"We're bringing the two products together," said Jeffrey Stamen, Oracle's senior vice president of OLAP (online analytical processing) products. "We want to give them a common metadata and a common GUI. Some of our users want a seamless connection between Discoverer and Express, and we'll do that for them."

The company is taking an evolutionary approach to this integration, which could be completed next year, Stamen said Monday. Oracle8, the much-awaited upgrade to the Oracle relational DBMS, will also be more tightly integrated with Express, although that will occur incrementally and will not be completed for some two years, he said.

Stamen made the comments at Oracle OpenWorld, following the company's announcement that the Express Server will include a ROLAP (relational OLAP) option in 60 days. The new ROLAP capability in Express will let users of Oracle7 tap Express as a calculation engine to analyze relational data without having to pre-store it in multidimensional arrays.

Oracle yesterday also announced Version 3.0 of Discoverer, which lets users drill and pivot and estimate how long a query will take to process. It is scheduled for availability in the first quarter of next year at a cost of $995 per user.

Oracle framed the announcements as part of its data warehousing strategy.

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