The Official Rocela Blog

Oracle Unlimited License Agreements – considerations for prospective buyers Part II

rocela — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:03:42 +0000

Paul Bullen, Senior License Consultant Rocela

Last time we looked at the basic principles of an Oracle ULA: for an up-front license fee, you can use as much product as you like, declare your usage at the end of the agreement and then own that amount of perpetual license. This time we’ll look at bit more at specifics for considering a ULA.

How much will it cost/is it worth it? Unsurprisingly, this is a very weighty question! This next bit will sound obvious: the key consideration is how much of the unlimited product you are expecting to use, and how much that would cost if you bought ‘normal’ perpetual licenses. Doing this requires some insightful modelling—we’ll look at a relatively simple example here.

Let’s assume we are embarking on a major business-changing programme. We have a basic but large requirement for Oracle Enterprise Edition Database and the Partitioning option. For the sake of clarity, it’s easier here for us to work with a small number of products at high volumes rather than a large number of products at lower volumes, though this may be slightly less realistic.

In order to be able to consider a ULA, I need to know what the likely total cost would be for these products and the volumes. After some calculations for ‘normal’ perpetual licenses, and applying a suitably appropriate discount, I have a potential bill of £1.3m license (capex) to cover this project’s requirements. Of course, if I could get a ULA for £1m, this would be a ‘no-brainer’, otherwise I need to start ‘hedging’ my bets – £2m could still be attractive if there are other quantifiable and realistic requirements in other areas of the business. Remember, the £2m capex would attract an annual support cost, let’s say 22%, of £440k per year – but for this £440k, we could actually use well over £2m worth of licenses. So, how do I build the business case to spend the £2m upfront?

There are a large number of variables to consider here:
• Likely cost of ‘normal’ incremental purchase
• ‘Known’ versus ‘unknown’ license requirements
• How much potential is there is fully utilise the ‘Unlimited’ component of the ULA?
• What degrees of certainty are there that certain projects will go ahead and make use of the products to the level forecast?
• Is there any chance of under-utilising the ULA?
• Discount levels for incremental purchases
• How much is the ULA likely to cost? (A fairly critical question!)
• What products need to be included in the ULA? How might your Oracle strategy change over the term?
• As with all Oracle licensing, working out the licensing requirement and purchase is dependent on both technical expertise (ensuring the correct license requirement is calculated) as well as commercial and financial expertise
• An absolutely critical point about a ULA is that your support cost is based on the license fee paid up front – NOT the amount you actually use

In order to answer all these questions accurately, we’d need input from a number of people within the business, from technical to strategy to architects to commercial stakeholders.

Do not let the number of variables put you off here: think about the potential value of a ULA and the flexibility and savings it could provide your business. Oracle ULAs are an excellent way to gain control of your licensing quickly and to provide your business with a clear strategy without worrying about additional licensing costs. Remember: you pay a ‘flat fee’ to use as much of the Oracle ULA products on the agreement as you like without any impact—no change to support costs, no additional capex.

Buying a ULA is not a trivial task – it is a significant purchase which needs proficiency in understanding Oracle licensing. It is well worth having the independent expertise of Rocela’s consultants to provide insight, lead you through the process, ask all the right questions and evaluate the ULA properly. Rocela’s consultants work with complex Oracle licensing situations every day and have helped many clients understand and manage the complexities of ULAs thoroughly.

Next time we’ll look at what happens once you have a ULA, and the associated management of licenses provided by a ULA. Please feel free to leave any comments below.

Virtualisation – The Reality, not the Hype. Part II

rocela — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:52:47 +0000

by Tam Kyle, Senior License Consultant

It’s been a few weeks since we posted our last blog (Part I) which covered what Virtualisation is and why companies are so keen to take advantage of it. In this piece, we will discuss the sort of problems organisations encounter when virtualising and at a high level, how you can avoid these issues in the future.

Remember, at the end of this series, we will publish a fuller Virtualisation publication written by one of our Senior License Consultants, Tam Kyle – this will offer you much more detail and insight into this paradigm , how to side step the common pitfalls, its impact on licensing and the ‘3 Vital Treatments’ for Virtualisation ROI.

So, why do organisations get themselves into hot water when it comes to virtualising their environment? From our Roundtable discussion hosted in November last year, and our day to day working with large enterprise organisations, we have obtained an insight into some of the most common areas that companies fall foul of when virtualising.

