Oracle’s BI Publisher which is part of the Oracle Business Intelligence Suit has at least within Enterprise Computing environment established as a reliable and preferable choice when it comes to replace the somewhat aged Oracle Reports.

Once being familiar with it you will ask yourself about why switching tool when it comes to the need of creating reports in a normal web design world mostly using MySQL Databases within a “LAMP” environment.

Written as an universal reporting tool BI Publishes does offer us a more or less universal data interface based on JDBC connections. And being able to act itself as a callable web service offering WEBDAV services based on XML data exchange it anyway seems to be an excellent choice for this world.

Already Oracle’s installation instructions does give you a quick idea about setting up BI Publisher working against some MySQL Database. But acting  in a Web environment you might find it cool integration the BI Publisher within an already existing Apache Tomcat environment and for exactly this environment I will give you a short explanation about getting things together and ready for work.

First we will pick the BI Publisher software itself by copying the xmlpserver.war file from the distribution DVD and throwing it into the webapps folder of our Apache Tomcat. Waiting a few seconds until the self-deploying mechanism of the Apache Tomcat has extracted the files for us, we need to specify the access path to our project and development repository within the file xmlp-server-config.xml.

Having done that, we need to add the MySQL JDBC driver to our system and making it known within the environment of the Apache Tomcat. (The MySQL JDBC driver can be downloaded from: http://www.mysql.com/products/connector/j/.)

So with the downloaded fileready, we have to extract it to any place we like onto our disk. Just I would recommend you to put it somewhere close to your MySQL installation for you being able to later on remember it again. Finally extracted and ready to use, we have to add the information about the mysql-connector-java- -bin.jar file to the Java Classpath of the Apache Tomcat and finally restarting it:

Having this set, as a last step we have to invoke the BI Publisher itself, in which we then will configure the new JDBC data source within the Admin region of it:

And now with this tweaking ready, MySQL DB should connect, open and work for you like a charm.