New Graph styles in the upcoming Discoverer release oracle

This summer (around August), there will be a new Discoverer release that will contain a few new features. The biggest news is in the OLAP area, where support for custom (or calculated) members will be available, with support in Discoverer OLAP (D4O) as well as the Spreadsheet Add-In (link to Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Standard Edition page on OTN). Also, there are six new graph styles that have been added to the list of available graph styles that were introduced in the 10.1.2 release (see section 1.2.3 of the the "Discoverer Statement of Direction" for some screenshots) - April, Comet, Confetti, Glass, Nautical, Southwest. See below screenshots of a 3D graph with each of these styles applied.

Southwest style

Nautical Style

April Style

Glass Style

Confetti StyleComet Style

The graph wizard in Discoverer looks pretty much the same, except when you go to the "Style" tab, you will find the new graph styles added (I have highlighted only three below).

And of course the styles applied are available in Viewer and Portlets.

Styles are one of the easiest ways of jazzing up reports and of allowing users to focus more on which graph type works best for displaying different kinds of data and less on how to pretty up the graph.
More on this and other new features in the upcoming Discoverer release soon... Watch out for a mini-series on the new improved Spreadsheet Add-In, which has a host of new and improved features, including better VBA support, named queries in Excel, non-modal query wizard, and lots and lots more.

ODTUG Conference Day 2 oracle

Day two of the Oracle Developer Tools Conference. What a broad spectrum of topics, you can get presentations from six sigma techniques, SOA, ADF, spatial analytics, predictive analytics, OLAP, unit testing and so on. If only I had time to attend them to all. I think the biggest buzzes are around Application Express and SQL Developer. The best part of these conferences is meeting people face-to-face, people you know from various blogs and just being able to sit down and just chat about any topic.

Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing as an interest group within ODTUG is growing rapidly. The presentations on BI Enterprise Edition have been well attended and everyone is impressed by the quality of the presentations and most importantly the product demos.

Tomorrow is the last day and I will be in the hands-on sessions all day. In the morning we have the Warehouse Builder 10g and in the afternoon there is the Oracle BI OLAP tools. This session will be show casing the new updated version of Discoverer OLAP and the BI Spreadsheet Addin that supports custom aggregates. This allows business users to create their own dimension members by manually selecting dimension members or alternatively by using a dimensional query. Sales Analyzer used to have this feature and it at last been added to the BI OLAP tools so now customers can at last upgrade from OSA to Discoverer and still have all the functionality they enjoyed in OSA (apart from the ability to create a forecast). As an FYI, the OWB team has developed an OSA flat file migration Expert that uses the metadata flat files to create objects and mappings within OWB that can be deployed to an analytic workspace. Using the Expert and BI OLAP tools most OSA customers can be upgraded and up and running in a very short time.

There are plenty of people in cyber space blogging about the conference and so far everyone seems to be impressed. One more day to go...

Discoverer 10.1.2.2 patch available oracle

The Oracle Application Server 10g Release 2 (10.1.2) Patch Set 2 (10.1.2.2.0) is now available for download from Metalink (https://metalink.oracle.com/).

This includes many features in Discoverer, primarily in the OLAP area.
The patch number is 4960210. It is currently available on Microsoft Windows (32-bit) and Solaris Operating System (SPARC 64-bit). Other platforms will become available shortly.
If you see the readme file, section 9.5.3 covers "New Features for Oracle Business Intelligence".

This is a list of new features in the release, from Table 10 of the readme file:

1. Calculated Members
   
2. Write-back
   
3. Graph Styles
   
4. Discoverer Catalog Support
   
5. Share Calculations and Saved Selections In a Workbook
   
6. Toolbar
   
7. Floating OracleBI Query Editor
   
8. Enhanced Refreshing of Queries
   
9. VBA Macros
   

These new features span Discoverer Plus, Plus OLAP, Viewer, Portlet Provider, and the Spreadsheet Add-In.
Look for more posts on these features. Here is a list of some posts by Aneel and me on some of the new features in the "calculated member" release:

1. Spreadsheet Add-in - Refreshing multiple queries
2. Spreadsheet Add-In - non modal wizard
3. Rename queries in Spreadsheet Add-In 10.1.2.2
4. New Graph styles in the upcoming Discoverer release