Prior to the 10g release of Discoverer, companies that wanted to present Oracle OLAP data had to develop their own applications using BI Beans, typically in JDeveloper. With recent releases, there are now several choices for front-ends that display Oracle OLAP data: Discoverer 10g, Custom-built BI Beans, Spreadsheet Add-in for OLAP, OLAP Web Agent, or 3rd party tools.

Discoverer release 10g gets its power from BI Beans to present Oracle OLAP data. How does this strategy give Discoverer users the flexibility to analyze OLAP data? What features does this expose to the users over what has been available previously? Custom applications that use BI Beans have many of the capabilities that are in the Discoverer 10g application. When would you want to use Discoverer and when would you want to code an application directly in BI Beans? This presentation will contrast Discoverer 10g with custom-built BI Beans applications and discuss why you should consider these or other products.