1 Introducing OracleBI Discoverer and OracleAS Portal

What is Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer?

Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer is an intuitive ad-hoc query, reporting, analysis, and Web publishing toolset that gives business users immediate access to information in databases.

Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer enables business users at all levels of the organization to make faster and more informed business decisions. Using any standard Web browser, you have secure and immediate access to data from both relational and multidimensional data sources. Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer provides a business view to hide the complexity of the underlying data structures, enabling you to focus on solving business problems.

Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer comprises a number of integrated components that work together with the Oracle database to give you a complete and integrated Business Intelligence solution.

What is a Discoverer workbook?

A Discverer workbook is simply a named collection of worksheets. Each worksheet contains the data and graphs that you need to extract business information from the database. Each worksheet contains the result of a query.

Worksheets can show information:

• as data points in cells (formatted as tables or as crosstabs)

• as graphs (OracleBI Discoverer supports many different graph types)

You use Discoverer Portlet Provider to enable Discoverer worksheets to be accessed by OracleAS Portal users.

What is Oracle Application Server Portal?

Oracle Application Server Portal is a component of Oracle Application Server that is used for the development, deployment, administration, and configuration of enterprise-class portals. OracleAS Portal incorporates a portal-building framework with self-service publishing features that enable you to create, publish, and manage information within your portal. Your portal can publish information from your database and other sources, provide and gather information from internal and external customers, and manage the content they will consume.

A portal is made up of groups of pages hosting many different types of content that come from many different sources, all presented from a single location, the portal. The basic structural components of a portal built with OracleAS Portal include page groups, pages, tabs, regions, portlets, and items.

Portlets are reusable information components that summarize or provide access to different types of information sources. You can customize the appearance of portlets on a per user or per group basis. Examples of portlets include a dynamically updated report of quarterly earnings, a Discoverer worksheet, a search field and button, or a simple user poll.

What are the different types of Discoverer portlet?

The following Discoverer portlets can be published in OracleAS Portal:

• Worksheet portlet (for more information, see "About the Discoverer Worksheet portlet")

• Gauges portlet (for more information, see "About the Discoverer Gauges portlet")

• List of Worksheets portlet (for more information, see "About the Discoverer List of Worksheets portlet")

About integrating Discoverer portlets in OracleAS Portal pages

You can integrate Discoverer portlets in OracleAS Portal pages using Discoverer Portlet Provider. Discoverer Portlet Provider is a Discoverer component that provides the Discoverer portlets for publishing Discoverer content in OracleAS Portal pages.

If you have created a Discoverer worksheet in Discoverer Plus Relational, Discoverer Plus OLAP, or Discoverer Desktop, OracleAS Portal makes it easy to publish the worksheet to a portal community.

For more information about portlet types available for Discoverer content, see "What are the different types of Discoverer portlet?".

The figure below shows a page in OracleAS Portal containing Discoverer portlets.

Key to figure:
a. A Simple Parameter Form portlet.
b. A Discoverer Worksheet portlet.
c. An Analyze link that displays the worksheet in Discoverer Viewer. Displaying this link is optional.
d. A Discoverer Gauges portlet.

There are a number of benefits that are available when you use Discoverer together with OracleAS Portal:

• display multiple crosstabs, tables and graphs from multiple datasources on a single page

  Discoverer Portlet Provider is the Discoverer component that enables you to put multiple presentations (crosstabs, tables, graphs) on one page. These presentations can be either from relational or OLAP datasources. Discoverer Portlet Provider also provides an additional visualization - Gauges which is not available elsewhere in Discoverer.

• control portlets through common portal page parameters

  Not only can you put multiple presentations on one page, but you can also have all of these presentations driven by a common set of Portal Page-level parameters.

• caching

  Discoverer Portlets provide results instantaneously, since they run the queries on a schedule in the background and cache the data for instant display.

• security enables greater control over what the user can see

  With Discoverer portlets you can create one portal page and show different results to different users. The data can be striped either by DB users or by SSO users in the database.

• personalization

  Discoverer portlets can also be personalized individually by users either through the Customization pages or by clicking the Analyze link.

For more information about OracleAS Portal, see Oracle Application Server Portal Configuration Guide.

What are Discoverer connections and why do I need to know about them?

A Discoverer connection is a stored set of database login details, comprising:

• a database user name - to identify the Discoverer end user

• a database password - to authenticate the Discoverer end user

• a database name - to specify the database containing the information that the Discoverer end user wants to analyze

• (optional) an Oracle Applications Responsibility - to specify a Discoverer end user's responsibility when using Discoverer with Oracle Applications

• (relational data source only) an EUL - to specify the End User Layer to be used

• a language - to specify the language to use in Discoverer

Discoverer connections enable Discoverer end users to start Discoverer without having to re-enter database login details each time they start Discoverer.

Note: If you have already used Oracle's Single Sign-On functionality to establish a database connection, you will not be prompted for password information when you start Discoverer.

You need to know about Discoverer connections because a connection must already exist before you can publish Discoverer data in a Discoverer portlet (for more information, see Chapter 3, "Authoring OracleAS Portal Pages with Discoverer Portlets").

In the example below, a connection called Customer Reports has been created that contains login information to connect to the database containing the reports.