with 1.5GB of memory – I need to have two Application Server tiers up and running (infrastructure and mid-tier), 2 Oracle databases (the metadata database, and my regular Oracle database with the Discoverer EUL in it), an instance of Application Server 10.1.3.3 and Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition, and BI Publisher – I had to be very careful about what’s running at any one time, and all of it worked most of the time unless I tried to run the Application Server Enterprise Manager website, whereapon things mostly seized up.

Anyway, once it’s up and running, there are two ways in which you can use data from a Discoverer worksheet in a BI Publisher report. Firstly, you can use the BI Publisher Enterprise Web site to create a new report, then select “Oracle BI Discoverer” as the data source type, then pick a connection – these have to be public connections as BI Publisher logs in to the Web Service as a trusted OC4J user, but not an authenticated SSO user.

Once you select the connection, you then pick from the list of workbooks available from that connection

When the workbook and then worksheet is selected, you can then save this part of the report definition and go over to the BI Publisher Desktop interface.

Laying out the report template involves firstly connecting to the BI Publisher server using the BI Publisher menu within Microsoft Word, and then bring up the Open Template dialog to locate the report that you’ve just created using BI Publisher Enterprise. Using the dialog, you locate the report, and then double-click on the entry below the report to create a new template.

This then creates a new blank template, with a sample of the data from the Discoverer worksheet available to you to help lay out the tables, crosstabs, graphs and so on. Once the template is complete, you upload it back to BI Publisher Enterprise and you can run it along with all your other BI Publisher reports.

The other way you can create reports using Discoverer data, is to go straight in to the BI Publisher Desktop application, log in to the BI Publisher server and bring up the Open Template dialog. This time though, if you use the drop-down list to select DIscoverer from the available workspaces, like this:

you can then select a connection:

and then a workbook and worksheet:

Then, you are prompted to copy the data source definition into the BI Publisher workspace (catalog), which creates a .XDO report definition and allows you to proceed as if you’d created the report yourself using the BI Publisher web interface.

Now you can create the template as you normally would, using the data supplied by the Discoverer worksheet (which can be an OLAP worksheet, not just a relational Discoverer worksheet) in charts, tables, crosstabs and form letters.

That’s it for now, I’m off on a flight up to Glasgow to run some BI Suite Enterprise Edition training through a partner, then it back again and bags packed for my seminar tour around Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland. Exciting stuff indeed.

The install went fine, easier than a normal Oracle installation to be honest, as there’s no Universal Installer and you just use a Windows InstallShield installer instead – not sure how this will work with the Linux version though, when I get a chance I’ll try and install this as well. Compared to the previous Siebel Analytics install, you need a Java JDK1.5 or higher (I used JDK 1.6) rather than JDK1.4, and you don’t need to separately install the J2EE web component into an application server, it comes with a standalone OC4J container, although you get the option of installing in to Oracle Application Server 10.1.3 as well. All told, a surprisingly painless exercise, although as I said installing it into a proper Application Server environment, or on Linux, or on Microsoft IIS, might be a bit more complicated.

One I started it up and logged in to the Dashboard application, it all looked fairly familiar compared to Siebel Analytics 7.8. There’s a new Oracle 11g look and feel (blue is obviously the new red), but the dashboard functionality looks much the same as before.

One nice touch with this new release is the “Paint” dataset and demo dashboard – it doesn’t need a database, and instead uses a set of XML data files stored under the \OracleBI\Server\Sample\Paint directory. This means you can get up and running and play around with the dashboard, even before you connect the server to a database.

Taking a look around OracleBI Interactive Dashboards first, the functionality of the portlets and reports themselves look much as before, although portlets containing lists of reports and other directories now have XML RSS links, so that you can subscribe to reports using an RSS Reader.

Looking along the top of the page, where the list of links to other Siebel Analytics programs used to be, this has been modified slightly to show only Dashboards and Answers, with the other products reached through a drop-down. Notice the BI Publisher link there – I’ll come on to that in a second.

Other than that, on the surface, the Dashboard product looks much the same. Going on to Answers, again there’s a new look and feel, but the layout and process of building a report stays as before.

I did notice a few new features as I built some reports – at one point, a “Create iBot” button appeared next to the report, allowing me to schedule it and run a later date, and of course there’s a bunch of new features documented elsewhere that I’ve not had a chance yet to look at.