• Scope creep – Part of the problem with virtualisation is that when you actually get something delivered, it’s good – people want more and they want it now. Don’t be distracted by the potential of success – by all means entertain change to your scope, but do it formally.

• Understand your needs and objectives – there are many physical implementations of virtualisation technology, but they’re not all alike; advanced implementations will bring advanced benefits, but require advanced technology. Have you considered the potential financial impact in your business case?

• Vendor Support – does the Vendor support your applications on a virtualised stack?

• Migration – Many organisations underestimate the work involved in migration. Get it wrong and you’ve got a broken application as well as a set of disgruntled users.

• License implications of migration – Checking whether your vendor is going to require you to double up licenses for the duration of the migration is important or you may unwittingly fall foul of their licensing rules potentially incurring unbudgeted expense for license non compliance

• Vendor lock-in – Your application is running on virtualised platforms and infrastructure in such an abstract manner that you don’t even know where your data is anymore. For some organisations, particularly those with sensitive data, this might not be ideal. Also, what happens if you need to change vendor?

• Ongoing control – Virtualisation isn’t a silver bullet – you don’t just walk away when it’s done. You’ve actually added a layer to your setup, so who manages the virtualisation part ongoing?

Avoiding the common issues of Virtualisation

Obviously I could go on for some time on how to avoid these common issues – for the purposes of this post, I have kept this deliberately brief. Remember that there will be a fuller publication available for down loading from our website after we have posted Part III (probably in a week’s time).

Our approach would be to understand your requirements thoroughly – document these and obtain appropriate sign off. Make sure that your business case has senior sponsorship and similar sign-off. Accommodate changes, but do it within a formal change request process.

Match your needs to a product set, or more rightly, product sets. Don’t necessarily force yourself towards one vendor – you might need to swap at some point.

Understand the footprint you are attempting to virtualise and remember, it’s unlikely that you’ll achieve 100% virtualisation. Manage expectations accordingly.

Consider the fact that there are some applications that just do not sit well with virtualisation; some are too big, have special vendor configurations and are tightly bound to hardware layers. There are other applications that you would not migrate for non-technical reasons such as company culture, 3rd party vendors and internal governance for example.

In our final blog post, we’ll look at the thorny issue of licensing impacts, with particular focus on Oracle.

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Oracle Unlimited License Agreements – considerations for prospective buyers

rocela — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:29:04 +0000

By Paul Bullen, Senior License Consultant

In the vast and complicated world of Oracle licensing, you may have heard about Oracle Unlimited License Agreements (commonly known as ULAs). Not many people fully understand how these license agreements work and often we see businesses using ULAs who do not know how to get the most from them, or who have fundamental misunderstandings about their licensing.

This is the first in a series of blog posts based on Oracle ULA’s. Over the next few weeks, we will describe what a ULA is and how to manage and declare one successfully. It should be noted that ULAs and Oracle licensing in general are very complicated and expert advice should be sought if you are considering, managing or declaring a ULA.

So, what is a ULA?

A ULA allows you to use an unlimited amount of a defined set of products, for a specific period. At the end of the specified period, you declare your amount of usage which becomes your perpetual license – you end up with exactly the same type of license as you would if you had purchased ‘normal’ perpetual licenses.

So, you pay your license fee upfront (your support cost is always based on this license fee), you use as much of those products as you like, declare your usage and then own that number of licenses. This type of licensing is different from Enterprise License Agreements and typically Oracle ULAs only apply to Oracle technology products (not applications).

Let’s re-iterate some important points here:
1) You pay the license fee up-front, there is no ‘true up’, ever. Your annual support and maintenance fee is based on this license fee
2) You may use as much of the defined products as you like, without limit (you do occasionally see ‘capped’ ULAs but these are less common than truly unlimited ULAs)
3) You declare your usage and own that number of perpetual licenses
4) Your annual support and maintenance fees are based on the original license fee
5) There is no true-up (have I said that enough?)

Sounds good, doesn’t it? However, there are a few things to consider if you are thinking about choosing an Oracle ULA. Let’s take a look at a couple of the above key points in more detail:

The license fee: if you ask Oracle to provide you a quote for a ULA, expect them to take into account everything they know about your roadmap and planned usage of Oracle. Additionally, remember that you are going to be paying for the luxury of deploying as much software as you like, and this will attract a premium.

