Oracle Discoverer

Explore New Dimensions

Oracle Discoverer
Explore New Dimensions

A key component of Oracles integrated business intelligence solution, Oracle Discoverer is an ad hoc query, reporting, analysis and web publishing tool that enables business users at all levels of the organization to gain immediate access to information from relational data warehouses, data marts or online transaction processing systems. Discoverers unique architecture, designed to simplify enterprise-wide deployment, includes a number of components. The User Edition provides superior ease of use, unsurpassed performance, integration with other desktop products and powerful data exploration via drill-anywhere capabilities, pivoting and charting. The Viewer Edition allows users to view and navigate through pre-defined reports with any standard Web browser. The Administration Edition provides an easy-to-use interface for the setup and maintenance of the powerful, server-based meta layer the End User Layer. The End User Layer is created from any relational meta data repository and hides the complexity of data structures and drill relationships from end users, allowing them to focus on solving business problems, not data access issues.

User Edition

Viewer Edition

Administration Edition

End User Layer (Business Abstraction Layer)

Data Warehouse, Data Mart, or OLTP database

Figure 1

Discoverer Architecture

Figure 2

Superior ease of use - wizard interface

database terminology in understandable business language. Business users rapidly create reports by taking advantage of pre-defined conditions and calculations available in the End User Layer. Report results may be shared with other desktop applications. Discoverers unique query prediction capabilities help users determine how long a report will take to run and, if necessary, schedule lengthy reports to run at a later time. Powerful integrated charting graphically displays trends and exceptions in data. Users drill down through charts to view specific details more closely.
High Performance Business Intelligence Superior Ease of Use

As a result of extensive usability testing and end user input from the outset of development, Discoverer is recognized as the easiest to use ad hoc query, reporting and analysis tool in the market today. End users have immediate access to information via an advanced, step-by-step wizard interface (Figure 2). Extensive help, cue cards and industry-specific quick tours provide additional assistance. The sophisticated, server-based End User Layer shields users from database and SQL complexity by presenting

Discoverer provides maximum performance by leveraging Oracle Server query technology such as bitmapped indexing and parallel queries. The expert SQL query engine dynamically generates performanceoptimized SQL queries. Non-blocking queries enable other tasks to run while a query is executing, improving productivity for business users. The incremental array fetch provides users with immediate response times and reduces network traffic.

Advanced Query Prediction

ResultsBase Architecture

Like other query tools, Discoverer provides a resource governor to stop long-running queries and control resource usage. In addition, Discoverer provides a unique query prediction capability that determines how long a report will take before it is run. (Figure 3). This removes frustration and gives users direct control over which queries to run and when to run them. Excessively long queries may be scheduled to run at a later time.
Intelligent Summary Redirection and Summary Management

The ResultsBase client cubic cache compresses and indexes retrieved data to enable rapid drilling and rotation on the client, without requiring repeated access to the database server.
Integration

analytical applications. Discoverer integrates with Oracle Designer for database and data warehouse design and generationand is included as part of the Oracle Data Mart Suite. As an integral part of Oracle Applications Business Intelligence System, Discoverer generates reports against Oracle Applications data using pre-defined business views and workbooks. The time and effort invested in setting up users, responsibilities and security in Oracle Applications is protected because Discoverer uses the same IDs and passwords. Discoverers unique support for Oracle Applications multi-organization access control allows users to query and analyze data from any and all organizations to which they have been granted access.

In a data warehouse, data is often pre-summarized to improve performance. When requesting information from a large detail table, Discoverer transparently redirects requests to any existing summary tables. Discoverer does not require an exact match between a query request and the summary tables available. Using a sophisticated algorithm, it identifies the closest existing match and seamlessly aggregates within the hierarchy. This reduces the number of summary tables needed and improves query performance by orders of magnitude. Discoverer also automatically identifies candidate summary tables which are generated, populated and scheduled at the touch of a button.

Discoverers tight integration with the Oracle database simplifies security, scalability, data access, drill out to external applications stored in the database, batch scheduling, query prediction, automatic summary management and meta data creation. Discoverer also provides seamless integration with Oracles complimentary business intelligence products Oracle Reports for enterprise reporting; and Oracle Express for advanced

Figure 3

Resource Control - Query Prediction with Scheduling option

Low Maintenance End User Layer

An intuitive management utility makes it easy to create and delete End User Layers. The Administration Editions easy, wizard driven interface further simplifies query building and analysis for business users.
Default Single Button Load

Setup and ongoing maintenance of the End User Layer is minimized through the extensive defaulting, wizard interface and single button load option. (Figure 4).
Figure 4

Low Maintenance End User Layer - Default Load Options

Designer Integration

Open Access

Flexible Warehouse Exploration

Discoverer provides access to nonOracle databases via ODBC, and includes native drivers to enable business user reporting against Oracle Rdb. By exporting reports to a number of common file formats, including HTML, ASCII and spreadsheet documents, Discoverer simplifies integration of report data with other desktop application tools. Users also share reports with one other via any MAPI compliant e-mail system.

