Using AE(htmldb 2.0) as for reporting tool for other oracle databases.

Question

Maybe I was mistaken, but when I first saw the HTMLDB demo's I saw this as a slick way to build a browser based reporting tool for the masses for quasi-ad-hoc reporting on some of our larger databases that currently have limited reporting capability, and also as a possible replacement for the many MSAccess applets we have.
I just got 2.0 installed and working on a 9i database and went through the basic tutorials, but I can't find much info on how to connect to other oracle databases.
Are my options as follows?:
create dblinks from the local database that houses htmldb to all the other databases?
or
install htmldb schemas on each database I want to access from htmldb?
or
I'll keep looking, but if any of you have any pointers or know of a tutorial that explains the best way to do this it would be greatly appreciated!
tia

Answer 1

As for question 1, yep, that's what I mean. Example:
In a schema in the App Express instance, create a user called "APP1_USER", and then
create view app1_user.people as select * from people@link_user@remotedb
As for the next question, using the built-in insert/update/delete processes will give you
ORA-01461: can bind a LONG value only for insert into a LONG column
among other errors. Apparently version 2.1 will fix this. See Cannot Update VARCHAR column in Remote DB
We address this problem by creating pl/sql APIs for DML, and then writing our own insert/update processes. Slows us down a little, but even with that, App Express remains a productive choice for us.
Another weird problem: auto-row fetch (built-in to HTML DB) doesn't work over db links when you have two columns for a primary key. Many ways around this, e.g. create sequence-populated primary key, create a view with single column that concatenates primary key column values (key1|key2)
Hope this helps!
-John