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Posted by: frijoles	4/18/2007
Last week my boss and I attended a presentation on Oracle's BI Publisher. BI Publisher is a slick way to build report templates and link data up to them. In our case, we were working with Microsoft Office. Basically you create a template (or use a pre-made one), using the addon to put fields around your template, and then publish it to a web server so others can access it. Currently, we're using an old method for doing overlays (invoices, purchase orders, etc) in Oracle. This works fine so long as we don't have to make changes to the overlay. Since E&S got rid of their PO Box, I actually do have to make changes. Here's what's involved: Find the latest Visio document (this is the easy part). Open it up and make the changes. Print to file using an old driver that supports PCL. Verify that the PCL file looks correct in the PCL viewer. Open the PCL file in a hex editor. Open the old PCL file in the hex editor. Compare the header and footer. Pray to some other-worldly deity. Copy header elements from the old file in to the new file. Same for footer. Test in the PCL viewer. Upload the PCL file to the print server. Test the overlay. Make adjustments as necessary. I don't really know who came up with this process. I suspect it was an out-going employee who hated his/her coworkers and wanted to piss everyone off years later. The above doesn't even go in to how the data actually gets to the overlay, just the overlay itself. Using BI Publisher, the steps are as follows: Open the template in Word. Import some test data. Click where you want a field and insert the field name. Save the .rtf file. Upload the rtf file to BI Publisher. Associate file with data. That's about it. I'm told the upload part is actually included in the new version (I have't messed with that yet) so you can do it straight from Word. Anyway, it's all point and click. Let's face it, if you need to open a file in a hex editor fix it, something's wrong with your process. After a report has been created, users can log in to the web server and access it. At the top of the report, you can include parameters if your query needs one (such as invoice number). The whole thing is fairly straight forward, and new end-users shouldn't have any problem figuring out how to run a report. Right now, our users have to open up Oracle Apps, navigate to the correct form, and click through that to get their report. BI Publisher makes that much easier. You can access your report in about 4 clicks as opposed to about 10 - 15 the old way. The downside, so far, is that's it's slow when you visit a new page. I think this is because I have it running on a little dev box. Also, this isn't running under Oracle AS. On Oracle AS, I imagine it's very speedy. I look forward to that. The install also spawns a command prompt box and runs as oc4j, not as a Window's service (ie, I have to be logged on to the box to have it open). I plan on converting it in to a service, but haven't yet. I'm not sure if that will help the performance. I should note that in our class, the application was very quick, and, as I mentioned, after you've visited a page, the version I'm running is also quick. So to sum up, BI Publisher is a win. I like the interface, I like how it works. Maybe that's because our current system is so buggered up. If you're contemplating it, I highly suggest trying it out.

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Re: Review: Oracle's BI Publisher

By frijoles on 4/19/2007

I just checked on pricing for BI Publisher. I couldn't find a "this is the price" page, but I did find a lot of comments on the price in the forums. And that price is $40k per processor. Yes, you read that right. 40 thousand dollars. As great as I think this tool is, that price is just sick. So, I hereby remove my support for this tool. Unless you are on 11i, which I believe comes with it. *this is me extending my middle finger at Oracle*

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