An IT Briefing produced by

Business Intelligence Best Practices:

Simplifying the Reporting Landscape

Sponsored By:
 Business Intelligence Best Practices: Simplifying the Reporting Landscape
By José Villacis, Rich Colton, and Mike Donohue

© 2008 TechTarget

José Villacis is Director of Product Marketing, focusing on Oracle’s Business Intelligence solutions for the enterprise and mid-market. He has over
BIOS

10 years in the BI industry, specializing in relational query and reporting, analytics and OLAP, data integration, and master data management
technologies. Prior to Oracle, Villacis spent four years at Hyperion in the corporate Product Marketing team.
Rich Colton is Application Integration Manager for the Washington Division of URS Corporation.
Mike Donohue is Director of Product Management at Oracle.

This IT Briefing is based on an Oracle/TechTarget Webcast, “Business Intelligence Best

Practices: Simplifying the Reporting Landscape.”
This TechTarget IT Briefing covers the following topics:
• Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
• Business Intelligence: the Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
• About Reporting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
• Acquiring the Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
• Layout and Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
• Output Code for Delivery Channels. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
• Developing with Classic Reporting Tools Is Slow . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5
• Maintaining with Classic Reporting Tools Is Costly . . . . . . . . . . . .5
• Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5
• BI Publisher Delivers One Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
• BI Publisher Is Highly Efficient . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
• BI Publisher Is User-Friendly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
• One Tool for All Reporting Needs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
• High-Fidelity Reporting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
• Extract Once, Publish Multiple Times . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
• Example: Government Forms. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
• Example: Global Report Consolidation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
• Some of Our Customers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
• Case Study: Washington Division of URS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
• Open Standards and Oracle BI Publisher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
• Automating the Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
• Converting the Reports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
• Availability and Integration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
• For More Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
• Common Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

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as allowed under the copyright laws. The individual authors are solely responsible for their content and opinions.
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 Business Intelligence Best Practices:
Simplifying the Reporting Landscape
Introduction
This document discusses best practices for reporting,
which have often been overlooked. Most of the time
we tend to focus on eye candy—either dashboards or
the actual deployment of business intelligence appli-
cations—and overlook classic report generation and
report production, crucial concepts at the heart of
business intelligence.
We will cover the background of today’s reporting
situation and look at ways to improve the reporting
processes within our companies and make them
more efficient.
Business Intelligence: the
bated because we have more access and flexibility to
implement operational applications.
Those operational applications allow us to generate
and produce more data, but at the same time busi-
ness requirements for reporting continue to grow. We
have tremendous demand for reporting, for access to
information, but most importantly for timely access
to information. All our users expect us to provide
them with actionable information across all types of
documents and reports—for example, financial state-
ments, labels, checks—and to a wide variety of desti-
nations, as in Figure 3. We also have implementations
of service-oriented architectures. All of this puts a
greater demand on classic report generation and pro-
duction.

Background The result is that it is costing far too much. We would

expect report production to be a low-cost item. Quite
Almost every research firm that has studied the mar-
the contrary; today, it is much more expensive because
ket and IT priorities consistently reports that business
it is a very complex environment. Not only have we
intelligence is a top priority for CIOs, as shown in
implemented all the different types of tools already,
Figure 1. It is a strategic topic for every IT organiza-
but also we find that data sourcing is very complex
tion around the world, which is good.
now. Maintaining a wide variety of reporting systems
is expensive and requires hiring more skilled person-
At the heart of business intelligence are actual reports
nel to manage applications that require very special-
and documents produced in multiple formats and
ized knowledge. It takes a lot of time. The bottom
generated at different frequencies. Most important,
line, as in Figure 4, is that reporting is a very big-ticket
they are dispersed to a wide variety of destinations
item.
and to different types of users.

