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 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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12/10/2009 by Simon Tomey.

I hope you enjoy this video which demonstrates some of the things you can do to achieve Great Oracle Reporting. Includes data templates, conditional formatting, output as Excel and bursting

Click here to see me talking about how you can do almost anything with Oracle BI Publisher

http://www.bipublisher.co.uk

Let me know what you think.

Simon

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