Leverage Automation to Migrate & Replace Oracle Discoverer - ennVee

Overview

Oracle Discoverer has long reached its end of life. With new modern data visualization tools exceeding the capabilities of legacy Oracle Discoverer, now is the perfect time to be exploring a platform migration initiative.

How can this impact your business? The traditional way of building ad-hoc reports has fallen out of favor in place of self-service reporting that allows users to create reports and dashboards from multiple devices without requiring involvement from IT. Having access to better tools to track metrics that matter most to your operations is critical for business competitive advantage.

ennVee’s proprietary tool, ennSight, allows organizations to automatically identify all Discoverer reports and automate the migration to a broad range of modern platforms.

Replacement options using our Oracle Discoverer Migration tool

• Microsoft Power BI

• Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)

• Tableau

• IBM Cognos

• Excel PowerQuery

• Qlikview

• Oracle APEX

• OBIEE

• MicroStrategy

• Pentaho

• Open-Source Platforms

• Third-Party Platforms (i.e., Reports Wand)

How ennVee's Discoverer Extraction & Migration process works

Watch how our Oracle Discoverer Migration Tool, ennSight, automates the extraction and migration process.

Step 1 — Automatically identify all Discoverer reports and elements

In some cases, you may already know how many reports you own and which ones you want to migrate. Although, most of the time, the actual number of reports is much higher.

We run ennSight to identify every Discoverer report in the system, including any duplicates, triplicates, outdated, or obsolete reports. ennSight builds a list of each report by name, number of workbooks and worksheets, files, folders, who owns the report, the last time the report was run, and the time and effort required to migrate and test each report.

The Discoverer assessment concludes with our creation of a migration roadmap and project plan, which includes scope, conversion timelines, and fixed-bid pricing to migrate to your platform of choice.

Step 2 — Automatically extract the report SQL from Discoverer

ennSight automatically extracts the following elements and objects from Discoverer:

Step 3 — Migrating, Testing, and Enhancing the reports

The extracted Discoverer SQL is migrated into the target platform of choice. No visual enhancements are made to the reports prior to migration. The migrated report will look the same as the Discoverer report. The reason we migrate the reports "as-is" is to avoid any potential errors and speed up the process. Additional enhancements can be made once the reports are successfully migrated and deployed to Production. (In some cases, you may just want to see the same tabular layout that exists in Discoverer).

After the business users have unit tested each report, we deploy the reports to Production and provide support for a 2-week period.

Oracle Discoverer migration examples

• EXAMPLE 1: Migrating from Discoverer to Power BI

• EXAMPLE 2: Migrating from Discoverer to Microsoft SSRS

• EXAMPLE 3: Migrating from Discoverer to Tableau

• EXAMPLE 4: Migrating from Discoverer to Oracle BI Foundation Suite / OBIEE

Example 1: Migrating from Discoverer to Power BI

The Discoverer to Power BI migration path is the least intensive in terms of cost, time, and resources. In many cases, we have helped clients migrate from Discoverer to Power BI in conjunction with an internal Windows OS, desktop, hardware upgrade, or Office365 migration project. These initiatives can be executed simultaneously without exceeding the budget or requiring a significant commitment from client resources.

Learn more about the benefits and drawbacks of migrating from Oracle Discoverer to Power BI.

Example 2: Migrating from Discoverer to Microsoft SSRS

Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is a server-based reporting solution that customers deploy on their own premises for creating, publishing, and managing reports, then delivering them to users via web browser, mobile device, or email. SSRS offers mobile and paginated reports, as well as a modern web portal to access all reports in one location.

Key Features and Considerations for Microsoft SSRS

• Provides a Report Builder tool for end users to design and format simple reports
• Interfaces directly into Microsoft Visual Studio
• Role-based security: strong on-premise security control
• Requires purchasing SQL Server licenses
• Supports ad hoc reports
• Installation, configuration, and management can be cumbersome
• Lacking report visualization capabilities compared to other platforms (i.e., Power BI)

Learn how a top US college enriched its business intelligence and operational reporting capabilities by Migrating from Oracle Discoverer to SSRS in 8 weeks.

Example 3: Migrating from Discoverer to Tableau

Tableau's powerful packaged BI offering allows users to drag and drop to analyze data, connect to data in a few clicks, and visualize and create interactive dashboards with a few more.

Key Features of Tableau

• Easy to use but requires SQL knowledge
• Can be connected to many different data sources to import and use data.
• Subscription-based licensing can help organizations optimize costs
• Ability to deploy Tableau in the Cloud or on a local server
• Ideal for data visualizations
• In-memory processing
• Limited security options
• Fast development speed

Discoverer to Tableau Migration Process

Many organizations select Tableau due to its abundance of self-service features available out of the box, data visualizations, scalability via ease of upgrade, and affordable licensing.

Sample of Oracle Discoverer in Tableau:

Example 4: Migrating from Discoverer to Oracle BI Foundation Suite / OBIEE

The Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite provides the industry’s best-in-class platform for business intelligence, including ad-hoc query and analysis, dashboards, enterprise reporting, mobile analytics, scorecards, multidimensional OLAP, and predictive analytics, on an architecturally integrated business intelligence foundation.

This enabling technology for custom and packaged business intelligence applications helps organizations drive innovation, optimize operations, simplify IT, and deliver extreme performance at a lower total cost of ownership.

Closing Thoughts

Migrating from Oracle Discoverer to a new and modern data visualization platform can bring about improved visibility and help lower existing support costs. Our proprietary Discoverer automation tool and migration services have helped organizations migrate from Oracle Discoverer under tight timelines and budgets. The standard cost of each migration is delivered under fixed-bid terms. Using our proven automation tool and services, we are able to guarantee a 100% success rate on your Oracle Discoverer migration needs.