Most companies are spending a lot of money, buying About Reporting

more tools but getting little value out of their invest-
The challenge of reporting is not so much overcom-
ments. For example, a study by The Data Warehousing
ing the complexity of the environment and systems,
Institute reports a proliferation of business intelli-
because we are producing them today anyway. The
gence tools. Needs are greater; there is more demand
challenge is that most of us have, and suffer from, a
for business intelligence, more demand for informa-
backlog of reports. We submit information and our
tion. At the same time, we invest in diverse technolo-
end users always demand more. But there is inevita-
gies, but they are not helping at all. Why not?
bly a backup and we are not able to produce or gener-
ate the information they need in a timely manner.
Today we see complex environments with multiple
operational applications, multiple data stores, diverse
Again, overcoming the complexity may not be the
end-user tools—but we have information chaos, as
only big issue. The real challenge is how to make
shown in Figure 2.
reporting more efficient so it not only costs us less
money, but takes fewer man-hours and uses fewer
This is something we have been discussing in the
implementation resources overall. This is nothing new;
industry for ten years or more, but now it is exacer-

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 Figure 1

Figure 2

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 Figure 3

Figure 4

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 it is a consequence of the evolution of technology, the
evolution of implementing operational information
systems, and the demand that everybody has for
timely, actionable information to make decisions.
What is behind a report is shown in Figure 5.
Acquiring the Data
If your main responsibility is to focus on producing
reports, you know that one of the most important
things behind any type of report is access to the data,
shown in the lower right in Figure 5.
We can acquire the data as code, maybe in the form
of an SQL statement. Or maybe we need to access
the information from one or more data sources, or
from a single data source that may not be in the right
schema for us to have efficient reporting against it, so
we may need to extract that and build a data model.
Or maybe we access this data through XML, through
a Web service. In other words, one of the main parts
behind a report is the way we actually get data into
the reporting environment.
Layout and Design
The second essential component of a report is the
layout and design, in the upper left of Figure 5. What
Figure 5
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kind of tool do we use to design and prepare the lay-
out of the report? We go through the design, analyz-
ing the needs of end users. Then we put that into an
interface—something printed out in hardcopy or
something sent out through a mobile device, what-
ever form it takes—because even if we have the right
data in a report, if it is not in the right type of design,
it could be a failure. We cannot just send out any type
of report to a mobile device, or to be printed, or to be
stored on a server for people to download or publish
on a dashboard. It has to respond to the specific
needs of end users.
Output Code for Delivery Channels
The third element behind a report is the actual output
code for each of the delivery channels, seen in the
upper right in Figure 5. This could be as simple as
printing it on a local printer. It could be as complex as
enabling the information that makes up this report to
be available as a Web service. Or it could be a delivery
channel to different types of devices: common office
technologies, office tools that we all use. It could be
sent out in different forms for dashboards that our
user population receives.
Note that this element of a report must contain speci-
fications for the end user, because not everybody
 should see the information in the same way that
other people or groups see it; most importantly, they
may need it in a different form. It is not just about the
layout, it is also about the way we deliver the informa-
tion that will be contained in the report.
Developing with Classic Reporting
Tools Is Slow
Report development with traditional tools is generally
a very slow process, because you have to go through
iterations with end users in order to define not only
the documents but also the way they want to receive
them, the layout, and how the data should be pre-
sented.
The problem is that you will generate many report
files anyway, because you have demands for different
languages, for different types of formats. You will
access the data sources to extract the data, because
you create independent report files for each variation
of those reports, based on end-user needs—lan-
guage, layout, and display—as in Figure 6. That is
what happens with almost every classic reporting tool
used today.
Figure 6
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Maintaining with Classic Reporting
Tools Is Costly
This means that maintaining those reporting solu-
tions becomes very expensive. It is complex to main-
tain as the report environment grows, because we
have multiple types of files and multiple reports that
we are generating, and we could potentially satisfy
many of those reports with a single query. We com-
pound the problem with multiple types of layouts and
multiple translations, as you can see in Figure 7.
With something that could be solved easily and effi-
ciently, we are creating a tremendous amount of
workflow, not only to our data sources but also on the
maintenance side of the house.
Oracle Business Intelligence
Publisher
We can do all this more efficiently with Oracle Busi-
ness Intelligence Publisher. BI Publisher is a strategic
component of Oracle’s Business Intelligence Founda-
tion. Figure 8 is a graphical representation of Oracle's
Enterprise Performance Management System. Its
 Figure 7

