Oracle Reports has done its job, Oracle Reports can go....
(freely adapted from Friedrich Schiller)
Everything has its time and now it's time to open the windows and let in some fresh air.
When Oracle started developing the database system in 1977, it quickly became clear that the new database model could only really show its strengths if, in addition to the classic programming languages of the time, new ways had to be found to make it much easier to record data, to search for and display it and to read it out again as printable documents.
Three heroes of Oracle history were born in the late 70s and early 80s:
UFI -User-Friendly Interface still known in services as SQL-Plus
IAF/IAP - Interactive Application Facility, the grandparents of Oracle Forms
and
RPF/RPT - Reporting Facility - the grandparents of Oracle Reports
Oracle Reports certainly had the hardest road to travel. While SQL-Plus and Oracle Forms gained a kind of cult status over time and contributed significantly to the great success of Oracle as a database and as a company, Reports was always a bit of an outsider in the family. Although the old RPF/RPT was already a damn powerful product, albeit extremely difficult to use, it had few friends within Oracle and few fans among customers. Today, one would say that the community was manageable, expandable, to put it mildly.
What was missing was unconditional support within Oracle for the reporting area. There was a lack of spirit for this product discipline, a lack of a guy like Mike Hichwa, who invented APEX and led APEX into the Champions League with his team. This ignorance is actually inexplicable, as reporting is one of the core competencies in the database business, with which you can do excellent business.
In 2005, Oracle ended the Reports career for good. In 2005 (!) the current (we are in the year 2024) release was delivered but, and this is the crux of the matter, the successor was not what you could call a high-flyer either.
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It is not for nothing that a large number of Oracle Reports applications still exist today.
What Oracle has failed to do, namely to provide a simple, highly automated migration path, PITSS GmbH / PITSS America LLC does with its offer to migrate Oracle Reports applications to JasperReports.
The process flow for a Reports-to-Jasper migration has been tried and tested many times and is highly productive thanks to the use of innovative software (the PITSS.CON product family). At the end of the project, the customer has converted its old Oracle Reports applications to one of the most modern reporting tools available today.
Let the specialists around Stephan La Rocca , the Development Manager at PITSS, demonstrate the products to you, and let Bernd Frost , the Consulting Manager, explain the project approach.
Steve Jobs once put it in a nutshell: “Stay curious and have the courage to move out of conventional paths.”
It's worth it!
- More Reports-to-Jasper : https://pitss.com/migration-reports-to-jasper
- PITSS Home-Page: https://pitss.com
- The most important recent publications can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/PITSS-Link
Oracle Reports will no longer play a significant role in the future.
Tackle it now with PITSS, because “doing is like wanting only much more blatant!”
CTO @ Viscosity | AI-Driven Low-Code Automation
2 个月Great perspective, Günther. The challenge with traditional reporting tools like Oracle Reports wasn’t just building reports—it was dealing with the endless variations requested by different stakeholders. I remember my first Oracle Report back in 1997, compiling and tweaking it dozens of times, only to end up maintaining multiple versions of the same core query. This “fan-out” problem is why interactive reports and grids in APEX have been a game-changer. Instead of hardcoding every possible format, users can dynamically filter, sort, and group data as needed—something developers couldn’t anticipate in advance. When modernizing legacy reports, we often consolidate hundreds of reports down to just a few dozen interactive ones. And for those critical pixel-perfect reports, AOP (or the new native APEX PDF features) does the job well. Oracle Reports had its time, but the future is in flexibility and user-driven customization.
ATZ@PEAG at PEAG Personal GmbH
4 个月Günther, als ich noch bei Oracle war, wollte Silke Sommerfeld die gro?e Bosch Installation auch migrieren, würde mich interessieren, ob dies erfolgte. sehr guter Artikel.. ??