Acknowledgments

When you write a book, you develop a “love-hate” relationship with just about everyone working on the project. A husband and wife team working on a book together could cause all kinds of problems, but we are crazy in love enough to get through it without coming to blows. Everyone in our family will be so happy when we can stop saying, “I can’t, I have to work on the book.” We want to acknowledge our children for their sensitivity and patience. We also want to acknowledge each other for demonstrating genuine kindness under difficult conditions.

We received some special help writing this edition of the Discoverer Handbook. We felt it was very important to add information on the Administration tool in the second edition. However, we knew that additional expertise was critical in getting it right. The chapter on Discoverer configuration and the appendix on functions could not have been written without the help of our good friend and colleague Chris DeYoung. Chris brought a special enthusiasm for details, which has really enhanced the book.

Another addition to the Handbook was the chapter on OLAP. OLAP was brand new to Discoverer in 2005, so trying to come up to speed with it while discovering all of the other new features was impossible. We called upon another colleague (and Michael’s fellow Brit) Mark Rittman to give us all an introduction to this new feature of Discoverer. Mark is a real Discoverer master and helped us to deliver a chapter that has wetted all of our appetites for Discoverer OLAP.

So far, it sounds like a whole lot of love. Where is the hate? The real “love-hate” relationships are between the authors and their editors. In retrospect, we could easily say that we loved our editor, Lisa McClain, throughout the entire project, but that would be a lie, and you know where liars go! Some mornings opening our e-mail was the hardest thing to do because we knew that we were going to be hounded for delinquent chapters or missing screen shots. But the end result is a book we are proud of and that was not drastically overdue. Lisa was truly good to us and treated us with respect and sensitivity. We appreciate her hard work more than we can say.

We would also like to acknowledge our copy editor Bob Campbell, without whom we would sound like idiots. Michael uses too many words, which Bob gently removed without hurting his feelings. Darlene, on the other hand, does not use enough words, and Bob was diplomatic in stating that something could use a better explanation.

Our final acknowledgement is to our technical editor from Oracle Abhinav Agarwal. His passion for Discoverer was evident as he helped us to make sense of all the new features. Because of Abhinav, this book is accurate technically and conceptually.