Discoverer Migration Options

Raju1225

Hello All,

Oracle announced that Discoverer is going to be sunset. I see several challenges for migrating discoverer to OBIEE and other third party tools.

 

Can you please share what are the challenges which you faced for converting discoverer reports and what will be better options.

 

I have done several discoverer migration projects and still facing lot of challenges.

 

It would be great if we share our knowledge to resolve any discoverer reports issues quickly.

 

Please contact me [email protected] if you have issues/questions for migrating workbooks.

 

Thank you.

Michael Armstrong-Smith

Hello Prasad and everyone

Like me, if you are a big user of Discoverer, you would have been alarmed at the news a few years ago that Oracle was dropping the tool. Well, once I got over my initial shock I started to think about how my clients could maximize their use of the, at times, millions of dollars of investment.

Oracle Corporation’s statement of direction implies that they will not force you off of Discoverer and on to another tool. It is important for all to understand though is that like all software, Discoverer will one day be phased out in order to make way for more modern BI solutions.

You currently have three options: Protect / Extend / Evolve

1. Protect your investment by staying with Discoverer, continuing to receive Oracle’s outstanding support until it runs out, after which you will be on your own
2. Extend you your investment by continuing to use Discoverer while integrating to other Oracle BI tools such as Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (OBIEE)
3. Evolve your investment by formulating a strategy to fully migrate to another tool, perhaps one of Oracle's other BI tools such as OBIEE, or to a third party tool such as splashBI owned by EiS Technologies or even going via their tool into OBIEE

Many years ago I was on the advisory board for Oracle Business Intelligence and I know Oracle had promised that there would be a migration tool that would take a Discoverer EUL and Workbooks and convert it. Sadly nothing came of that tool which in the early days looked very promising.

My company, which has been heavily into EUL development, Discoverer training and installations, was dismayed to think that all that investment, which is in the millions and millions of dollars, would be lost. We started a search to see if there is something that could be done and after many, many months of fruitless searching came across EiS Technologies in Atlanta, GA, who claimed they could convert not only the EUL but also the workbooks. You can imagine how excited I was so I contacted them to find out that their claim is true, their utilities really can convert a Discoverer EUL and most of the workbooks. I say most because, if you have extremely complex workbooks containing analytic functions or other complex analytical calculations embedded these will not convert on the first pass. However, being able to convert the EUL and most of the workbooks without manual intervention or rewriting is a huge step forward.

Their utilities convert the workbooks and EUL into their own tool which is every bit as good as other reporting tools on the market. However, if you wish to remain with Oracle they also have a utility that will then take this converted metadata and migrate it into OBIEE.

Hope this helps

Michael