Discoverers drill-anywhere and pivoting capabilities give end users a powerful tool for exploring information in a data warehouse or data mart. The drill architecture simplifies slicing-and-dicing of data to view results in different ways, giving a complete and accurate picture of the business without requiring users to write complex SQL.

Discoverer protects your investment in Oracle Designer by automatically loading definitions from Designer into the End User Layer. This ensures one central source for all data definitions and lets administrators use Designers powerful refresh option to update Discoverer and keep meta layers consistent.
Open Meta Data Access

Discoverer reduces the work involved in creating the End User Layer and associated business areas by re-using existing relational meta data sources. The End User Layer Gateway accesses diverse meta data repositories; for example, Extraction, Transformation and Load tools, other applications and query tools. It provides a single interface to build EUL business definitions for database objects.

Server Based Scalability and Security

Comprehensive Reporting

Batch and Scheduled Reporting

By leveraging the power of the centralized database server for storage of the EUL, Discoverer provides a scalable and secure ad hoc query and reporting environment for end users. The ability to define folders based on SQL statements provides administrators with even more flexible data access for end users. The unique, automatic summary table maintenance feature further reduces administration time and provides enhanced performance for users.
User EditionAd Hoc Query, Reporting, Analysis, and Web Publishing

Discoverers standard report templates (tabular, cross-tabular, group sort and master detail) have been specifically designed to satisfy common business requirements. Users bring data to life visually by applying a variety of font styles, sizes and colors to headings and data. Worksheet titles optionally contain bitmaps, page numbering, conditions and parameters to easily identify the particular data set to which the report refers.
Exception Reporting

Oracle Discoverer User Edition empowers business users to create reports and to perform powerful analysis, via the End User Layer, without understanding SQL or database structures.
Create Powerful Queries

The ability to place exception bands on large data sets easily identifies ranges of interest and lets users produce a traffic light effect by color-coding data ranges.

Discoverers server-side Batch facility schedules a report to run at a later date and time. (Figure 5). Users have the option of running the report in batch mode via a menu option or scheduling a report when Discoverers sophisticated query prediction mechanism warns that the query may take too long to run online. The Scheduling Manager lets users view and delete results, keep any number of copies of the report and/or choose to expire results after a pre-defined number of days. The Administrator has full control over the number of reports retained, the default expiration time for reports, the time period within which a user runs a report, and whether a user only runs reports in batch.

Building queries with the User Edition is straightforward and intuitive. Users simply select the data required and alter the layout of the worksheet by dragging and dropping. A stepby-step wizard interface makes it easy to build conditional filters, percentages, totals and calculated items. Users never have to worry about data types, parentheses, function names or data values.

Figure 5

Schedule reports to run at a later date and time

Enterprise Wide Reporting

Gateway to Advanced Analysis

Discoverers integration with Oracle Reports enables a report to be converted into Oracle Reports .RDF (Reports Definition Format) and Adobe .PDF (Portable Document Format) formats, allowing business users to share query results across the enterprise. (Figure 6). Once a query is in .RDF format, the Reports Server dynamically generates and publishes standard HTML reports via the Web.

Discoverer dynamically passes data to Oracle Express applications, enabling more sophisticated analysis such as forecasting, budgeting and modeling.
Distribute Reports

Discoverer enables reports to be sent to other users via a MAPI compliant e-mail system. (Figure 7). Users send reports as a Discoverer attachment, as other file formats (e.g., Excel, CSV, PRN, HTML, TXT), or as part of the e-mail message body.
Flexible Exploration

Extensive drill functionality lets Discoverer users drill among items and up and down hierarchies. Discoverer also provides the unique ability to drill from summary to detail data, as well as out to external applications that complement the data being viewed.
Just-in-time Drilling

Discoverers unique just-in-time drilling retrieves only the specific information needed to satisfy a particular query. Conditional drills allow retrieval of small, specific amounts of information that can be used with existing cached data to further improve performance and reduce network load.
Figure 6

