Oracle Buy Sunopsis
October 11th, 2006 by Mark Rittman
Of course whilst I’ve been gallivanting around Europe doing my BI seminars,the news came out from Redwood Shores earlier this week that Oracle had bought Sunopsis, an ETL tool vendor that probably most people wouldn’t have heard ofuntil this announcement was made. Sunopsis, as Peter Scott points out, sell two products that operate within the data integration space; “Data Conductor“, an ETL tool, and “Active Integration Platform”, middleware that bridges disparate datasources in either data driven, event driven or service-orientated mode. Interestingly, like Oracle Warehouse Builder, Sunopsis take an “Extract, Load andTransform“ approach to data movement where they extract data out of the source system, load it on to the target database and then transform it, using native SQL commands on the target system.
And this of course is where Oracle’s interest surely lies with these products. Like Warehouse Builder, which uses the Oracle database to perform the ETL tasks, Sunopsis’s products also leverage the target platform, but extend this approach to not just Oracle databases, but also platforms such as Teradata, DB2, Netezza, SQL Server and so on. Sunopsis’s products are also built on Java, which again fits in with Oracle’s strategic technology direction, and ticks all the right boxes in terms of Master Data Management, Service Orientated Architecture and so on. If Oracle can integrate Sunopsis’s technology into Warehouse Builder and Fusion Middleware, then they can extend the same functionality currently provided for Oracle targets and sources to all platforms that customers have to deal with – immediately negating any currently perceived limitations with Warehouse Builder and simultaneously reinforcing the position as target databases – i.e. the Oracle RBDMS – as the natural place to perform ETL functions. Which should make life interesting for the pure-play ETL vendors such as Informatica.
Looking through the FAQ on the Oracle website, it seems that Oracle’s plansare to firstly continue supporting the current Sunopsis product lineup, then start integrating Sunopsis technology into Warehouse Builder, use this to provide enhanced ETL functionality to BI Suite Enterprise Edition (which, in it’s Siebel Analytics guise, previously used an OEM’d version of Informatica Powercenter to provide similar functionality), and eventually incorporate Sunopsis functionality into the broad family of products known as Fusion Middleware. Reading through the product documentation, it also looks like Sunopsis comes with a slew of real-time data integration features – Enterprise Information Integration, Business Activity Monitoring – that are conspicuously absent from Warehouse Builder, having been removed at the last moment from the “Paris” release before it was released earlier this year.
Overall then, this looks like a shrewd move by Oracle. It allows them to take their current philosophy – extract, load and then transform on the target platform – from just Oracle targets to most every other database platform, keeps to their Java technology direction and brings on board a development team with direct experience in the “next generation” ETL market. No doubt life’s going to be busy in the OWB team over at Redwood Shores, but it should make for an interesting next set of product releases.
More information can be found at:
- Peter Scott : “Oracle Buy Sunopsis“
- Mark Madsen : “Oracle and Sunopsis?”
- Rick Sherman : “Oracle Significantly Upgrades it’s Data Integration Offering by Aquiring SunopsiS”
- Lisa Vaas : “Oracle Tackles the Data Integration Mess With It’s Sunopsis Buy”
- Oracle and Sunopsis FAQ
November 26th, 2006 at 8:28 am
[...] If you were reading this blog a month or so ago, you may well have seen a posting about Oracle’s purchase of Sunopsis. Sunopsis are a French company with offices around the world that specializes in ETL tools; Oracle have bought them because they bring to Oracle the ability to load and transform data on all data platforms, not just the Oracle database, whilst keeping to the current OWB philosophy of using the database as the ETL engine, rather than using a separate ETL hub with it’s own language, database and so on. [...]
January 19th, 2007 at 10:40 pm
[...] Getting Started with Sunopsis Data Conductor If you were reading this blog a month or so ago, you may well have seen a posting about Oracle’s purchase of Sunopsis. Sunopsis are a French company with offices around the world that specializes in ETL tools; Oracle have bought them because they bring to Oracle the ability to load and transform data on all data platforms, not just the Oracle database, whilst keeping to the current OWB philosophy of using the database as the ETL engine, rather than using a separate ETL hub with it’s own language, database and so on. I met up with some of the Sunopsis team in the UK last week to go through their product architecture, and to get hold of an evaluation copy of Sunopsis Data Conductor, the main part of their wider ETL and data movement suite. I’ll be covering Data Conductor in the forthcoming Oracle Business Intelligence book I’m currently finalizing, and so I thought it worthwhile putting the product through it’s paces and seeing how it compares to Oracle Warehouse Builder. Data Conductor comes with an evaluation guide and dataset as part of the download, and so I’ve worked through this first, and I’ll move on to transforming and loading my own data later on. Taking a quick look at the product architecture first, like Warehouse Builder Sunopsis Data Conductor uses the target data warehouse, or in some circumstances the source database, to do the data transformation rather than using a separate ETL server. The rationale behind this is that set-based transformations on the target data warehouse are usually faster than row-by-row transformations and inserts performed by an ETL server, and by buying Sunopsis Data Conductor, you preserve and leverage the investment you’ve made in your database engine rather than paying all over again for a separate ETL box to do the work for you. Like Warehouse Builder, Data Conductor is based around a repository that can be held in any relational database. It stores metadata about the source and target databases, details of the mappings (called “Interfaces” in Data Conductor), the process flows and details of the execution results. [...]