Oracle Data Integrator Article on OTN
May 25th, 2007 by Mark Rittman
My article on real-time data integration with Oracle Data Integrator has just been published on OTN.
This was quite an interesting article to write; apart from establishing how ODI related to OWB, I also put an example together that takes data, via Asychronous Hotlog Change Data Capture, from an Oracle database, combines it with data from a flat file, and then loads it, in real-time, into a Microsoft SQL Server database. It’s a real working example, and although I’ve obviously had to summarize the steps to keep the article a reasonable length, you should be able to follow it along and get it working yourself, if you’re interested to see what ODI is capable of.
I’ve also uploaded the final copy of the slides that I presented at the UKOUG BIRT SIG earlier this week (“Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition for Discoverer Users”), and we’re extending the offer at the end of the presentation to all the readers of this blog in the UK and Ireland (and possibly mainland Europe): if you’re considering migrating from Discoverer to Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition, and you’re looking for a partner to help you with the migration process, we’re offering a free day’s initial assessment where either Jon or I will come in, talk to you about what’s involved, give you a tour around the new BI EE software, take a look at your existing Discoverer setup and give you a road-map for making the move.
Oracle Product Development are also keen to help out, so if you go ahead with a migration or prototype, they’ll provide access to an “accelerator” that will do the majority of the work in migrating the EUL and the workbooks, leaving you and us with just the task of working with the new features such as dashboard, alerting, publishing and so on. Drop us an email if you’re interested in taking part.
June 8th, 2007 at 8:33 am
In the ODI article you recommend using ODI for gathering information from disparate data sources to the staging area of your Oracle data warehouse, then using OWB to populate the ODS and analytic layers inside the warehouse. SInce this would mean having to maintain two skill sets for ETL development, what advantages does this approach have over just using ODI throughout?
June 12th, 2007 at 8:25 pm
Hi Mark, good to hear from you. The reason I’d still advocate OWB as the main Oracle DW tool, with ODI being used to provide heterogenous connectivity, CDC, SOA integration and so on, is that ODI doesn’t come with any of the OLAP and DW data modeling features that OWB has. You can’t define dimensions, cubes and so on in ODI, you can’t interface directly with Discoverer, and so on, which is why OWB is still an essential tool.
As you say though, the requirement to have two sets of skills, two repositories and so on is a not insignificant overhead, hence I’ll be pleased when the two tools become increasingly merged and/or integrated over the next couple of years.
regards
Mark