Past Discoverer...And Beyond!

Apologies to all you Buzz Lightyear fans for the title...

If you pay any attention to the Oracle enterprise applications space, you’re likely aware of the fuss being raised over the impending demise of Oracle Discoverer.  Discoverer is a pretty nifty ad hoc reporting tool used for both enterprise applications and in “home grown” data applications.  It’s been a pretty good tool when used properly.

The thing is, Discoverer has been around for a very long time.  And, in all honesty, it just doesn’t play well with the other components in Oracle Fusion Middleware (“FMW”). As FMW continues to evolve and progress, Discoverer has unfortunately become a casualty of that evolution and progression.  While you don’t want to stop the continued improvement of FMW over a single component, the sunsetting of Discoverer does leave Oracle customers in a bit of a pickle moving forward in regards to handling ad hoc transactional reporting.  With that pickle in mind, let’s take a look at your options moving forward:

And a few notes to supplement the table of options:

1.  I’m not planning to discuss the legitimacy of the fuss over the sunsetting of Discoverer here.  You can check it for yourself at Page 8, Line Item 9 in the Oracle Lifetime Support document for Fusion Middleware at http://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/lifetime-support-middleware-069163.pdf. 

2.  Oracle’s recommended path is for Discoverer users to leverage Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence, which is part of the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition platform.

3.  Feedback from those using DOMA indicated that only the simplest of Discoverer workbooks will convert automatically.  Most require significant manual assistance.

So what’s the upshot of this blog post?  So that you can be informed and begin to prepare for the change.  While it’s not time to panic by any means, it is time to get ready:  consider your options, lay out your roadmap, then execute against that roadmap.  Discoverer is sunsetting.  What’s your plan?