Create an Excel Report From Several Oracle Databases Using Apache Jakarta POI

Overview

Microsoft Excel spreadsheets are ubiquitous in today's business environment. Although Excel can read and display delimited files, the .xls proprietary format provides additional expressive features, including font formatting and multiple sheets per spreadsheet. Many tools - commercial as well as open source - provide a mechanism for producing reports that Excel can read. Depending on the structure and use of particular databases, there are additional reasons why one might produce this type of spreadsheet, but these reasons are dependent upon functional requirements and definitions of particular databases. This paper describes how to use the Apache Jakarta POI open source project to produce a spreadsheet from several different datasources.