By:

Arthi Subramanian
CIS 764 Fall 2008

Business Intelligence:
Business intelligence (BI) is a broad category of applications and technologies for
gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users
make better business decisions.

Present Day Challenges:

Massive amount of data availability.
Data spread over multiple resources.
Publishing information in a secure, reliable
manner .

The solution came from.

In the form of Oracle Reports

- Oracle Reports is the enterprise reporting
component of Oracles BI offering. It enables
an organization to convert data into
information, and publish the information
securely and reliably

Rapid Development
Each major task in report generation taken care of

by a wizard. Eg: Query wizard, report wizard, graph

wizard

Customization report templates and WYSIWUG live

previews

Creating complex data models drag and drop

actions

Re-entrant wizard technology

Publish data in a transparent way

Oracle Reports provides an access to multiple data

sources. Eg: manufacturing organization

It supports SQL, PL/SQL, XML, JDBC, Oracle OLAP,

and text files. JDBC data source can be used to access

data from different JDBC-compliant data sources, and
JDBC-ODBC bridge can be used to connect to any data
that can be exposed as an ODBC data source.

With Oracle Reports, the source of data is

transparent, because data coming from any data

source is available to you in exactly the same
representation.

Publishing the Report

Oracle Reports caters to different audiences

using single report definition.

1) Paper based publishing :
Established way.
O/P can be generated in HTML,PDF,HTMLCSS,
Word-compatible, Excel-compatible etc.
Can be sent to the printer (PostScript).

2) Publishing as dynamic web pages:

No page boundaries.
Needs to be dynamic.
Adding elements to Web pages
-Using custom JSP tags, JavaBeans or regular Java code
JSP format
-develop once, deploy anywhere principle of Oracle
Reports.
Why JSP-based Web reports ?
i) separation of dynamic and static content.
ii) Support of scripting and tags
iii) Reuse, portable, easy to use
iv) Deployed to produce both paper and Web output.

Deployment
Easy deployment on server.
Paper based reports : Copy definition file to

location accessible by the server.

Web-based reports : Copy to J2EE

Application Server / deploy as part of EAR

file.

Security and Reliability

Oracle Portal user interface:
Secure reports by registering with Oracle Application
Server security framework.
Define which users or groups are authorized to
access, view, or manage the resources.

Oracle Application Server High Availability:

Industrys most reliable, resilient, and fault-tolerant
application server platform.
Oracle Reports is integrated with Oracle AS High
Availability.

Conclusion
Oracle Reports:
- the most flexible enterprise-reporting tool in
the market today
- is reliable
- is integrated
- is extensible

References

Books:
Oracle Reports - Pinnacle Software Solutions

Oracle Developer Advanced Forms and Reports (Paperback) by Peter Koletzke

(Author) and Paul Dorsey (Author)

Web References:

About Oracle Reports:

http://download.oracle.com/docs/html/B10612_01/toc.htm

Oracle Reports The basics

http://www.scribd.com/doc/3960412/Basic2-Oracle-Reports-10g-Tutorials