Introduction

The first step in writing the second edition of the Oracle Discoverer Handbook was to determine who our audience was. In the first edition, we limited the content to the end-user edition of Discoverer, with the focus primarily on Desktop. In this edition, we have changed our target audience to cover not only end-users but administrators as well. The focus for end-users has switched to Discoverer Plus. However, Desktop is still covered, and we have also included information on both Viewer and Portal. We felt we would be doing our readers a disservice if we did not include the Administration Edition in this book; we have, therefore, added a complete new section dedicated to administrators.

Our second challenge was deciding which release of Discoverer to include. At first we thought we could cover multiple releases, but were soon overwhelmed with the effort and potential page count involved. The decision was made to focus our attention on 10.1.2.

We also knew that users of Discoverer at all levels were in need of a tutorial on this powerful and very complex piece of software. We made the decision to reach out to all users—from the novice end-user to the true power user.

We believe there is something in this book for every Discoverer end-user and administrator. The novice will be taken from the very first step of each task through to its successful completion. The power user will find information he or she may have otherwise needed to look for elsewhere. We have organized the steps for every task into useful and easy-to-follow workflows, and have tried to provide as much detail as possible. The administrator will find help and support to release the power of Discoverer to their end-users. We have shared with you skills and methods that have taken us years to develop.

When we took on the challenge of writing this tutorial, our desire was to bring all of Discoverer’s powerful features into one source. You will find many hitherto undocumented Discoverer features in this book as well as dozens of tips and tricks.

How This Book Is Organized

This book is divided into four sections and four appendixes:

• Part I, Getting Started with Discoverer: Part I covers the basic history and philosophy of Discoverer. It also contains an extensive description of the types of databases with which Discoverer can interface. Following this introductory material, we deal with the login sequence and all steps of the Discoverer Workbook Wizard.

• Part II, Editing the Query: Part II focuses on turning a basic Discoverer query into much more. We begin with formatting issues, such as font, colors, headings, and numbers. We then move on to graphing in Discoverer and turning a query into a well-formatted and ready-to-deliver report. Chapter 9 is all about analyzing data. This is a powerful tutorial on the elements of analysis as well as how to use Discoverer’s various tools to analyze your data. Chapter 10 covers using Discoverer Viewer. We felt there was enough power in this great new release of Viewer that it deserved its own chapter. Don’t overlook the advantages of using this tool in your organization.

• Part III, Advanced Discoverer Techniques: The first three chapters of Part III take all of the Discoverer tools and give detailed instructions on how to use them effectively, including refining items, drilling, and building effective conditions, along with refining parameters, calculations, sorting, and percentages. The next two chapters of Part III deal with query management, user preferences, the toolbar, and how to interact with the Discoverer administrator. With the inclusion of OLAP in Discoverer, we felt the need to offer an introduction to the OLAP tool; therefore, the final chapter of this section is dedicated to the power and features of Discoverer OLAP.

• Part IV, Using the Discoverer Administration Edition: In this section, we have attempted to pass on as much of our knowledge and experience in building and managing great business areas as we could in the pages allowed. We could have easily written a one-thousand page book on the Administration Edition alone, but we surely would have killed each other had we tried. Chapter 20 covers configuration. This highly technical chapter is a must-read for anyone wanting to know how to manage Discoverer on an Application Server.

• Part V, Appendixes: There are four appendixes in this book. Appendix A is “Michael’s Gold Mine of Questions and Answers.” As you can imagine, questions come in to us at what is sometimes an alarming rate, but Michael tries to answer them all. We have attempted to include as many of the questions he has answered over the years as possible. Appendix B contains a detailed list of all of Discoverer’s functions, including syntax, descriptions, and examples. It also contains a detailed list of format masks and a simple introduction to the use of analytic functions. Appendix C contains a description of the various types of databases you can use with Discoverer. This appendix also covers views and in particular Noetix Views. Appendix D gives a description of the tutorial database we used throughout this book.