Its finally here, Oracle BI Publisher 11g! Right now you need to download the full suite and then select to just install BIP. Not sure if there are plans to release an installer just for BIP? There is so much new stuff, its like Christmas ... OK, now Im getting geeky. The highlight for me is the new data modeler, no more Notepad to build your data template there is a cool and useful new user interface.
Yep, your seeing that! Database query connecting to Excel spreadsheet ... bringing in supplemental Excel data into the main data set. Way cool demo I built there!
The big new fundamental change is a further separation between report and data model. You can now really consolidate your data sources and come up with a common data extraction with a superset of parameters. You can then add the data extract to multiple reports and show/hide and default in parameter values. There's so much more!
The documentation for the new release is available here. I'll be covering as much as possible in upcoming posts, gotta get those Excel template posts out too!
It's been a while coming but I think its been worth the wait. Enjoy!