New OWB Product Roadmap on OTN
July 8th, 2008 by Mark Rittman
I’m not sure how much significance we should attach to it (in terms of it being new news), but there’s an updated product roadmap document for OWB now available on OTN. Apart from the details we all know about such as OBIEE support in the next release, ODI knowledge module support and so on, there’s a fairly clear statement towards the end of the document that says that OWB and ODI will eventually merge:
“Short Term Strategy
Oracle purchased Sunopsis in October 2006 and re-branded it as Oracle Data Integrator (ODI). ODI’s mission is to enhance the Oracle Fusion Middleware offerings, which require broad support to heterogeneous sources and targets. Warehouse Builder’s mission continues to be to support the Oracle Database. Today, ODI and OWB are released separately. For the short term, both products will continue to deliver stand-alone releases.
Although released independently, both products are currently being developed with a common goal of integrating with each other and, ultimately, merging into a single product. In the next release, for example, OWB will support the knowledge module framework developed by ODI. And in future releases, both products will share the same user interface framework and will be able to launch each other processes.
Long Term Direction
Oracle is committed to protect the investments customers have made in both Oracle Warehouse Builder and Oracle Data Integrator. In a future release, Oracle will deliver a unified data integration product that protects customer investments in both products.”
To me this is pretty significant as it’s the first time I’ve heard anyone say, officially, that ODI and OWB will eventually merge. I know it’s common sense that this would be the case (architecturally and in how they are both used, they’re so similar to each other), but up until now the message from Oracle has been that they are different products that serve different use cases. As this was clearly untenable (if only because of the amount of effort Oracle are currently expending trying to explain the rationale for the continued existence of two product lines) this to me is a welcome change of message, and it’ll be interesting to see how they converge over time. Once they’ve done this, they can then move on to doing the same for their OLAP products, with my suggestion being to rename Oracle OLAP to “Data Warehouse Advanced Aggregation Option” and position Essbase as Oracle’s standard solution for OLAP analysis.
July 8th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
Mark,
This is great that they say it more formally now, but this plan was discussed in written documents from Oracle a year ago. I spoke of it in my ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2007 talk titled “Oracle BI – Which Way is Up?”. If you register for Piocon’s Learning Center at http://www.piocon.com/learning_center, you can see my talk under the ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2007 papers. On page 10 of the paper and slides 38 and 39 of the PPT, I refer to quoted statements of direction from Oracle in 2007 to this same effect.
Albeit, there was no real evidence of this plan other than words back then. But now we start to really see it in action, as we see Knowledge Modules integrated in OWB and other key integrations of OWB and ODI functionality.
Keep up the great investigative reporting!
July 9th, 2008 at 12:00 am
Very good news indeed. I like the bit you mention about them moving on to the integration of OLAP. Not sure how easy that will be, but it will give Oracle a unified OLAP option that will be incredible.
July 9th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
Hi Matthew,
Ah, interesting, I’d not seen this myself but I’m not surprised it was written down somewhere. I’ll register on the Piocon site shortly and take a look at your paper, also hopefully we’ll catch up at OOW.
Greg – yes, it’d be good if they considered something similar for OLAP. Also I expect we’re looking at least in the 12g timeframe for the OWB/ODI integration, so at least you’ll hopefully be able to get your book on the shelves for a least a year or so before it all changes again!
cheers
Mark
May 12th, 2010 at 5:07 am
ODI is simple light weight tool.They should try to develop it separately and not mix it with OWB.
Architecturally these 2 are very diffident tool.And in terms of functionally you can do same thing in both the tool.
Mixing these 2 tools will gives unnecessary redundant functionality.
Plus I think OWB is a tool full of bugs and is a very heavy weight as well.Oracle should concentrate on resolving the OWB bugs and optimising the OWB.
June 3rd, 2010 at 11:32 am
Ankit,
What value does you statement of May 12th 2010 extend to me?
Cheers
Niels