Inevitably, ULAs are almost always multi-million pound/dollar affairs – don’t expect to get one for £50k. You need to consider how much you are expecting to spend over the term: this can be a significant challenge considering the term is typically three years. Building a business case to justify spending £5m now rather than a total of £8m piecemeal over three years takes some foresight. You may know you have significant project plans in the pipeline, or your estate may be woefully out of date and ready for a wholesale capacity boost or technology refresh. More on this in a later blog post

Support fee: this is an interesting and key part of ULAs. It’s important to realise that any existing support for the products included in the ULA will be added to your new ULA support fee. Support and maintenance is, as ever, linked to the initial ULA license fee and the first year is paid up front. The license fee is a one-off capital payment. Support and maintenance, like normal perpetual licenses, is opex paid annually and typically subject to retail price index (RPI). So if your current Oracle Database Enterprise Edition support and maintenance cost is £200k per year, and your ULA (just for DB EE) costs £4m (support at 22%, giving £880k per year), your total new annual support will be £1.08m. This leads us nicely into…

What happens to my old licenses? Any licenses for products on the ULA will be ‘converted and replaced’- i.e. you have no rights to use these after your ULA starts. Not a problem: you have a ULA!

Use as much as you like: Really? —you can use as much of the products on the list as you like. Most ULAs are for a number of products: getting this requirement sorted at the time of negotiation is very important. Plus, you need to be aware that new products may be introduced during the course of the ULA which you would not be entitled to use under this agreement.

You need to think about your Oracle strategy: will your upgrade to and management of 11gR2 benefit in the long term with some of those shiny extra cost options or management packs? Does your Oracle strategy involve newer Oracle products?

The really tricky part is making sure that everyone who downloads, installs and uses Oracle software across the business only uses software that is part of the defined list of products. Whilst using the software, it is vital you track its deployment. We’ll come back to this in another post—it is a critical part of owning a ULA.

Next time, we’ll look at an example ULA, explain it further and we’ll review other considerations. In the meantime, please feel free to ask any questions below!

There is more information on our website too!

Virtualisation – The Reality, not the hype. Part I

rocela — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 13:46:30 +0000

Tam Kyle, Senior License Consultant

So, just to remind everyone, Rocela will be posting a series of short blogs based on a Virtualisation Roundtable discussion that we hosted in November last year. This topic proved to be particularly relevant with many of our clients so much so that we thought we’d share the experience with you.

Remember, at the end of this series, we will publish a fuller Virtualisation publication written by one of our Senior License Consultants, Tam Kyle – this will offer you much more detail and insight into this paradigm, how to side step the common pitfalls, its impact on licensing and the ‘3 Vital Treatments’ for Virtualisation ROI.

As we said in our introduction post earlier this week, this piece will concentrate on (at a very high level) what Virtualisation is and why companies are so keen to take advantage of it.

So, what are we talking about when we discuss Virtualisation? The concept of Virtualisation is not a new one – IBM was one of the first to produce a type of Virtualisation years ago however this was restricted to its large expensive mainframe platforms.

Today, when you look at standard server based virtualisation technologies, what we are referring to (in very simplistic terms) is an abstraction of the hardware interface from the operating system – allowing you to visualise your Operating System (OS) as not being ‘hard wired’ to your hardware – i.e. decoupling your operating system and everything that runs on it from the physical tin. That being said, Virtualisation is no longer restricted to servers – you can virtualise storage, desktops, applications and so on. Gartner predicts that by 2018, the percentage of x86-architecture workloads running in VM’s will be a massive 86%.

In general, there are 3 main kinds of virtualisation:

• OS virtualisation
• Type 2 Hypervisors
• Type 1 Hypervisors

The type you chose/use depends on many factors – cost, functional or operational requirement, strategic vision, resource constraints, current issues and so on.

In general, the differences surround how a particular Virtualisation technology is implemented, and what it’s operational and functional capabilities and constraints are. For example, all OS Virtualisation ‘instances’ need to be of the same type, whereas Type 1 hypervisor ‘instances’ can usually run many different operating systems – you could have a Windows server running in a VM (virtual machine), alongside a Linux server in another VM. This provides more flexibility but requires typically more effort to provision, operate and support.

Let’s have a quick look at why Virtualisation is so popular with businesses today. Well, the answer is simple – time and money.