Enterprise Wide Reporting using Oracle Reports

Date Drills

Tight integration with date structures in the database and the default date hierarchy generation means that specific date columns (for example Year, Quarter, Month) do not need to be explicitly created to perform date exploration. Users seamlessly drill through automatically generated columns year to quarter to month and so on. In addition, date dimensions may be placed on different axes of a cross tabular report to provide greater flexibility when viewing data.
Expand Drills
Figure 7 Send reports as an attachment or in the message body of an e-mail message

Users drill outside the default hierarchy structures specified in the End User Layer by defining individual drill paths. Using the same consistent interface, they simply choose the information they need next and expand the data set to the next level of detail.
Summary to Detail Drills

Many query tools provide the ability to drill through summarized data. Discoverer extends this in a unique fashion by seamlessly drilling from summary information to detail transactions. For example, a user noticing a profit increase for October in the East quickly drills to the individual detail orders to find out why this occurred. (Figure 8).

Figure 8

Summary to Detail Drills

Drill Out

Extended drill capabilities in Discoverer allow users to drill out of their data to supporting content such as a video clip, sound file, text file, word processor document, or spreadsheet. For example, a report containing medical records can be linked to images of patient X-rays. This powerful extension provides users with open-ended capabilities to access additional information stored outside any database structures. External files may be stored on the file system or in the Oracle database. (Figure 9).
Figure 9

Drill out to supporting applicationse.g. Video Clips

Business Charting

Discoverer users easily spot trends and anomalies in data by displaying them in graphical format. The intuitive chart wizard creates two dimensional and three dimensional graphs in a number of formats, including area, line, horizontal bar, pie, surface, pareto, doughnut, scatter, column, cube, fit to curve, polar, and open-hi-low-close. Charts are dynamically linked to the underlying data, allowing users to drill through the chart itself. (Figure 10).
Web Publishing

Figure 10

Business Charting - View trends and anomalies in your data

The ability to publish Discoverer workbooks in .HTML format enables a wider audience to view static query results using a standard Web Browser. (Figure 11). Exporting the Discoverer

workbook to the Oracle Reports .RDF, or Adobe .PDF, formats facilitates the publishing of dynamic HTML or .PDF via the Reports Server.
Ad Hoc Query and Analysis for the Web

With the Web release of Discoverer Viewer Edition (Figure 12), users access Discoverer workbooks from any standard Web browser, and then drill down to analyze query results. The Web release of the Viewer Edition provides the same industryleading ease of use and performance features as the Windows version of Discoverer. It also takes advantage of the unique query prediction, automatic summary redirection and rapid query performance technology. The net benefits to the organization are lower cost of ownership, greater user satisfaction and fast access to vital business information. The thin-client, 100% JAVA/CORBA architecture of Viewer Edition for the web makes it easy to deploy and provides unsurpassed scalability. It shares the same End User Layer as the Windows release, allowing companies to immediately deploy ad hoc reports to the Web without placing any additional demands on IS staff. By dynamically loading client Java applets from a middle-tier

Figure 11

Web Publishing

Figure 12

Oracle Discoverer Viewer for the Web

application server, Discoverer Viewer minimizes the cost and complexity of providing Web based ad hoc query and analysis capabilities to users throughout the enterprise.

Administration Edition Minimal Setup and Low Maintenance

Minimal Setup and Low Maintenance

Discoverers End User Layer Management Utility rapidly creates and deletes both End User Layers and the Discoverer Tutorial via an intuitive wizard interface. (Figure 13). The Administration Edition wizard interface automatically populates the End User Layer with a fast one-button load capability. The ability to create and maintain multiple End User Layers provides complete flexibility in data access and management among the business user community. By grouping information into logical Business Areas within the End User Layer, administrators make data access easy and intuitive for business users.

Extensive defaulting enables business users to immediately start querying their data as soon as the bulk load process has taken place. The initial Discoverer setup provides default folder names and descriptions, item names and descriptions, lists of values, join definitions, aggregation of data points, and drill definitions. With the End User Layer Gateway, administrators re-use information held in the Designer repository or other meta data repositories to automatically create Business Areas in the End User Layer. They also re-use existing meta data definitions for previously created Business Areas in order to save time. Composite folders provide virtual views of information which inherit formula changes from the base folders and provide users with a simpler view of the business. The ability to create folders with free-hand SQL provides greater data access flexibility and support for set operatorse.g. Union, Minus; to support Synonyms, Optimizer Hints and even Connect By clauses. (Figure 14). Pre-defining complex formulae and storing them as calculated items further reduces the complexity of data structures.

