Is Oracle interested in Salesforce.com?

This article contends that Salesforce.com may have approached Oracle to guage their interest in an acquisition. This may raise a few eyebrows, but probably comes as no surprise to anyone.

What I am surprised is why Microsoft would not be interested in Salesforce.com as well. I know that they are pursuing Yahoo, and are interested in Yahoo's search and ad revenues, but they are also pushing heavily their cloud computing offerings of which a SaaS CRM service would fit nicely. While online ad revenues can be a nice profit, Microsoft needs to continue to be a player in the enterprise market, and Salesforce.com would go a long way in keeping them firmly entrenched in many enterprises, while giving them a nice platform to roll out additional cloud applications. If Oracle gets Salesforce.com, how much further does that put Microsoft behind Oracle in Enterprise applications?

Would I like to see Oracle gobble up Saleforce.com? Sure - it bolster's Oracle's SaaS/OnDemand products, but wither Siebel? I know Oracle was planning to make Siebel OnDemand a direct competitor to Salesforce.com. So if they make the deal, what then? Does Siebel simply become the on premise CRM solution, and Salesforce.com the cloud solution? Oracle has many horses in the stable, but could this be one too many, or one too many studs?

Lastly, it may be a good buy simply from the author's assertion that Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, would be a logical successor to Larry Ellison. He has that same swagger, and desire to be #1, and I think he would be a great leader for Oracle. So that begs the question - would Oracle buy Salesforce.com just to get Mr. Benioff?

Oracle E-Business Suite: Query, Report & Print Output Options

The most common reporting tools used in the Oracle E-Business Suite are:

• Oracle Reports: Fixed format reports delivered with the 11i release were built on this tool. This is the most used tool for reporting on Oracle E-Business Suite. Most customizations of available reports are built with this tool. Once customized the output of the report can be delivered in Excel, Word, Acrobat documents or text format.

• Oracle Discoverer: is an intuitive tool for creating reports and performing on-line analysis. Discoverer uses the EUL (End User Layer), a metadata definition, which hides the complexity of the database from the end user and provides easy to use wizards for creating reports to suite individual needs. The flexibility of this tool allows the user to create cross tab reports that perform like pivot tables in Excel.

• Oracle XML Publisher: is a new Oracle tool for reporting. It enables users to utilize a familiar desktop tool, like MS Word or MS Excel, to create and maintain their own report. At runtime, XML Publisher merges the custom templates with the concurrent request extracts data to generate output in PDF, HTML, RTF and EXCEL.

• RXi Report: (Variable reports) – variable format reports delivered with the E-Business 11i. With this tool a user has the ability to print the same report with multiple layouts. The user can also choose which columns he requires on a particular report. This tool is most used on Oracle Financials Applications

• FSG Reports (Financial Statement Generator): is a powerful report building tool for Oracle General Ledger. Some of benefits of using this tool are that a user can generate financial reports and schedule reports to run automatically. FSG Reports are available for the general ledger responsibility only and can be used to see key financial account balances.

• Business Intelligence System (BI): is a set of tools to provide high level information for the managers (decision makers) to run their business such as the profitability of a particular business unit. The information this tool provides helps managers to take the right decision with the daily data that is uploaded on their systems.

Every organization is unique and the standard reports delivered with Oracle E-Business Suite will never meet all the reporting requirements of every organization. Choosing the right reporting tool for effective business decision making is critical to every Oracle E-Business Suite implementation.

Database 11gR1 Version 11.1.0.7 Certified with EBS 11i

Here is a link to the Oracle E-Business Suite Technology blog that now lists Oracle 11gR1 version 11.0.0.7 Certified with Oracle EBS 11i. Note that this database version is not yet certified with R12, nor is it certified with Database Vault 11.1.0.7.

Oracle SQL Developer and TOAD

While doing some development with some large tables recently, I found that Oracle's SQL Developer seems to die out after trying to export > 100k records. It doesn't really error out, it just dies, without error, and consumes memory. I have only done some limited trials with large data volumes, but ended up going to good old SQL*Plus to get the proper output, as I was pressed for time. I plan on doing some more detailed analysis to see what the magic number of records is, and if there is any logging I can turn on to see what is really happening.

I would normally use Quest Software's TOAD for Oracle for this type of work, but I was using a customer supplied laptop, and did not want to install any unlicensed software. I have found that SQL Developer is good for some things, and shows a lot of promise, but for any real hardcore development or database work, I find myself turning to TOAD most often.

I also have a few MySQL databases that I need to maintain and run reports/queries against, and use TOAD for MySQL Freeware whenever I need to do some work on it. I have a few monthly reports I run to extract data, and have TOAD set up to run them for me, and really like the feature to export the results directly into a running Excel instance at the highlighted cell.