It’s a well known fact that the sheer complexity of datacentre technology and manpower required can impede an organisations ability to make change happen quickly which could affect their competitive edge in the market place. Furthermore, the ever increasing costs of power, square footage, hardware, software and internal resources means those organisations will be paying more and more to keep their IT lights on.

Virtualisation can help to solve both these problems – put simplistically, by decreasing the amount of physical hardware and space required to do the same (or a much better job), you decrease the amount of power, footfall and manpower and in turn, reduce cost. You are paying much less for more.

Virtualising also allows for much quicker and simpler provisioning – whether it’s resolving a failing server, running maintenance patching or accommodating new applications. It’s the dream scenario every IT or Datacentre Manager dreams of – efficient, resilient with minimal ‘hands on’ management.

You might be saying to yourself ‘I know all this’, however from our experience in helping clients resolve Oracle licensing issues, what is less understood is why many Virtualisation projects go wrong, particularly when it comes to license compliance. In our next blog post, we’ll take a look at some of the common issues including the impact on licensing.

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Virtualisation – The Reality, not the hype – An Introduction

rocela — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 12:18:43 +0000

by Tam Kyle, Senior License Consultant

In November last year, Rocela hosted a Roundtable on Virtualisation which discussed the challenges of virtualising and the ‘3 Vital Treatments’ to ensure business case ROI.

It was obvious from the peer to peer group discussion that organisations are giving Virtualisation serious consideration in an attempt to save cost and improve efficiency and are therefore, keen to side step some of the many challenges faced when virtualising their IT environments.

In this series of blog posts, we will discuss Virtualisation at a reasonably high level, covering elements such as;

• What Virtualisation means.
• Why organisations are keen to virtualise.
• Why Virtualisation projects go wrong.
• Some advise on avoiding the Virtualisation pitfalls.
• Licensing impacts, particularly with Oracle licensing.
• The 3 Vital Treatments for getting Virtualisation right!

At the end of the blog series, we will publish a 5 page Virtualisation publication written by Tam Kyle, Rocela Senior License Consultant, (which will be downloadable from our website) and will provide a full insight into the typical pitfalls of Virtualisation, some tips on how to avoid them and culminate on the ‘3 Vital Treatments’ to ensure business case ROI.

Part I, which will be published in a few days, will cover what Virtualisation is and why organisations are so keen to take advantage of this technology. Make sure you subscribe to receive notification of its publication.

FOREX – using the Google Rates API in Oracle

rocela — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 10:34:17 +0000

By Kenny Miller, Principal Consultant for Rocela

I thought I’d share a simple but useful database function I’ve developed. I had a requirement to determine foreign exchange spot rates in real-time for the GBP (United Kingdom Pound). The European Central Bank provides a live exchange rates feed for the Euro, and the Federal Reserve provides the same for the US Dollar (both in XML format, available over HTTP). Unfortunately the Bank of England doesn’t provide an equivalent feed for GBP.

Google do however provide a free exchange rates API, where they source rates under licence from Citibank. The API works by passing currency details in the parameters to a web page.

For a GBP to USD example, try the following in the address bar of your favourite browser:

 http://www.google.com/ig/calculator?hl=en&q=1GBP=?USD

This will return something similar to the following:

 {lhs: "1 British pound",rhs: "1.5548 U.S. dollars",error: "",icc: true}

This is all that is returned – there are no HTML tags. It’s easy to write a function to “scrape” out the rate from the text.

CREATE or REPLACE FUNCTION xxget_google_rate (p_from_currency varchar2,
                                              p_to_currency varchar2)
  RETURN number IS

  -- Variable declarations.

  t_page_table    utl_http.html_pieces;
  l_url           varchar2(100);
  l_fx_rate       number;    

BEGIN

  -- Build the URL to the Google API.

  l_url := 'http://www.google.com/ig/calculator?hl=en&q=1' ||
             p_from_currency || '=?' || p_to_currency;

  -- Make a HTTP call to the API           

  t_page_table := utl_http.request_pieces(l_url);

  -- The rate is returned on the first line, so scrape out the rate. There is
  -- no HTML returned. The following is an example of the text returned:
  -- {lhs: "1 British pound",rhs: "1.5625 U.S. dollars",error: "",icc: true}

  l_fx_rate := to_number(substr(t_page_table(1),
                 instr(t_page_table(1), 'rhs: "')+6,
                 instr(substr(t_page_table(1),
                 instr(t_page_table(1), 'rhs: "')+6), ' ', 1, 1)-1));

  -- Return the rate.

