Here Comes BI Publisher 11G!

It’s been long since the last post. I’ve been on vacation plus leave of absence and traveling around northern Europe with my bike ‘Surley’. It was the best trip in my life and maybe the best thing I’ve ever done. But now back to work, another thing I love!

Well, first thing I found when I came back is the news of BI EE 11G being released finally! This is the long waited and much needed release with a lot of innovative new features and products. It provides much winder solutions and functionalities and it is the most competitive product in today’s BI and Reporting market. It’s Complete, Integrated, and Open.

And sure enough it goes the same for BI Publisher too. This is the most anticipated and the most innovative release with a lot of new offereings. Let me go through briefly.

Data Model Editor

This is a new product targeted for the reports developers. Well, probably I don’t need to explain how this product improve your development productivity. Now you don’t need to see or edit the Data Template XML files anymore! You can build queries, create calculations and define the data structure all in the Data Model Editor Web UI. Along with this, now the data model you create is completely separate from reports. That means you can choose any existing data model when you create a report. This makes the report maintenance much easier and improve the data quality and governance.

Layout Editor

This is another new product targeted for both Business Users and Reports Developers. This is a tool that you can use to create from a simple report to a management report to a pixel perfect report within the Web UI. You don’t need to install anything, not even need an add-ins or anything. The Web UI is similar to the MS Office 2007 , it’s very intuitive so the business users don’t need to have any special training. You can open the Layout Editor with your browser, select data columns you want to display, format and layout as if you use MS-Word, then boom, you get your report output the way you want and many different formats.

Interactive Viewer

 

This is personally the most excited new product in this release for me. Finally BI Publisher brought your reporting experience complete and rich. You can not only generate the reports in a pixel perfect, but the same report allows you to interact with the data to get deeper insight. You can click any chart or pivot table within the report and all the data presented in the report automatically and instantaneously updated and filtered based on the Click! I’ve been working on many BI and Reporting projects where often the reports requirements contains both pixel perfect and interactivity nature. Until recent the users either needed to sacrifice some functionalities or requirements for a sake of selecting one reporting tool or needed to have two reports with two different reporting tools or components. This brought a tremendous frustration and maintenance headache on both the report users and developers. But not anymore. This is the complete reporting solution for both interactive reporting and product reporting, and for both the users and the developers.

Well, there are many other new enhancements like Enterprise Security and Scalability, Scheduler, UI, Reports editor, new diagnostic capability, etc. I will talk about them some time soon. So stay tuned!