Figure 8

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 core enabling technology is our Business Intelligence
Foundation. BI Publisher is an essential element of
what we do for performance management and busi-
ness intelligence at Oracle.
This document explains some of the technology in BI
Publisher, the benefits that it provides, and how it all
works together.
BI Publisher Delivers One
Environment
The first thing we wanted to do within BI Publisher
was create a reporting tool that allows you to meet
requirements for all types of documents you need to
create. So, with BI Publisher, you can create not only
management and operational reports, which are typi-
cally the types of documents created with enterprise
reporting tools, but also customer-facing documents
such as invoices and correspondence, checks that
include MICR fonts, and labels that include embed-
ded bar codes. We can even generate electronic funds
transfer documents. If you need to generate some-
thing in XML format or EDI or EFT, we can do that.
So we offer one tool, shown in Figure 9, to manage
all your documents.
Figure 9
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BI Publisher also includes a scheduling and delivery
mechanism, to make sure you get reports to the right
people in the format they need.
BI Publisher Is Highly Efficient
At the core of the product architecture is a separation
of data logic, layout, and translations. In BI Publisher,
the data model can have multiple layouts associated
with it. So you can write your SQL query, or a refer-
ence to a Web service, or whatever it is you are get-
ting your data from, and then you can apply different
layouts to that data logic to generate the different
types of output you need. That gives you great flexibil-
ity: instead of having to make a copy of the report to
create a new layout, or to recode that, all you need to
do is create new layouts.
Likewise with translations. Suppose you have an
invoice that you are perfectly happy with as far as the
layout and the data source, and you have written it
and coded it in English. If you do business in Que-
bec, you need a French version of your invoice; or
maybe you are a multinational company and need a
Japanese version. With this separation of data logic,
layout, and translation, all you need to worry about is
 translating the boilerplate text strings in your docu-
ments and applying a different translation. You do
not have to touch your layout; you do not have to
touch your data logic.
This vastly improves flexibility and dramatically
reduces maintenance costs, because you can focus
on the parts of the reports that you need to, to create
different layouts and for your different users and
requirements.
BI Publisher Is User-Friendly
This separation of data and layout produces another
useful consequence, the user-friendliness shown in
Figure 10. We allow users to create layouts with com-
mon desktop tools. In the typical process of creating
a report with a classic reporting tool, an end user
brings a requirement to someone in IT, a report
developer who has access to a very powerful but
often very complicated or difficult-to-use reporting
tool. Once the report is created, the developer gives it
back to the business user who says, “This is great but
I thought of two more data elements I need, plus I
don’t like the fonts, I need this column right justified,
and I want to add boilerplate text here and there.”
With BI Publisher, since we have the separation and
because we have leveraged common desktop tools,
end users can actually create their own layouts based
on data models provided by IT departments. We will
discuss this further in our case study of the Washing-
ton Division at URS.
Even if your end users are not sophisticated enough
to use our technology to create layouts, if they can
mock up the layout they want in Microsoft Word, it is
a very easy task for a report developer to create a lay-
out template for the end user, so they can generate
the report they want. This means fewer round trips
between end users and report developers, reducing
the time and pain that it typically takes to create
reports.
We have designed the tool to use practically any data
source you can imagine: the Oracle Database, the
Oracle BI Server, BI Applications—any source that
can provide a JDBC connection can be a data source
for a BI Publisher report. We also support E-Business
Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Web services, and
custom applications.