  RETURN l_fx_rate;

EXCEPTION WHEN others THEN

  -- Return -999 to indicate that a rate could not be determined.

  RETURN -999;

END xxget_google_rate;
/

That’s all folks, except to draw your attention to Google’s disclaimer for the API:

Currency Conversion Disclaimer

Google cannot guarantee the accuracy of the exchange rates used by the calculator. You should confirm current rates before making any transactions that could be affected by changes in the exchange rates. Foreign currency rates provided by Citibank N.A. and displayed under license. Rates are for information purposes only and are subject to change without notice. Rates for actual transactions may vary, and Citibank is not offering to enter into any transaction at any rate displayed.

BI Publisher Licensing considerations

rocela — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 13:46:29 +0000

By Paul Bullen, Senior License Consultant for Rocela

Recently we’ve heard about the many advantages and considerations of using BI/XML Publisher against Oracle E-Business Suite. Like many Oracle products, this provides some very powerful functionality which once mastered can revolutionise your use of applications. However, this functionality comes at a cost. As part of any (correctly) licensed Oracle E-Business Suite applications, you receive a restricted use license for Business Intelligence Publisher. What does this mean? Well, unfortunately the restrictions really are quite significant. Looking at standard terms and conditions, you are allowed to use Business Intelligence Publisher to publish and/or view:

1) Shipped Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher reports: you are allowed to make changes to the layout of these reports

2) Shipped or newly created Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher reports that are modified to access data from existing Oracle E-Business Suite Applications schemas that have not been customized

So, you can use the shipped reports and change their layout. Or you can create new reports which access non-customised schemas. In order to gain most business benefit from the BI Publisher, you’re probably going to want to create your own reports or query against schemas which have customisations.

Oracle provide further clarification:

Full use of Business Intelligence Publisher is required if any shipped, modified or newly created Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher report:

1) Accesses data from a non-Oracle E-Business Suite Applications data source, or

2) Accesses data from a new schema within the Oracle E-Business Suite Applications that is not shipped by Oracle, or

3) Accesses data from a modified Oracle E-Business Suite Applications schema (e.g., by adding columns to an existing table).

Given how BI Publisher is Oracle’s strategic enterprise reporting tool, and may well become yours, it is imperative that you understand how you are licensed for using it. As a separately licensed product, it is available in either Named User Plus (£308 each, list price, minimum of 50) processor metric (nearly £31k per processor, list price), or Employee metrics.

The above restrictions are standard terms and conditions, they do vary and so it is worth checking your license documentation, bearing in mind your license may have been purchased before BI Publisher was released. If you are in any doubt, contact Rocela!

Oracle experts Rocela events for 2012

rocela — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 13:42:58 +0000

Rocela’s Oracle experts have been involved in a considerable number of client side activities this year – from assisting large enterprise organisations declare their Oracle ULA to helping a global utilities company upgrade to Oracle R12.

Our website, twitter and blog all try to educate, deliver value and convey our deep knowledge of ‘all things Oracle’ however there is nothing better than looking us in the eye and asking us the difficult questions.

That is why we are planning a Roadshow of events for 2012 – taking us all around the UK (Edinburgh, Aberdeen, London, Manchester) to talk to large enterprise organisations on;

• Oracle Thought Leadership – a peer to peer ‘behind closed doors’ session discussing Oracle trends, product roadmap, Cloud, ULA’s, Virtualisation, Strategic Vendor Management to name a few.
• Rocela Control ™ Session – a presentation on the complexities of Oracle license management and how our proven SAM methodology, Rocela Control ™ can help. This will also include a client case study, where one of our customers will present on their situation, what problems and impacts this was causing and how engaging with Rocela benefited.
• R12 Sessions – presentations and peer to peer discussions on how we can help assess whether Oracle R12 is best for your organisation and how its new features/functions will benefit.

