Chapter 1. An Overview of Discoverer

This chapter will introduce you to Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer 10g (10.1.2), henceforth referred to as Discoverer, the award-winning reporting and analysis tool from Oracle Corporation. We will discuss business intelligence and see how Discoverer is perfectly suited to be your company’s tool of choice. We will discuss some of the recent business intelligence trends and how Discoverer fits in with these trends.

The 10.1.2 release of Discoverer, which came out at the end of December 2004, is very exciting and places Oracle firmly at the helm of the information revolution. This new release is more powerful than ever before and has given a whole new look and feel to the two web-based products, Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer Plus and Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer Viewer, henceforth referred to as Plus and Viewer. Perhaps the single biggest innovation, though, is the capability for Plus and Viewer to access OLAP (Online Application Processing) data. We will discuss this in more detail later in the book.