RE: Microsoft Excel vs. Oracle discoverer

Discoverer has something called an End User Layer (EUL) ripe with own security, tables, dimensions, joins, and materialized views. The EUL can be conveniently exported/imported for backups and/or upgrades. Thus, centralized reports can be created, secured, and shared ONLY with specific users/groups via a central EUL having a designated administrator. These reports can be viewed via a browser such as the infamous IE leveraging SSL (aside from Java applet no client installation required for Disco Viewer).

Of course the EUL also provides the ability to limit or govern user resources in creating and running reports so that ANY report could be limited to running NO LONGER than 15 minutes, for example. Further, aside from the ODBC avoidance issue, Disco also provides a utility for collecting and analyzing "ad-hoc" SQL thereby recommending materialized views. Upon recommendation these materialized views can then be created and managed/refreshed from within Disco. Disco reports can also be incorporated into Oracle Portal. The list goes on and on (and that whole SSO thing really makes a lot of sense).

In contrast, Excel and Access "reports" propagate themselves to the wide opens spaces of the LAN like a bad virus and like Herpes can be treated yet never go away. By the way, the young attractive couples riding bikes and sailing in the commercials look like they are having a really good time, too. I don't have Herpes, yet, but I think I want it.

PowerPoint is for presentations & any software application or tool explicitly devised for the sole purpose of generating or supporting the creation of corporate presentation materials is explicitly banned under the revised US Patriot Act including anyone harboring the software license for such a tool. I used PowerPoint in 2004 and lost my cattle ranch in Texas, three failed oil exploration companies, and part ownership in the Sheik's Kentucky Derby stallion. I loved that horse, man.

You may not get to bike and sail around the world with a beautiful person but if you want to keep your horse and failed businesses you'll stick with Discoverer....that's all I'm saying.

-----Original Message-----

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Murching, Bob
Sent: Tuesday, July 12, 2005 8:51 AM
To: 'juancarlosreyesp_at_gmail.com'; 'oracle-l' Subject: RE: Microsoft Excel vs. Oracle discoverer

Discoverer lets you aggregate and report (dynamically) on a much larger set of data than Excel typically is comfortable with. Therefore I treat Discoverer as a tool by which a user can identify or create the subset of information that he or she is interested in. Once they have sliced and diced to get the "chunk" of knowledge they are looking for, I certainly agree with you that Excel is the better tool for dressing it up for presentation purposes.

We've also seen Discoverer act a hybrid query/research tool that can cut down on development time. We have "quality control" users who are trying to find a single errant record in a 10 million record table and we typically built query forms for them. We have "analyst" users who want to drill through 25% of that same 10 million record table and we typically built a separate Oracle Reports-type report for them. With Discoverer, we can expose the table in a manner that fits the needs of both users---at the same time. You just have to be very careful thinking through the risks involved with exposing a particular set of data via Discoverer instead of query forms and canned reports.

-----Original Message-----

From: Juan Carlos Reyes Pacheco [mailto:juancarlosreyesp_at_gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, July 12, 2005 9:09 AM
To: oracle-l
Subject: Microsoft Excel vs. Oracle discoverer

Something funny I recently knew, is about a business who was trying to get oracle discoverer to fit his needs several months, and finally discovered that moving the data from oracle to an excel's spreadsheet, they could do everything they want to do (several complex graphics and tables).

I don't know which is the sense of oracle dicoverer if you can use excel. Specially for non technical people.

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8 years of experience in Oracle 7,8i,9i,10g and developer 6i
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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l Received on Tue Jul 12 2005 - 16:19:46 CDT