Chapter 4. Analyzing Data and Creating Reports

In the previous chapter, you looked at some wonderful ways you can use SQL for business analysis and reporting. As you no doubt have realized, the only serious downside to this approach is that it requires you to manually compose SQL queries, which often is a time-consuming process, especially when it comes to answering complex business questions.

Using Oracle Business Intelligence components, you don't have to write SQL queries by hand. These clever tools hide the SQL complexities, allowing you to focus on the questions you have, without having to know or worry about how they're going to be implemented in SQL.

In this chapter, you will see the following Oracle Business Intelligence components in action:

• Oracle Discoverer Administrator

• Oracle Discoverer Plus

• Oracle Discoverer Viewer

• Oracle Reports Server

• Oracle Reports Builder

Analyzing and reporting with Discoverer

Some examples of using Discoverer were provided in the first two chapters, giving you...

Analyzing and reporting with Discoverer

Some examples of using Discoverer were provided in the first two chapters, giving you some understanding of this Business Intelligence tool. The following sections take a closer look at Discoverer Plus, Discoverer Administrator, and Discoverer Viewer, explaining their features in more detail.

Preparing your working environment with Discoverer Administrator

Before you can start exploring the Discoverer Plus features, though, you need to create a working environment allowing you to look at those features by example. What you'll need is some data stored in the underlying database as well as an EUL making this data available for use in Discoverer. As for the database data, you will use the database already created in the preceding examples. If you've followed the instructions in the Multidimensional data analysis with SQL section of the previous chapter, you should have a database schema with the tables populated with data. If you haven't done it yet, do...

Using Oracle Reports

Oracle Reports is another intriguing Oracle Business Intelligence component, which comes with the Oracle Business Intelligence suite. As its name implies, Oracle Reports is a reporting tool. It enables you to develop and deploy a wide range of reports against virtually any data source and then publish them in a variety of formats, including HTML, XML, and PDF.

Starting up the Reports Server

Oracle Reports uses Reports Server to listen for client requests and then processes them, generating requested reports or fetching the completed ones from the reports cache. Before you can make use of Reports Server, you have to start it up. This can be done with the following commands issued from an operating system prompt.

On Windows:

rwserver server= reports_server_name

On Linux, you would run the following command instead:

rwserver.sh server=reports_server_name

This should output the following dialog:

As you can see in the figure, you can always shut down the running server...

Summary

This chapter gave you some detailed examples of how you might use the Oracle Business Intelligence components for analysis and reporting. In particular, you looked at the Oracle Discoverer components, including Discoverer Administrator, Discoverer Plus, and Discoverer Viewer. Then, the chapter proceeded to another Oracle Business Intelligence component, Oracle Reports, explaining how you might use Reports Server and Reports Builder for building, deploying, and executing reports.

In the next chapter, you will look at how you can use the Oracle data warehousing feature for analysis and reporting. After a brief look at the architecture issues, the chapter will cover how to build a data warehouse, using a design tool such as Oracle Warehouse Builder.