OBIEE Vs BI Publisher

OBIEE Vs BI Publisher

I recently was asked by one client  the difference between BI Publisher and OBIEE reports. To them, BI Publisher is either a ‘different Feature’ within OBIEE, or it’s a completely different Application who competes with OBIEE in ‘reporting business’.

BIP
BI Publisher was originally a different application, which is now part of OBIEE. The best way to put it is, BI Publisher is another technology that has been integrated with OBIEE, so now the two are both parts of Oracle Business Intelligence.

OBIEE
OBIEE analysis provides dynamic and interactive ad-hoc reporting capabilities that allows users to dynamically change queries on the dashboard as well as interacting with other objections on the dashboard through action links. These are the original features of OBIEE, these capabilities can date back to nquire or Siebel Analytics time. The idea was to create a reporting platform and have users stay there, like the dashboards.

However, certain business requires very specific type of reports that are highly standardized across the industry that has to be pixel perfect in very specific ways. These can be financial statement, invoice statements, certain transactional statements in Auto industry and so on. These reports are typically generated by the department and have to be eventually mailed out to external customers, therefore the look and feel of these reports will have to pixel perfect, meaning that the space between each line has to be specific, the colors, the fond and layouts among all the fields have to be arranged in specific ways. Moreover, when you print these reports out, it should ideally fit in to one page (in most cases). All these requirements can’t be achieved easily using OBIEE’s native dashboard features. Therefore, Oracle has decided to integrate BI Publisher into OBIEE platform and making it additional reporting layer on top of dashboard.

BI Publisher allows you to define your data model using existing OBIEE analysis (or others) as data set where reports draw data from onto it’s templates. The template provides features similar to words document that allows you the design your own pixel perfect layouts like the below as an example:

[supsystic-tables id=’1′]

When to use what?

[supsystic-tables id=’2′]