Figure 10

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 One Tool for All Reporting Needs
Eventually that data comes to the BI Publisher server
engine as XML data, where layouts are applied—and,
as mentioned, these layouts can be created with com-
mon desktop tools: Word, Acrobat, Excel. To develop
layout templates with more traditional developer
tools, we support Adobe Flex Builder and JDeveloper.
The layout gets merged with the data. We support a
wide range of output formats, as seen in Figure 11,
and our scheduling and delivery mechanism delivers
over the Web to any of the destinations you would
expect: printer, e-mail, fax, content repository, and
content management systems.
High-Fidelity Reporting
Figure 12 shows examples of reports generated with
BI Publisher, including customer-facing documents,
management reports, and financial reports. Note the
specialty documents, such as shipping labels with
embedded barcodes. We also support the two-dimen-
sional barcodes that are becoming much more preva-
lent. We include a rich set of fonts with the product,
including an MICR font, which is the font you use at
the bottom of checks for your routing and account
numbers.
Figure 11
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Extract Once, Publish Multiple Times
Figure 13 is an example of the benefits of BI Publisher.
Suppose you have some payment data and you want
to do several things with it. You can extract that data
once with the BI Publisher data extraction engine,
and then generate a wide range of documents to
serve all your needs. First you may want to pay your
supplier or your partner, so you create an electronic
funds transfer document. A controller in your organi-
zation may want the data in an Excel spreadsheet to
do some analysis on it. A line-of-business manager
may want to see it up on a portal or a Web page, so
you generate an HTML file. You may be required to
file some government forms; BI Publisher can popu-
late PDF forms with data, so you don’t have to spend
time duplicating or replicating a PDF. You may have a
third-party company that handles your books or does
your finances or your taxes, and you need to send
information to that company in a specific XML for-
mat. You can do all those things with BI Publisher.
By extracting once, you have minimized the load on
your transactional system, yet through BI Publisher,
you are able to generate a wide range of documents
without having to go back and fetch data again.
 Figure 12

Figure 13

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 Example: Government Forms
Figure 14 shows government forms, some of the spe-
cialty documents we can create. Governments and
other organizations often require such forms; with a
traditional reporting tool, you would have to replicate
all their boilerplate text and formatting. BI Publisher
allows you to mark up their PDF form with the neces-
sary data fields; then we generate the exact same PDF
with your data included, so it can be sent right back
to the agency that needs it. This dramatically reduces
the time needed to work with PDF forms.
Example: Global Report Consolidation
Another benefit provided by BI Publisher was devel-
oped by an Oracle team that was responsible for all
the internationalization of Enterprise Business Suite,
Oracle’s Application Suite: they designed it right from
the start with excellent internationalization support,
as shown in Figure 15.
A wide range of languages is supported, including
almost all Unicode languages—over 185 languages in
244 territories—all from a single server. Some com-
peting products claim that they have internationaliza-
tion support, but then they require that you install a
French or Japanese version of their server. With BI
Publisher, one server supports all these languages.
We embed in the document the glyphs or characters
needed for that particular language, which also elimi-
nates the need for specialized printers. We put them
right into the PDF and you can print it out in the lan-
guages you need.
Some of Our Customers
Figure 16 shows some customers who are success-
fully using BI Publisher and are quite happy with it.
One customer, Rich Colton, has done fantastic things
with the product and been able to get real benefit
from it. Originally his company was called Washing-
ton Group International, but it was recently acquired
by URS; now it is the Washington Division at URS. He
is working with us to discuss how he is using the
product and the benefits it brings him.
Case Study: Washington
Division of URS
Some of the division’s historical projects include the
Hoover Dam, the San Francisco Bay Bridge, power
stations, railway systems, and the Alaska Pipeline.
And they use a variety of Oracle technology.

