Another BI blog of interest

You may be interested to know that Steven Chan has started a blog (link) dedicated to Oracle's E-Business Suite. In Stephen's own words he describes his site as follows: "An insider's take on technology stack-related topics for the Oracle E-Business Suite, with the occasional product announcement, glimpses into the inner workings of Oracle Development, editorials on business philosophy, and musings on IT industry news."

Of significant importance to the Discoverer world is the fact that Steven, who is the Director for Applications Technology Integration Oracle E-Business Suite Development, will be posting insider snippets from Oracle as they relate to both Discoverer and E-Business Suite.

One notable posting today (link) details the fact that Oracle plans to desupport Discoverer 4i by the end of October this year. This will have a significant impact on all of the Oracle Applications (E-Business Suite by another name) organizations that have been resistant to upgrade Discoverer to 10g. Now is the time to plan your upgrade. There is no reason for staying behind the eight ball any longer. Discoverer 10g R2 (10.1.2) is fully certified for Oracle Applications and, to quote from Steven's posting:

"The good news is that there really isn't any reason why you should hesitate to upgrade. Discoverer 10g is faster, more efficient, and has more analytic features for your end-users.

For example, Discoverer 4i's automatically-generated SQL statements tended to be very long, and would result in extremely heavy database queries, which in turn would return massive datasets, weighing down your application server. You probably already know this from reviewing your server logs, and from the number of helpdesk calls from annoyed users whose workbooks are taking hours to run.

The Discoverer 10g release has an automatic SQL trimming feature that intelligently removes unneeded columns. Depending on the workbook, this can result in significant improvements in the responsiveness of workbook queries, and lighten up your Discoverer and database server load, as well."

So there you have it, straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak. I urge you to not ignore this desupport notice and begin your upgrade plans. One of the key phrases that I like to use in training is "What starts right, stays right". If you wait until the last minute to plan your upgrade you will rush it and possibly get it wrong. Plan now while you still have five months of support.