09/01/2010 by Simon Tomey.

We understand the requirement to be to get this cake into your tummy …but don’t worry we have a 30 second window and team of consultants on hand who are equipped with installation accelerators.

I attended another great conference at the UKOUG in December this year. It was good to catch up with some old friends, make new acquaintances and learn more. My contribution to the presentations this year was “BI Publisher and a Reporting Roadmap”. You can get the slides here http://www.oracle.belife.co.uk/BeLife%20-%20BI%20and%20the%20Reporting%20Road%20Map%20v1.0%20pps.zip

The presentation was initiated by what seemed to be a universal view that sponsoring and implementing some BI projects was a bit like convincing your FD to eat a Christmas cake whole in 30 seconds flat (and pay several hundred thousand pounds for the privilege). I think that you can implement great Oracle BI one slice at a time – starting with the EBS free and integrated functionality found in BI Publisher and progressing piecemeal to the powerful and impressive OBIEE. Here’s what I think are characteristics of a good BI roadmap:

• Benefits
  You can get benefits whenever you stop. You don’t have to continue to the bitter end, if you’ve taken a wrong turn.
• Low Risk & Cost
  Pleasant surprises only. Minimise risk and cost.
• You’re in Control
  Get consultants to advise you and transfer the knowledge so that you are in control of the project & the technology and can combine it with your deep business knowledge and expertise.
• Supported & Sustainable
  Ensure the components are Oracle compatible and on future roadmap.

We are introducing a “BI Publisher template library” as an excellent way to kick start the implementation of the rich and useful functionality in BI Publisher. See http://www.BIPTemplates.com for more details.

Check out the presentation and tell me what you think.

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09/01/2010 by Roshan.

Dig through the archives of literature, philosophy and art and you will find hundreds of phrases for it. Plato called it the good life, and Aristotle referred to human flourishing. The Bible talks about it as being blessed, and the Declaration of Independence refers to the pursuit of happiness.

Human beings have a unique problem. We do not know exactly how to be good human beings. We wake in the morning, and unlike animals that are driven by instinct, it’s not always immediately apparent what best to do with ourselves.

Into this void, every society in human history has offered one or more answers as to what constitutes the good life. We have venerated great warriors who defended their tribe or city from attack. We have celebrated thinkers and scientists who have discovered new truths about the world.

In the twenty-first century West, our cultural conversations about the good life are dominated by the quest for wealth and celebrity. As a general rule, we all aspire to be rich and famous, because of the many subtle and not-so-subtle ways that our culture reinforces the belief that wealth and celebrity are the ingredients of the good life. Most people spend the greater part of their working lives in the pursuit of money.

Yet there is scant evidence even in our own culture that wealth and fame bring happiness, let alone guaranteeing their possessors anything approaching human flourishing. A cursory reading of even non-sensational accounts of the lives of those that have achieved what our society holds out as the hope of human existence suggests that at best, the rich and famous are no happier than the rest of us, and possibly much less so. Likewise our societies, which have accumulated the greatest material wealth of any in history, do not seem to have achieved an equivalent rise in overall happiness. We are embarrassingly stressed, depressed and unhappy.

We need to acknowledge that this exposes a deep problem in our culture. It is possible that our belief is wrong – that in limiting our pursuit of happiness to the pursuit of material prosperity, for all its many benefits (disclosure: this article was typed on a computer), we have wandered down a dead end in the pursuit of what it means to be human.

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09/01/2010 by David Ballinger.

Xpath is a bit like a ladder: it’s fairly simple in itself, but it enables you to do things you probably wouldn’t even think of trying without it.  That’s what we discovered anyway, when we were asked to replicate some Oracle reports in Excel via BI Publisher templates.

You may be familiar with the way that Oracle’s default plain text output looks: it’s set up so that the page width is not exceeded, allowing for straightforward printouts.  However, what if you’re not primarily interested in printing a particular report, but would like to run some analysis on it instead?  Using a BI Publisher template is the obvious answer for redirecting the report data away from the Notepad dead-end and channelling it towards the Excel information powerhouse.

But if you’re going to send data to Excel, why keep it in a page-width-bound structure that cages it from Excel’s analytical power?  Well, because without Xpath, you wouldn’t even think of trying to open it all up!  Xpath, a simple query language that interacts with XML documents, releases your data to Excel’s powers, freeing the layout of your report from the hierarchy of its source XML file.  It allows you to completely “flatten” the structure so that data from the innermost XML element to the most distant ancestral node can all be placed on a single line of your report.  No more tables within tables: just one simple, wide, analysis-inviting table.

That’s not the only way that our use of Xpath helps us exceed our customer’s expectations.  Employing Xpath to flatten the report structure makes it super simple for us to produce a stack of reports in an impressively small amount of time!  So not only are we able to deliver reports that can do a lot more than a customer might ask for, we can achieve this more efficiently than anyone trying to replicate Oracle’s standard layout in a BI Publisher template.  You can check the results at www.BIPtemplates.com .

BI Publisher is an incredible tool for making Oracle reports come alive, but there’s another whole level of functionality that you could not even think of trying if it weren’t for Xpath!

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