Figure 14

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 Figure 15

Figure 16

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 You can see in Figure 17 that they use E-Business
Suite, Portal, the SOA Suite, and BI Publisher. They
have third-party applications that use the Oracle tech-
nology stack, as well as internal applications that use
the internal technology stack.
The types of reporting they require vary by construc-
tion project and functional area. This includes project
management for tracking, procurement for purchas-
ing, project costing and accounting, labor informa-
tion for the project managers at construction sites,
invoices, labels, and legal documents.
Key to the division has been the ability to generate
parameterized reports. Compliance to publishing
open standards is also important for them.
Open Standards and Oracle
BI Publisher
The Washington Division started publishing using
the XSL-FO standard, which is an XML markup
language. XSL-FO was designed from a standard
called Document Style Semantics and Specification
Language (DSSSL). It is an international standard
developed by the International Electrotechnical
Figure 17
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Commission (IEC), an organization begun in 1906.
IEC developed the DSSSL standard in conjunction
with ISO. Because XSL-FO was based on that stan-
dard, it is very rich in features for publishing docu-
ments and reports.
Washington Group International started publishing
documents in 2003, including purchase orders and
RFPs, and they wanted to move into generating
reports with this standard because it is very rich in
features. At that time, there was no commercial
engine in the marketplace. They decided to use the
Apache FOP engine initially; when they first started
using it, they had to install it themselves. It later
became part of the Oracle Application server, and
then Oracle replaced the FOP engine with our own BI
Publisher.
Some shortcomings they found with the FOP engine
were:
• To administer the environment, they had to
develop their own tools.
• There was a lack of security in both data and
reports.
 • Standardization of report parameters was an issue;
they did not want to redefine parameters as they
moved from one environment to another.
Another performance win for Oracle BI Publisher: In
the Apache FOP engine, the document object model,
which is the data content for the report, had to exist
in memory. If a report was too big for memory, they
could not execute it. Oracle resolved that issue, as
well as improved performance immensely.
With PDF documents, another drawback of the
Apache FOP engine was that it did not support all
PDF attributes, in particular security attributes such
as encryption and digital signatures.
As shown in Figure 18, BI Publisher addressed all
these issues. More importantly, as has been dis-
cussed, the data, the layout, and the output are sepa-
rated in BI Publisher. From a programming point of
view, this allows the developers to concentrate on
data models, train their users on report formats, and
then use BI Publisher to decide how they are going to
deliver information.
One of the applications the Washington Division
developed was to manage information related to
Figure 18
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transmittals. When they send or receive information
from a client, supplier, or subcontractor, they record it
via transmittal; for each project, they maintain a
record of all incoming and outgoing information.
This is based on EMC’s Documentum, and uses a
product on top of that called McClaren.
You can use the BI Publisher environment in three
ways:
• As a stand-alone report server, where you log in
and execute reports
• As a Web service provided by Oracle, which you
access to execute reports you have defined within
BI Publisher
• By calling BI Publisher with an API
In the example in Figure 19, they use the API to call BI
Publisher. Documentum has its own JDBC connection
that uses DQL (Documentum Query Language), an
SQL-based language. The information is stored in
an Oracle database. You can use SQL, but the data
structure is very complex. So Documentum puts a
logi-cal structure above that, to make it easier to
access the data. The JDBC installed in BI Publisher
 Figure 19
allows you to query data through BI Publisher to the
document control language.
Washington Division’s goal is to generate labels for
the documents that go out or come in with a trans-
mittal; one transmittal may contain hundreds of doc-
uments. They needed to automate the process to
generate the number of labels needed for each docu-
ment.
Automating the Process
Figure 20 shows what the BI Publisher form looks
like. The user who created this form was a superuser.
She was very good at Word and Acrobat Writer. While
it usually takes Washington Division a day or two to
train superusers, she was able to add the data into
her form in a couple of hours. She generated this in
Word, and then they taught her how to attach the
data to the appropriate fields she had designed.
Next, Washington Division developers use Oracle
service-oriented architecture (SOA) to actually put
this process in place. They use a BPEL (Business Pro-
cess Execution Language) process that is exposed as
a Web service; the application makes a request via the
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particular transmittal. The BPEL process makes a
connection to the appropriate Docbase that contains
the information, gets the transmittal, and then gets
all the associated documents that McClaren has
attached to that transmittal. From that the developers
extract the data to obtain the XML content of each
document associated with the transmittal. Then they
marry that with the format above, and process it via
the BI Publisher API. What is returned to the user is a
document that looks like Figure 21: Each item in the
figure is a label that can be peeled off and attached to
a document associated with the transmittal.
One of the other applications Washington Division
wanted to deploy was Web-based. They wanted to be
able to provide a reporting system for any Web-based
applications they developed, as described in Figure 22.
Now they have an application called PTS (Project
Tracking System). This application was developed
using Adobe Flex, so it uses the Adobe Flash plug-in
on the client side. They chose this technology
because they wanted to provide a rich client in a Web-
based application, and they did not find one in
the.NET environment for Web-based applications.
From a developer’s standpoint, the Ajax technology
 Figure 20

