Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer New Features Overview
ORACLE
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE DISCOVERER
December 2004
Oracle
Business Intelligence Discoverer™ empowers business users at all levels of
the organization to make faster and more informed business decisions. Using
any standard web browser, users have secure and immediate access to their data.
Discoverer provides a business view to hide the complexity of the underlying
data structures, thus enabling users to focus on solving business problems.
This latest release of
Discoverer is packed with highly anticipated features. Five key areas of the
release include:
Discoverer fully
leverages the OLAP option in the database, which
provides multi-dimensional views to data in relational tables and analytic
workspaces (AWs).
The Oracle Database
has integrated OLAP and relational analytics into a single engine. It
is no longer necessary to extract, migrate, and transform your data into
a separate multi-dimensional engine for analysis. This means lowered administrative
and maintenance costs. Best of all this power is now easily accessible
through Discoverer.
With this new direct
OLAP access, users can perform their own multi-dimensional analysis, create
reports, and share them to make better decisions. Anyone at any business
or technical skill level across the company can explore large volumes
of summarized data with fast response times.
Discoverer supports
three types of connections:
Relational
connections
Oracle E-Business
Suite connections
Oracle OLAP
connections (NEW)
We have extended
our award winning and familiar user interface to encompass the direct
OLAP access.
Discoverer Plus with relational connection zoom
in
When
users connect with an OLAP connection, the experience
is virtually identical as with a relational connection.
Discoverer Worksheet Portlets display graphs,
data or both; Discoverer Viewer opens workbooks
and allow users to change layout, drill, change
graph types, export, and more; and Discoverer
Plus allows users to build new worksheets and
do direct manipulation query and analysis.
With
an OLAP connection, querying is based on the multi-dimensional
(cube) model, which uses stepwise query building
(OracleBI Beans query builder). The query is built
incrementally with each step modifying the previous
query. You use intuitive condition templates to
build up query steps. Pivoting on dimensions,
drilling through hierarchies and building of queries
through add, keep and remove semantics are all
supported.
You
can administer, configure and manage all Discoverer's
middle tier applications through a single console.
This is because of Discoverer's tight integration
with Oracle Enterprise Manager.
You
can control how reports will look by generating
high quality PDF instead of relying on the web
browser for printing. This support is available
in common for Discoverer Plus and Viewer. In addition,
export to PDF is now available.
New
functionality includes:
Print
preview
Page
layout (portrait, landscape, paper size
etc.)
With Discoverer Viewer, users will now be able to email their worksheet content in any of the export formats such as Excel, PDF, HTML, text, CSV etc. as an attachment. For users more comfortable with Excel worksheets, Discoverer not only exports data but also exports as Excel pivot tables.
Cascading
LOVs As
you pick parameter values, subsequent parameter
value choices are filtered by your previous
selection. Example, you pick Region = East;
now the City parameter values are filtered
to just the cities in the Eastern region.
Descriptive
LOVs
You
can populate an LOV from a descriptive column
(for example, part description) but run
the query with the corresponding value in
a numerical column (for example, part number).
This enhances performance as it is typical
for a numeric column to be indexed.
Optional
and mandatory parameters You
may choose to leave a parameter blank and
the query will run as though all values
have been selected. Example, you leave the
Region parameter blank, so the query will
execute for All regions, East, West and
Central.
Support
for keywords/tokens such as SYSDATE, USER
& NULL For
example, the default parameter value is
always populated with Today's date.
You
can specify conditions to highlight data in reports
that exceeded the threshold values set. This includes
specific values or ranges of values. This is an
excellent way to construct dashboard reports especially
when used in conjunction with the Discoverer portlet
provider.
You
can annotate your report through a provided text
area (for example as a report header and/or a
footer) and the information will be seen by all
users viewing the report.
In the new Discoverer
release, direct manipulation to perform most tasks are now available as
well as the ability to traverse through the data easily in multiple ways
such as drilling to detail, drilling out and drilling in graphs.
You can drag and drop items from the item navigator to quickly select the data you want to see in the report. The following ease of use improvements simplifies the tasks of creating reports.
You
can easily select dates and date ranges using
a calendar style date picker in entering parameter
values, creating conditions, and scheduling workbooks.
Portal is important
for enterprise wide dissemination of business intelligence. Especially
exciting enhancements for Discoverer include personalization of reports
and the ability to wire reports to Portal parameters.
You
can personalize your portlet view of a published
worksheet by changing parameter values, formats,
layout, graph types and so on. These preferences
are associated with each user and does not change
the original worksheet.
You
can change the results in all or some of your
portlets on a Portal page via a Portal parameter.
Portlets may be wired to Portal parameters and
they will be refreshed automatically whenever
the parameter is changed.
Additional enhancements
in the infrastructure include:
Improvement
in Discoverer Viewer Scalability
Discoverer Viewer has been completely rewritten with
a new Java architecture that significantly improves
scalability.
SSO
User Propagation
The Single Sign On (SSO) identity of the user is available
at the database level allowing enterprises to implement
their own security mechanisms based on SSO user identity.
Oracle
Advanced Security Option Encryption Support
Discoverer will be certified with the database Advanced
Security Option. This
ensures that data is safe and secure with the use of
RC4 Encryption, DES Encryption, Triple-DES Encryption,
and AES Encryption.
Additional
Platform Support
Discoverer availability has been expanded to include
the SUSE Linux middle-tier platform.
The new Discoverer release
is packed with highly anticipated features. With high quality printing, direct
OLAP access, a completely rewritten Discoverer Viewer that scales better than
ever before, and greatly improved usability, this is a must have release!
This document is provided for
informational purposes only, and the information herein is
subject to change without notice. Please
report any errors herein to Oracle Corporation. Oracle
Corporation does not provide any warranties covering and specifically
disclaims any liability in connection with
this document.
Oracle is a registered trademark
of Oracle Corporation.
All other company and product
names mentioned are used for identification purposes only
and may be trademarks of their respective owners.
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