Friday 9 December 2011

Book review - Oracle BI Publisher 11g: A Practical Guide to Enterprise Reporting


Below is a review of Oracle BI Publisher 11g-A Practical Guide to Enterprise Reporting, written by Daniela Bozdoc and published by Packt Publishing. More information about the book can be found at here
A sample chapter of the book can be downloaded here
This book is about BI Publisher which is increasingly becoming a major component of Oracle’s BI solution. Its ease to use, simple design and user friendly template builder have played a major role in increasing the popularity of the tool
The author begins by meticulously pointing out the differences between the previous version and the new version of BI Publisher. The strength of this analysis lies in the point by point descriptions, distinctly mentioning the newer features.
The book contains ample number of screenshots to understand and follow the process in a better way. It is a good attempt to present pictorial process manual to achieve various things in the tool
The book also gives due attention to the basic concepts like creating data sources. These features were introduced in the previous releases but they form the heart of the tool.
We also have a complete working example of a BI Publisher report which helps us understand the entire life cycle of the development of BI Publisher report.
The most striking feature of the book is the inclusion of a section to list the common debugging mechanisms.
The success of this book lies in the arrangement of the material. Rather than being a glossary of the features offered by the tool, the book attempts to group various tool functions to showcase the achievable end results.
In a nut shell, it is a good asset because of its ease to use and simple understandable narration of the intricacies of the tool. The author's success has been in the ease with which she has managed to describe the concepts

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