Oracle has released Business Intelligence 10g, providing a packaged version of familiar and new BI applications that were first announced last December.

The release offers a new user interface that brings together Discoverer for querying, reporting and analysis; Spreadsheet Add-In for accessing Olap data from an Excel spreadsheet; Warehouse Builder with data quality tools including extract, transform and load (ETL) functions; and BI Beans for application development.

"Having all the pieces together is important," said Oracle's Andy Cleverly. "Customers were (asking us) 'what do you have for us in BI?'"

Some observers said Oracle's BI users formed a distinct community and merited a separate release rather than being distributed among a database, applications server and other programs.

Mark Rittman of Oracle integrator SolStonePlus beta-tested the product, and was impressed. "It delivers on some things Oracle has been promising for some time - integration with Olap and tools," Rittman said.

Rittman added that some users of BI tools from vendors such as Cognos are considering moving onto the Oracle toolkit.

But others are waiting for a new version of Warehouse Builder - codenamed Paris - that delivers better data quality and profiling tools, said Rittman. Paris is due in the second quarter of this year.

Oracle BI is included with Oracle Application Server 10g Enterprise Edition and is available alone for $20,000 (£10,400) per processor or $400 (£210) per named user.