What is Oracle BI Publisher ? - A brief Introduction

In this post, we will have small introduction for Oracle BI Publisher. Let's what this product is all about.

Going by following Bookshelf Guide reference,
Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Installation Guide(Release 10.1.3.4,Part No. E12690-01) >Introduction>Introduction to Installing Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher

we can find crisp intro of Oracle BI Publisher as given below:
Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher offers you the most efficient, scalable reporting solution available for complex, distributed environments. It provides a central architecture for generating and delivering information to employees, customers, and suppliers—both securely and in the right format. Oracle BI Publisher reduces the high costs associated with the development, customization and maintenance of business documents, while increasing the efficiency of reports management.

Oracle BI Publisher is a Stand-alone Reporting Tool. It's a Java-based product and can also be used with vastly used CRM and ERP Products such as EBS, PeopleSoft, Siebel, JD Edwards and BI Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) with varied Output Formats like pdf, word, html, ppt, excel, csv, xml, Flash etc.  Earlier, it was called as XML Publisher. Acronym- XMLP stands for XML Publisher and could be seen at many places where BI Publisher is implemented.

Generating Reports from Varied Sources in Varied Output Formats

It's a template based publishing engine and separates the Data Schema and Data Layout development which gives the customer flexibility to make as many changes in the report layout as user wants without getting into the hassles of touching the original repository (unless and until the Schema requirement gets changed).

Along with all this, BI Publisher also gives the flexibility to Localise the report output Formats Language with the help of translations files which are again independent of the Schema.

Hence,in nutshell BI Publisher works on the concept of treating three main components: Data Logic/Schema, Data Layout, Translation separately at the Design Time and all these three gets merged when the final report is generated.

This gives customer:
- More Flexibility
- Single Schema/Logic Definition with flexibility of re usability across multiple reports.
- Language Localization Support
- Lack of Maintenance Cost
- Ease of changing the reports

Basic Architecture of Oracle BI Publisher