16 September 2003

Julian Ford points out an article at DMReview entitled "Web Services: Fulfilling a Spectrum of Business Intelligence Needs". Written by Dan Everett at Hyperion, it talks about the move within the BI marketplace to expose application functionality through APIs to as a service to other applications, using Web Services technologies such as XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI. The introduction of Web Services functionality promises to address a traditional limitation with HTTP-based BI tools, in that the HTTP protocol is stateless and users normally require a persistent connection when carrying out OLAP analysis. Oracle have dealt with this in the past through either thick-client java applet techologies (as with Discoverer Plus) or through java servlets and cookies (as with Discoverer Viewer, or Reports when using 9iAS and SSO). However, the introduction of web services technology promises to open up the functionality of tools such as Discoverer and Reports so that it can be used by a range of applications, and indeed Oracle are some way to achieving this objective with Oracle Reports, as this tutorial over at OTN demonstrates. 2:51:42 PM

There's a new page available on OTN that contains a number of Hints and Tips for Oracle Discoverer. Some of the ones that I thought were particularly useful were; How to Drill Out to a Predefined Worksheet with Supporting Detail How to Set Up Fine Grain Security for Discoverer Environment How to Set Up Column and Row Based Security How to Apply a Specific Help Page to a Specific Workbook How to Define Discoverer Viewer as an External Application in Oracle Portal 1.0.2.2 How to Set Up Automated Schedule to Publish as HTML  How To Access Flat Files Or Excel Files As Data Sources With Discoverer How to Replicate an Environment in Discoverer (NOT to be Confused with CLONING) How Do I Size the EUL? Cannot Login or Communication Protocol Error (RMI protocol over JRMP transport issue) 1:13:25 PM