Figure 13

End User Layer Management Utility

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The database server provides a centralized, secure repository for business definitions in the End User Layer. Efficient multi-user access and the scalability of the server protect existing investments in Oracle technology. Using native database security to determine user access control saves administration time and significantly reduces security concerns. Administrators rapidly synchronize the End User Layer with changes to the database by using the Refresh utility.
Full Resource Control

Figure 14

Custom Folders - Extensive support for SQL operations

Administrators have full control over the business user environment. They define default resource governing limits for users based on the number of rows returned from a query, the elapsed time of a query, the query prediction warning threshold, and even resource governing system profiles defined in the database. For batch operations, administrators control on a per user or public basis the number of reports retained, the default expiration time for reports, the time period within which users are allowed to run reports, and whether users are only allowed to run reports in batch. The Privileges dialog makes it easy

to grant access to specific elements of User Edition functionality, and provides more flexible and granular support for administering End User Layers and Business Areas.
Advanced Summary Management

Discoverer collects statistics to identify aggregated queries that users perform on a frequent basis. Administrators may then automatically generate summaries based on these query statistics (Figure 15). By automatically creating and maintaining summary tables, Discoverer vastly improves performance. The summary wizard also registers existing summary tables to ensure the User Edition and

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Word and Microsoft Excel. The ability to export data to common file formats (e.g. XLS, TXT, HTML, and PRN) and to distribute reports via MAPI e-mail clients, facilitates information exchange between common desktop tools. The Discoverer End User Layer can be installed on any ODBC-compliant database, and native drivers are provided for Oracle and Rdb.
Migration from Discoverer/2000

Summary Wizard - Create and Automatically Maintain Summary Tables from Query Statistics
Figure 15

Viewer Edition for the Web exploit and re-use these summaries using Discoverers powerful automatic summary redirection capabilities.
Oracle Integration

Discoverer automatically loads semantic data from Designer into the End User Layer. Integration with the Oracle database provides support for role based security, resource governing profiles, query prediction, batch/scheduled reporting, access to external data such as video clips and word documents stored in the database and automatic summary table creation and maintenance.

Discoverer exports workbooks to Oracle Reports .RDF or .PDF format and automatically publishes dynamic Web reports utilizing the Oracle Reports Server. Customized Business Areas and views allow rapid access to Oracle Applications data with minimal setup and maintenance, providing business users with access to any Oracle-based applications modules.
Open Access

Discoverer/2000 users immediately take advantage of Discoverers enhanced functionality by effortlessly migrating existing End User Layer definitions. Queries defined using Discoverer/2000 are easily imported as Discoverer Workbooks.
Platforms

Discoverer User Edition and Discoverer Administration Edition are available on Windows95, Windows98 and Windows NT. Access from other platforms is available via Discoverer Viewer Edition for the Web.

Discoverers End User Layer Gateway uses meta data from third party extraction, transformation tools, query tools and other applications as the source of business area definitions. Oracle Discoverer is OLE2 compliant, which enables data transfer between familiar desktop tools such as Microsoft

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Oracle Corporation World Headquarters 500 Oracle Parkway Redwood Shores, CA 94065 U.S.A. Worldwide Inquiries Phone: +1.650.506.7000 Fax: +1.650.506.7200 Americas Phone: +1.650.506.7000 Fax: +1.650.506.7200 Asia/Pacific Rim/India Phone: +65.333.8816 Fax: +65.333.8806 Europe/Middle East/Africa Phone: +41.22.799.9900 Fax: +41.22.799.9901 Japan Phone: +81.3.5213.6666 Fax: +81.3.5213.6600 11657.0399.10K Part #: C12744-01

Oracle Corporation is the world's leading supplier of software for information management, and the world's second largest software company. With annual revenues of more than $8.0 billion, the company offers its database, application server, tools and application products, along with related consulting, education and support services, in more than 145 countries around the world. For more information about Oracle, please call 650.506.7000. Oracles World Wide Web address is (URL) http://www.oracle.com/. Oracle is a registered trademark, and Oracle Discoverer, Oracle8, PL/SQL, Oracle Rdb and Oracle Express are trademarks or registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation. All other company and product names mentioned are used for identification purposes only, and may be trademarks of their respective owners. Copyright 1999 Oracle Corporation All Rights Reserved Printed in the U.S.A.