Improvements to the OLAP engine will focus on smoother enterprise-scale deployments managed from a central administration point. Customers seem to love our OLAP engine but deploying it to multiple sites from a single administrator wasn’t easy, Phillips said.
We’re fixing that in this next release of the OLAP engine due later this summer.
On the BI tools side, Oracle is completely revamping the user interface by introducing more wizards and support for more multiple report types. Phillips said that a product developed from its Applications division called XML Publisher, which he expects to be available across all Oracle’s applications soon, will deliver a flexible infrastructure for a range of enterprise reporting needs.
What [XML Publisher] does, it takes all of your reporting capabilities and puts it in a single repository. You then hit a button and decide how you want to substantiate that report — go to print, fax or website.
Users can design the front-end report using Word and Excel and put it into the repository which converts it to XML and makes it available to everyone, he said.
[Because] it’s all in a single XML repository it gives you a single infrastructure for all reporting. In most companies those are all separate products — whether production reporting and ad hoc query.Phillips added: We do a lot more BI than people know because we don’t break it out that way. [BI is] just another market for us related to the database.
Technically there’s a lot happening over the summer. We have a lot of BI products and we’ll be doing a better job of packaging it, Phillips said. You’ll be hearing us talking about that a lot more OpenWorld.
