News

Oracle Releases Upgrade of Report-Writing Tool

• By Scott Bekker
• 05/10/1999

The database and applications vendor released an upgrade today of its enterprise reporting tool, Oracle Reports 6.0.

Despite the high version number, it’s only the second release of Oracle Reports as a stand-alone product. The versioning matches the Oracle Developer suite.

“The product itself has been around for seven or eight years at least, primarily as part of our Developer product line,” says Vince Casarez, Oracle’s vice president of tools marketing.

The tool came out about a year ago as a discrete product called Oracle Reports 3.0.

Casarez says Oracle has been fighting several factors in trying to get customers to think of Oracle for enterprise reporting the way they think of Seagate Software, Actuate Software Corp. or Sqribe Technologies (recently acquired by Brio Technology Inc.).

“I think a lot of times what ends up happening is people look at Oracle tools in general and say, ‘They’re really more for the Oracle server.’ We’ve spent a large part of our time focusing on making sure it works with other databases as well,” Casarez says.

Major enhancements include report bursting, multiple output styles from a single report run and clustering and load balancing for large numbers of users.

Teresa Wingfield, an analyst with Giga Information Group (www.gigaweb.com), finds Oracle Reports competitive with other enterprise reporting tools.

“Oracle Reports fairs well as a report-writing product competing against products from Actuate Software, Brio Technology and Seagate Software,” Wingfield writes in a recent report. “Oracle also rates highly as a provider of integrated business intelligence tools that include report writing, ad-hoc query and OLAP technologies.”

Other competitors in the integrated business intelligence space include Brio, Business Objects, Cognos Corp., Seagate Software and Hummingbird Communications Ltd. -- Scott Bekker