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This session will be very similar to the case study and lessons learned that I presented this October at Oracle OpenWorld (CON6115 - Financial Reporting with Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Against Relational Databases).

As a BI consultant, I've spent years pulling my hair out and multiple ugly attempts at generating Profit and Loss (P&L, Income Statement) reports directly within OBIEE. I finally bit the bullet and learned how to try and leverage BI Publisher with OBIEE to help generate these reports.

Ideally, I feel HFR and Essbase should be used for these deliverables whenever possible. However, many of my clients do not own Essbase, or don't have the desire/budget to upgrade to it for financial report requirements. As a result, the solution has to be built against a relational database source as opposed to OLAP cubes.

OBIEE alone has far too many limitations to be a true "financial report writer" and lacks many of the required formatting options. And as a newbie to BI Publisher, I found that tool alone too cumbersome and complicated to generate the needed data set outputs and calculations. So, I eventually settled in on a combination approach using the two -- OBIEE 11g to generate the raw P&L data sets and calculations, and BI Publisher to format the required layout.

In this case study session, I'll show the lessons I learned and illustrate one man's approach to solving this regularly needed problem of delivering financial reports by getting them out of an Excel based world and into a single supported reporting platform like OBIEE (with BI Publisher).