Figure 21

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 Figure 22
was in its infancy. As mentioned, this is an interna- Converting the Reports
tional company, and they needed to be able to pro-
Washington Division converted 50 reports from Crys-
vide connectivity all over the world. Adobe Flex
tal Reports to BI Publisher in about 30 days.
provided that capability by providing a rich client
environment, allowing them to transmit information
They trained the developers in one week; they
rapidly to wherever the client is.
included training for the report writers. Since the data
model is separate from the format, they first had to
Their next step was to develop the reports they
develop the data model, which took two developers
needed for this environment. The reports were origi-
two to three weeks. Once that model was laid out,
nally designed in Crystal Reports; when BI Publisher
they used three interns to convert the layouts from
became available, they chose to move those reports
Crystal Reports and then attached the data in the
into it. Instead of using the API, they use the Web
appropriate columns in the report layout.
service provided by Oracle.
Figure 23 shows the report layout they designed in
So, they design the reports and place them in BI Pub-
Word. Behind it is the data model; the fields for the
lisher. They design the data models in BI Publisher
data are placed in the appropriate column.
and manage the security within BI Publisher, but
users do not execute the report from the BI Publisher
Figure 24 shows what it looks like on the BI Publisher
server. They do it through the Adobe Flash plug-in
side. In BI Publisher, you can organize directory struc-
and request the report, select parameters, and make
tures to segregate applications, and set up security to
the requests for the report. Those requests are made
limit the applications by users. If you have three dif-
through the Web service, which executes each report
ferent applications, you can have three different direc-
as if it were executed on the report server, and returns
tories and keep the reports related to each application
that report to the user in a separate browser session.
under its directory. You can segregate the administra-
Users can select whatever parameters they want and
tor of each area, so they can only manage the data
then generate reports.
and reports for which they are authorized.

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 Figure 23

Figure 24

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 Figure 25 shows a sample screenshot from Adobe
Flash, after you design the report and the user exe-
cutes it. Users select the parameters to execute the
report; the submitted report is returned in a separate
browser session.
As shown in Figure 26, users include on the front
page the parameters they chose for the report.
In Figure 27, you can see the information generated
in that report.
BI Publisher can produce some very sophisticated
reports. For example, for the report in Figure 28, the
user selects a time period. The bottom portion
of the figure shows the periods displayed; the data
on the top is correlated with those reporting periods.
So the data columns are dynamic; if you start with a
different time period, the data starts from there. At
the bottom of the report, BI Publisher uses BI Beans,
the same technology used in Oracle Report Server.
Availability and Integration
BI Publisher is available as a stand-alone product.
You can also purchase it with Oracle Business Intelli-
Figure 25
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gence Enterprise Edition Plus or as an option to the
Oracle Application Server.
As Oracle’s enterprise reporting tool, BI Publisher
also is integrated with Oracle Application Express
(APEX), Oracle’s Hyperion Planning or ERP applica-
tion suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, or JD Edwards
Enterprise One. We are working with other groups,
such as Siebel CRM, Oracle Transportation Manage-
ment, and some of the life sciences products. Soon
BI Publisher will be able to provide highly formatted
reports from a dozen more products.
For More Information
Visit TechTarget’s SearchOracle.com and look for “BI
Publisher” or go directly to http://oracle.com/tech-
nology/products/xml-publisher. The Oracle Web site
has data sheets, presentations, forums, an active
blog, and a very active community that keeps every-
one up to date on new and exciting things coming up
in the product.
 Figure 26