One thing that did catch my eye was the BI Publisher integration. In the previous, Siebel Analytics 7.8 release, formatted (as opposed to ad-hoc) reporting was provided through Actuate, a reporting tool Oracle OEM’d and bundled with the suite. In this release, Actuate has been replaced with BI Publisher, which of course is the new name for XML Publisher. I did actually download and start using BI Publisher a couple of weeks ago (I’m writing an article for it for OTN) but it was nice to see it integrated in with BI Enterprise Edition; the integration has gone pretty well and you wouldn’t know you’re going from one technology to another, at least initially. BI Publisher gets installed along with the rest of the BI EE tools, and all the configuration and wiring in is done for you, so that you can start building reports off of the BI Enterprise Edition metadata layer (the “Common Enterprise Information Model”).

Once you select BI Publisher from the menu, you launch out into the BI Publisher Enterprise Environment, with security and user details being picked up from the Presentation Services server (the new name for the Siebel Analytics Web server, or “Oracle BI Web” as they were calling it at one point). Once you’re in, you get the standard BI Publisher Enterprise interface…

As you can see, Oracle have more or less matched the visual style of BI Suite Enterprise Edition, which itself is I take it the visual style of E-Business Suite 11i. Anyway, when you go to create a new report, you now have the option to create your report against the logical tables in the BI Server Common Enterprise Information Model, or against the columns in an Answers report, or you can just connect directly via SQL or XML/HTTP/Web Services.

In my case, I connected to the BI EE metadata layer and created a report against the Global Electronics business model.

The Query Builder lets you graphically construct your query against the BI EE logical tables, which it then copies into the SQL Query window to create your data model. One slight inconsistency I noticed was that you have to edit the resulting query to add SUM() and GROUP BY clauses to the SQL statement, which you don’t have to do when working with Answers, as it picks up the default aggregation method from the metadata layer. Obviously BI Publisher doesn’t have access to that – it thinks it’s just dealing with a set of relational tables, via an ODBC link – and so you have to go in and add any aggregation elements to the SQL that it generates. That’s not to do down what they’ve done – other than that, the integration is very impressive – but you can see how Oracle might improve it in future: Have the Query Builder directly access all the logical table metadata as well as just the table definitions. A good first release though.

Once you’ve defined the BI Publisher data model, you then use the BI Publisher Desktop add-in to lay out your report template, in the same way as XML Publisher. One improvement in BI Publisher desktop is that you don’t need to re-key the SQL statement into the Report Wizard; now, you log on to the BI Publisher server directly from within Word, like this:

Then you get presented with report catalog, where you can either select from the reports (and their data models) in the BI Publisher catalog, or you can pick a OracleBI Answers report and use that as your data source. In my case, I pick up the BI Publisher report I just created, and press “Open Report” to pick up the data and start laying the template out.

I think we’re almost at the point now where BI Publisher can be used by end-users, rather than just by developers; the report definition phase can be a lot simpler now, as the dataset can be created using the BI Server metadata layer, which is the same as if you could create reports against the Discoverer End User Layer, a feature Reports should have had years ago. Once the data model is complete, the end-user can pick up the dataset using the dialog above, so there’s no need to expose him or her to the underlying SQL. It’s still not as simple as Cognos Impromptu, which is often the benchmark for simple, formatted reporting, but it’s certainly getting there.

Other than changes to the main products, OracleBI Delivers looks broadly the same; one of the new features I was looking for was the ability to kick-off a BPEL process from an iBot, which doesn’t seem to be there yet, at least not directly – you can however call a generic Java program or bit of Javascript, which could act as a wrapper for your BPEL process instead.

Coming away from the Presentation Services server now, going over to the OracleBI Administration tool, this seems pretty much unchanged (on the surface, at least) compared to the Siebel Analytics Administration tool. A couple of new features I did notice though were the Consistency Check Manager, which lists out any issues you might have with the metadata model:

Also, I seem to remember from Open World last year that there are new team development features to help when multiple people are working with and checking in changes to the repository; I’ll have to take a look at this earlier as I believe team working was one of the weaker points of the earlier Siebel Analytics releases.

Taking a look at the server installation itself, it’s more or less the same file layout, with a NQSConfig.INI file holding the server parameters but with the repository and other server directories now held under the \Server directory under the main BI Server installation directory. I did try and copy across a repository file from my Siebel Analytics 7.8 installation, re-create the references it to it in the NQSConfig.INI file and then see if it worked, but the Presentation Services fell over afterwards. There’s probably an upgrade method in the documentation somewhere, but it does seem that you can’t just take a Siebel Analytics 7.8 repository file and expect it to work in Maui.

