27 September 2003

Cognos have launched a replacement for Impromptu, their venerable web-based reporting tool, and it's causing quite a stir in the BI market. Credited by some with being the real reason behind the recent series of mergers in the BI & reporting market, Cognos ReportNet is a fully web-based reporting suite that includes tools for developing, managing and distribution reports via a range of J2EE application servers such as Tomcat, Weblogic and Websphere. What seems to have captured people's imagination with ReportNet is its use of web services and standards such as SOAP, together with it's ability to bring together data from more than one source in a particular report, native integration with a range of RDBMS and links in with the other Cognos applications. Cognos ReportNet is therefore an obvious competitor to Oracle Reports, and would deserve serious consideration if you need to report against a range of different data sources, or if you've already invested in the Cognos technology stack. Looking at it further, though, integration with Powerplay or other multidimensional datasources is still quite basic and is unlikely to come close to the integration Oracle Reports has with Express and 9i OLAP. It's also encouraging to see Cognos backing the web services initiative, which of course has been a feature of Oracle Reports for some time now. At the end of the day, ReportNet is a long overdue replacement for Impromptu and, whilst it's got some excellent new features that have gone down well with Cognos developers, in a mainly Oracle environment where there's already investment in technologies such as 9iAS, Single Sign-On, RAC and J2EE, Oracle Reports still has the edge for most Oracle customers. Oracle Reports is part of the Single Sign-On environment, so security is integrated in with 9iAS and Portal, and scripting is done through Java and PL/SQL, which are familiar languages for most Oracle developers. Technologies such as pluggable data sources make integration with 9i OLAP and Express simple and straightforward, and in a way that can be extended to other data sources through a software development kit, and of course Reports is bundled with 9iAS and 9iDS, meaning that most customers have paid for it anyway. For further details on upcoming features in Reports 10g, check out this presentation on Oracleworld, and for more details on Cognos ReportNet, take a look at this pdf from Cognos. 7:23:06 PM

Red Hat 9.0 looks like being the last release of this Linux distro, with Red Hat the company concentrating on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the consumer distro being merged with the Fedora Project. According to the Fedora Project website; "The Fedora Project is a Red-Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source project. It is also a proving ground for new technology that may eventually make its way into Red Hat products. It is not a supported product of Red Hat, Inc. The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software. Development will be done in a public forum. The project will produce time-based releases of Fedora Core about 2-3 times a year with a public release schedule. The Red Hat engineering team will continue to participate in the building of Fedora Core and will invite and encourage more outside participation than was possible in Red Hat Linux. By using this more open process, we hope to provide an operating system that uses free software development practices and is more appealing to the open source community. " I must admit I hadn't heard of the 'Fedora Project' until now, and the relationship between them and Redhat is likely to be similar to the one between the Mozilla project and Netscape. Still, it was obvious Red Hat wanted to get out of the retail market and it's good that they've open-sourced some of the Red Hat proprietary stuff such as the Bluecurve theme. 5:19:14 PM