Using Discoverer Plus, this
isn't a problem. Although Marketing Manager is a dimension
attribute (a column in the CUSTOMER_DIM table) I can drop it
onto the crosstab and see it in the report:

Using Discoverer for OLAP though, I'm stuck, as although
Marketing Manager is a dimension attribute, I can't display it
in the crosstab - I can only use it to make dimension member
selections:

If you're an old Express user and you're
reading this, you're probably thinking "what about one
dimensional text variables - they're our way to include labels
in crosstabs". What this involves is using AWM10g to create an
additional cube in your analytic workspace, with one dimension
(in our case, Product) and a single measure defined as a text
variable. Then, whenever you display products on the screen,
you can include your "attribute measure" in the report as
well. Traditionally, this is done as a way of adding text
annotations to cubes, with the annotation being held in a
variable dimensioned the same way as the measure.

Note that the measure is nonadditive, which
means that it will only exist at the bottom level of the
product dimension.
Next, we add the measure to the crosstab:

and then the measure appears - but it gets
added alongside the Sales measure, and then is only visible
when you drill down to the bottom level. So - it's not really
where we were expecting it to appear, and it's not being used
as a way of subdividing our products into those managed by
particular product managers.

Now I'm sure there are probably ways of
getting around this - maybe making product managers into a
hierarchy of their own, or there may be some other way of
achieving this. But what this says to me is that, when you use
the logical dimensional model and you load up your dimension
with attributes, it's not all that straightforward to have the
attributes appear on the report, or use them to further group
or subdivide your data. It's just the way the logical
dimensional model works - it's got it's advantages (logical
grouping of data into measures, dimensions, attributes and so
on) but it's not as freeform as an SQL query tool that lets
you group data by just about anything.
The other issue is around the production of
tabular reports. As you know, Discoverer for OLAP is designed
around crosstab reports - indeed it's the only option that you
get when putting together a new workbook. But what if your
organisation wanted to produce a report that lists out the
products that you sell, who is the marketing manager, grouped
into product categories and listed in order of sales volumes.
Using Discoverer Plus, you could produce something like this:

A straightforward listing report, group sorted
by category and with the category, product name, marketing
manager (remember, an attribute) and sales total on the
report.
With Discoverer for OLAP, although you can't
choose to create a tabular report, you can achieve something
like this by creating a worksheet using only one dimension
(product) and hiding the others.

Then, by bringing in the Marketing Manager
measure that we created earlier, we can put something together
that is "sort of like" our relational tabular report:

However, it's probably not what we were really
after. The product name and category are part of the dimension
crosstab element, not the report, the report is all spread out
rather than available on one page, and there's lots of cells
that have no values in. It's probably not what the users were
expecting and probably won't be acceptable for production use.
Now none of this is meant to detract from what
Discoverer for OLAP, and the OLAP Option, offers. It's just
that not all enterprise reporting fits neatly into the
category of OLAP analysis of cubes of financial data, and
formal OLAP structures aren't always the most appropriate for
ad-hoc, freeform reporting. What this says to me is that, in
reality, most Discoverer implementations are going to consist
of a bit of relational Discoverer analysis, and a bit of OLAP
Discoverer analysis; Discoverer for OLAP will be best suited
to analysis of cubes of financial or performance data, where
you want to drill into and investigate how the figures are
made up using complex multidimensional selections, whilst
Discoverer Plus is for when your reports need a lot of textual
data, you need to produce simple listings of data, or your
users want the freedom to have just about anything that's in
the underlying database appear in the report.
Any comments from anyone, perhaps who's worked
on a Discoverer 10.1.2 implementation or perhaps who has used
Express to meet some of these non-OLAP reporting needs?