Anyway, that’s my first impressions with the new release of the Suite. Overall, it’s recognizably Siebel Analytics but with spruced-up Oracle look and feel, with the major new addition being the BI Publisher integration, which overall is done very well. The “fit and finish” is of a very high quality, and being honest they’re benefiting here from the more “Web 2.0″ approach that Siebel took as compared to the rather clunky Java applet approach that Oracle took with Discoverer. It’ll be interesting to see how the two technology streams develop over time – I predict the Siebel BI technology framework will win out over time, it’s just so much closer to what people expect in terms of a user interface these days.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting more on BI Suite Enterprise Edition, in the context of migraton from Oracle Discoverer. I’ll also be posting on the new Oracle Data Integrator, as I’m due to present on this and Discoverer migration at a fair few user group events in the next few months.

About half of the presentation was a general recap on BI Suite EE and it’s positioning, and we got to see what I presume to be the 10gR3 V10.1.3.2 “Maui” release in action. Here’s a few screenshots taken with my camera:

• Logging in
• OracleBI Answers (note the slightly different style, colours to the 7.8 release)
• OracleBI Interactive Dashboards
• OracleBI Administration

The architecture part of the session walked through the basics of the BI Server and the BI Web Server, and there was a nice section on fragment handling (subsets of dimension tables used to assist lookups), multi-user development in the new release, the various levels of caching and the calculation wizard in the administration tool. From this slide it looks like the Enterprise Semantic Model is now called the Common Enterprise Information Model.

Straight after the BI EE Architecture session was Mike Donahoe’s one on BI Publisher. Mike used to be a Discoverer PM and now he’s moved over to XMLP, which is now being renamed “BI Publisher” with additional integration points into BI Suite Enterprise Edition, and BI Suite SE some point in the future. Some highlights of this session included a demonstration of the integration with Oracle BI Suite EE (you create the request, then go into the XMLP report browser and select “OracleBI” from the report source drop-down – presumably Discoverer will be another source in the drop-down when Discoverer integration is completed), the latest version of the Word add-in (a new Discoverer menu toolbar menu more options, new chart and table wizards), upload of report definitions from within Word and a slightly spruced-up look and feel for the Enteprise product.

Next up was Ed Suen’s “Oracle BI Enterprise Edition Best Practices” – Ed was one of the co-founders of nQuire and now heads up development within Oracle BI. I was particularly looking forward to this session but at the end I had mixed feelings – it tried to cover too much and instead didn’t cover anything in enough detail. I’ve fallen in to this trap myself with my OLAP Best Practices paper – you feel obliged to include every best practice you can think of, when in fact just five or six covered to a proper depth would be more useful – but it was still very valuable to hear Ed’ take on the BI EE development process, and to go through metadata creation best practices and some common design patterns. Anyway, some of the key points that came out of the presentation included:

• the key differentiator for BI Suite EE is it’s model-driven approach, which helps minimize requirements suprises as you develop the application
• BI EE handles large data volumes through function shipping to the back-end DW database or OLAP server, rather than creating it’s internal data stores and trying to scale those
• The model-driven approach makes early prototyping easier – prototyping rather than a long requirements-writing process is the preferred development method, with a fully-functional prototype featuring role-based dashboards being delivered at the end
• A typical BI EE project would involve the prototyping/requirements gathering phase, a performance tuning phase, regression testing and subsequent projects/iteration
• When you build the Common Enterprise Information Model, make sure detail-level transaction data is kept in separate subject areas to aggregate, summary data, as mixing the two creates unusable presentation catalogs and bad query performance
• Although BI EE supports the integration of data across data sources, this shouldn’t be used as a way of creating a virtual data warehouse (EII) – according to Ed this just doesn’t work.
• Understand the semantics of fact-based partitioning and logical table sources – by default every measure is a separate query block, but coalescing measure mappings in a single logical table source allows you to optimize by coalescing measures to reduce the number of queries
• When implementing BI EE, resist the urge to rebuild the source data warehouse – instead create a handful of aggregates to speed up the slowest report, migrate these eventually to the source warehouses, use the caching and aggregate navigation features of EE to speed up the warehouse in-place.
• When building analytics catalogs, keep to no more than seven top-level folders and seven columns per folder, minimize detailed columns (use navigation to access these instead), focus on adding measures and cross-fact calculations – this is where the value of EE is achieved, and use consistent order and naming – dimension folders at the top, measures at the bottom, and measure folders are named specifically so that end-users can distinguish between dims and measures.

Anyway, I’m off to the blogger event soon, so it’s back to the hotel for a shower and then out again.