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 of
until 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 and
Transform" 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 plans
are 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
October 11th, 2006 at 4:36 pm
They are spinning now… OWB (a product I helped spec out way back in 1999-2000) is about to die. It will live another year, at most. My speculation: Oracle will buy Informatica next.
October 11th, 2006 at 11:40 pm
(looks like you are missing a trailing f on the faq link)
I can’t see how doing the transform in the db is more efficient than doing it outside of the db. All the undo and redo overhead is avoided if you do it beforehand, right? Not to mention possible blocksplits, chaining and that sort of thing. Am I way out in dinosaurland?
October 12th, 2006 at 2:15 pm
i dont think oracle wud buy informatica. If it had to buy that out .. why develop owb (paris) and buy other ETL tool companies like sunopsis ? It can just buy the market leader itself and do with it …
ETL means row wise processing only .. ELT u can go in for transformations at the set level ( cursor level!)
October 12th, 2006 at 3:47 pm
Joel – true there is overhead transforming on the target system but sometimes it works out more efficient to do bulk operations (set based) on a database than in some other system especially if it ends up inserting the transformed data row by row into the target.
And no, you are not in the slighest jurasic – well not from your photo!
October 12th, 2006 at 3:56 pm
I like your new blog. The design is easy on the eye. Was it easy to migrate?
October 26th, 2006 at 10:19 am
Joel,
I think Pete_S is right – in a database you are much more prepared to do all the transformation set based. You can beat a row-by-row processing by orders of magnitude (I’ve done this already).
As for REDO – you would normally do it with CTAS or insert/*+ append*/ – both they do not generate REDO.
As for UNDO – inserts (creating new rows) generate little UNDO – how much idata do you need to UNDO an insert (delete the row)?
I think tehere are other factors that may dictate the transformations to be done outside the db (in a dedicated ETL Tool) – speed of development, automatic documentation, metadata. When it comes to the performance of the ETL process itself – well, I still haven’t seen a Mapping outside the db which is doing it faster as it could be done in the db itself.
November 10th, 2006 at 8:59 pm
[…] 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. […]