We have run a number of these sessions before which have prompted the following comments;

“Great to hear from other contacts in the industry and how they have tackled the same sort of issues we are facing.” IT Director, Retail Company

“(This session) has helped us consider whether Oracle R12 is the right move for us.” IT Manager, Public Sector Organisation

“Rocela has given me an invaluable insight into the benefits and pitfalls of Oracle’s ULA’s – many of which I was not aware of before!” License Manager, Financial Institute

If you are struggling with the complexity of Oracle licensing, need to reduce risk and cost or need advice on Oracle R12, then please email Linda Anderson on linda.anderson@rocela.com with your contact details and highlight which event you would be interested in attending.

Have a Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2012.

Oracle experts Rocela speaking at UKOUG 2011, Birmingham

rocela — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 09:41:18 +0000

Oracle experts Rocela will be speaking at this years’ UKOUG Conference in Birmingham’s ICC. We will be presenting on the complexities of Oracle licensing and cost management.

Ian Smith, Executive Director of Rocela will discuss ‘How to master the art of Oracle Compliance and Cost Management’. Ian will explain how a proven software asset management methodology can achieve on-going compliance while ensuring right-sizing of Oracle licensing to aid cost management and control.

If Oracle license management is your responsibility and you need to find ways of reducing cost and risk, then come along to Executive Room 1 on Monday 5th December at 17.45pm to hear more.

For more information on the UK OUG Conference 2011, visit the UK OUG’s website.

We look forward to seeing you there.

XML (BI) Publisher fit to ‘burst’!

rocela — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 09:53:23 +0000

By Andrew Archibald, Senior Consultant Rocela

As a curious technologist, I have recently revisited the functionality of emailing documents from Oracle E-Business to multiple recipients; a functionality called ‘bursting’ in Oracle E-Business language. I have used BI Publisher to ‘burst’ PDF’s out of Oracle E-Business R12 and save them to the server ready for printing – a relatively simple process using the web services available with BI Publisher.

However, when using Oracle E-Business R11 and XML Publisher, this method is not as straightforward and requires additional coding. Happily, there is a great deal of solid reference material out there for this (both Oracle documents and blog postings) which details the steps required for ‘bursting’ in XML Publisher.

One of the best features of XML Publisher is the ease in which you can link to Oracle E-Business Suite – if you set the code of the concurrent request to the same name as the XML Publisher data definition template, they automatically link together. My colleague Kenny Miller mentioned this in his recent post.

For now, I’m going to consider some of the “gotcha’s” when implementing ‘bursting’ functionality.

Building your RTF document, beware!

Oracle BI Publisher desktop is a great tool and makes it easy to create templates. The plug-in allows you to import demo XML and then create groupings, tables and fields on templates, but there are a couple of things that you need to watch out for.

Firstly, when you insert a new field into the template, BI Publisher creates a Word field and then attaches the BI Publisher options. The problem this can cause is around the values within the ‘advanced’ properties (right click on the field and select ‘BI Publisher’). These must match up with Word’s ‘help’ properties for that item. If they are different then the document will fail when BI Publisher tries to merge the XML and the template.

Secondly, if you are looking to ‘burst’ this document and also to store all the output as one document, you need to create a grouping which will encase your template and fields (don’t worry about headers and footers on the RTF document).

Be aware if you have a grouping on a lower set of data within your document; for example you have your invoice header details then displaying the invoice lines, the outer grouping may have an effect on the whole document. Always remember my first point about Word’s ‘help’ properties; these are easily reset by Word which will break your document. So, always check them before uploading to BI Publisher!

Building your ‘bursting’ file

Best tip is to start small, only build small components and start with small amounts of data. Don’t think that because the individual file generation works, that it will also work when it’s called a ‘bursting event’.

The log files are stored in the following places to help diagnose the issue. Log files are located in comn/util/java/jdk1.6.0_22/jre/lib for any BI Publisher logs.

The ‘bursting’ file takes an XML path as a parameter (tag

Ensure that the XML in the ‘bursting’ file is consistent with the structure of the output from the concurrent request. To view what is generated by Oracle E-Business, run the concurrent request to output the data as XML. If the XML path is incorrect you will notice that your document will only show the first record in your XML output.

These are just some of the features which you should watch out for and hopefully this will save you a few headaches! Just one more potential headache before you ‘burst’: it’s worth remembering that BI Publisher is a separately licensed Oracle product and although a restricted use license is included with Oracle E-Business Suite, it only allows certain restrictive usage of the product. One of my License Optimisation colleagues will write a blog about BI Publisher licensing soon. In the meantime, assuming you are licensed correctly, happy ‘bursting’!