Some Discoverer news

I must admit that as the last few weeks passed by, I haven't been paying a lot of attention to other things than the Oracle BI EE suite. My current customer is in the process of adopting the OBIEE suite and all effort has gone in to getting up to speed with it and learning the 'curve'. It was a very nice surprise to see that Oracle has issued a new Statement of Direction for Discoverer. I first noticed this announcement over on Oracle Business Intelligence Blog, which is often first with the news on the Oracle BI scene.

When Oracle first announced the roll-out of the enterprise edition of the Oracle BI suite, I was a little worried that the fantastic Discoverer might be 'gone to meet it's maker'. But seeing how the (formerly-known-as-Siebel) Oracle Answers is still lacking on supporting all the native Oracle analytic functions, I gladly accept Discoverer as the stronger candidate in ad-hoc querying against the Oracle database. Now, in the SoD they don't go as far as really suggesting you absolutely should migrate to the Enterprise edition of the suite and drop your Discoverer environment, but the case for doing so is made a lot stronger than the case for staying with it. At least the promise is there to keep it alive and in the loop. The following quote does give some food for thought:

Existing Discoverer customers can continue to use Discoverer with the assurance of Oracle’s Lifetime Support Policy, as well as continued planned enhancements and integration with future releases of Oracle Application Server and Oracle BI EE.