Figure 27

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 Figure 28

21 IT Briefing:
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 Common Questions
Question: Does BI Publisher accept data in formats
other than XML?
Answer (Donohue): Yes. Ultimately, when the data is
being merged with the generated layout template,
that data has to be in XML format. However, our data
engine turns the original data into XML format for
you. For example, when you write an SQL statement
through our query processor or data engine, we will
turn that into XML. But the data you request does not
need to start out as XML.
Answer (Colton): BI Publisher can take three formats.
First, you can design an SQL statement, and because
you can use third party JDBCs like those we use with
Documentum, it does not necessarily have to be in
Oracle Database or Oracle SQL; it can be Microsoft
SQL server or any number of JDBCs. Second, you can
build a Web service that converts the data from
another environment into an XML format that BI
Publisher will accept. Third, the data source can be an
RSS feed. So your file ultimately comes out in XML
format but you access it through a URL as a data
source.
Answer (Donohue): We are fairly open and flexible;
we do not require any specific data model, but can
accept data in a wide range of structures.
Question: Can you repeat what end-user tools BI
Publisher supports for layout?
Answer (Villacis): Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel,
and Adobe Acrobat. You can use any XML develop-
ment environment—XML IDE for example—that is
Flex Builder-compatible. We will also release an
online report builder shortly. So end users have multi-
ple ways to interact and work on the design of tem-
plates for the reports.
Answer (Colton): Before BI Publisher came out, the
Washington Division used Altova XMLSpy and their
design module; when we went to BI Publisher, we
were able to use what we created from Altova, as with
the XSL-FO for BI Publisher, without any changes at
all.
22 IT Briefing:
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Answer (Villacis): Our goal is to give our customers
the right support for tools commonly used to create
these types of layouts. And we extend that as needed,
as Adobe Flex Builder was offered this past year. So
yes, we support a wide range of tools to create lay-
outs.
Question: Converting 50 reports in 30 days is quite
remarkable considering that the data models—which
I assume did not exist in the Crystal environment—
had to be generated. Did you use any automated
tools to perform the conversion or was this largely a
manual effort?
Answer (Colton): This was largely the data models. In
BI Publisher, you design your data source through
SQL statements. That was the base of the Crystal
Reports, and we use those same SQL statements.
A couple of caveats: If you develop reports with Crys-
tal Reports, Oracle Report Server, or other tools, you
find that you have snippets of SQL code embedded in
other parts of the report. Because BI Publisher sepa-
rates the data model from the format, you need to
include all that data in the SQL statements.
Generally, when you use an SQL statement it flattens
the data model, and in some cases you may want the
hierarchical structure that XML provides. One of the
rich features of XML is that, if you build a good hierar-
chical model, you can use XPath to go up and down
the tree to get the data you need. Oracle has provided
a great definition for the data model, called a data
template; you can design your SQL structure so that
it is broken up into a hierarchy. For example, if I have
an invoice with line items and products under it, I can
build a hierarchical structure that allows me to really
use the power of XML, so that I can design a report
from that data template; I could start with the prod-
uct, or the line item, or the invoice order.
Answer (Donohue): On our Web page, we have a
white paper that describes how to convert from
Crystal Reports to BI Publisher; it takes you through
the process manually, and it is not at all onerous. We
are working on a utility that will assist you if you are
converting from Crystal. We already have a utility that
helps you convert from Oracle Reports. It takes the
 report definition, creates the separate data model,
and creates a layout template. So we have some
things coming that will make this easier.
Question: Do I need to have any Microsoft products
on the machine where I am running the BI Publisher
server?
Answer (Donohue): No, you do not. In BI Publisher,
we take the layout template that you have designed in
Word; the file format is RTF. We convert that to an
open standard called XSL-FO, so there is no need to
have any Microsoft or other products to understand
various template types. Nor do you need to have
Adobe or Microsoft products on the server to actually
generate all the various output formats.
Answer (Colton): We run our BI Publisher server in a
Linux environment.
Question: How long does it take to train users?
Answer (Colton): For developers, plan on about four
days to go in-depth through the technology. We
brought in an Oracle consultant and did a week-long
training course, basically four days of going through
the development. For part of that training we also
included the report writers. And we have some one-
day training courses to get a report writer going with
BI Publisher using the Word plug-in.
Question: If I have an Oracle database outside the
E-Business suite, does BI Publisher have tools or util-
ities—XSL-FO maybe—to convert this to XML for
me, or do I need to be an XML-cognizant developer?
Answer (Donohue): When you use the BI Publisher
Enterprise, our stand-alone product, we provide a
data-model builder. We have a little SQL, a query
builder, so you just point that to your schema in the
Oracle database. As with any other type of query
building tool, you choose the tables you want, the col-
umns you want, how you want them joined. That SQL
statement is processed by the BI Publisher data
extraction engine, and it generates XML. With our
data template technology, you can then structure that
XML as a hierarchy, which is often beneficial.
Question: How many people do you currently have
on staff developing reports and how many adminis-
tering your BI Publisher applications?
Answer (Colton): We have one system administrator
who manages the BI Publisher itself. And we have
23 IT Briefing:
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administrators for each application—for example, the
PTS application and McClaren—who manage the
reports that are created. They load their reports into
BI Publisher; the reports are then available to the
applications they are responsible for.
Report writers vary; I don’t know that we have a core
of report writers full-time in our environment. As I
mentioned, we use superusers, and today we have
probably around a dozen report writers capable of
writing reports in BI Publisher.
Question: Do you have a similar utility for converting
BusinessObjects’ Web Intelligence reports to BI Pub-
lisher?
Answer (Donohue): We have not started looking at
Web Intelligence reports yet. We are focusing on
Crystal initially, and we will probably look at Actuate
next, so we are looking more at enterprise reporting
tools. Analysis reporting typically has greater meta-
data and interactivity, so we have not started looking
at those yet. Our focus first is going to be on the
enterprise reporting tools.
Answer (Villacis): Web Intelligence from Business-
Objects is more focused as an end-user reporting
tool than a production reporting or enterprise report-
ing engine; that is what they focused on with their
Crystal Reporting technology. The vast majority of
customers who focus on Oracle BI Publisher will
be using core production or enterprise reporting
engines.
Answer (Donohue): The component within the
Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition
that most closely competes with or handles the same
capabilities as Web analysis would be our Answers in
dashboard products. So when we start to look at con-
version utilities, we will probably be converting to
those technologies rather than to BI Publisher, which
is targeted more toward enterprise reporting.
Question: How can an independent developer access
BI Publisher for learning purposes?
Answer (Villacis): Look at the URL given earlier, which
takes you to Oracle Technology Network (OTN). From
that page for BI Publisher, you can access a self-train-
ing license on the software that you can download,
and you have access to a wealth of information about
the product itself and its architecture. You can also
reach the discussion boards from that same page. A
 comprehensive set of information and resources is
available there.
Question: What type of architecture does BI Publisher
support?
Answer (Donohue): BI Publisher is a Java applica-
tion, so as far as IT infrastructure, it can support any
J2EE server; it supports JDK1.4 and JDK1.5. Obviously
our preference is that you run it with the Oracle Appli-
cation Server, but you can run another application
server that supports that JDK version.
As mentioned before, we have three ways to imple-
ment BI Publisher. One is as a stand-alone applica-
tion. The second is to integrate it through our Web
services into an SOA architecture. Third, if you want
highly customized applications, you can embed our
Java classes and take advantage of our Java APIs to
do highly embedded customized applications.
Answer (Colton): We began testing in a Sun Solaris
environment. Then we moved to a Linux server that is
currently in production. You can run either in the Ora-
cle environment, as a stand-alone OC4J, or within the
Oracle Application Server.

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