New OWB Product Roadmap on OTN

Mark Rittman

Jul 8, 2008 • 2 min read

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.

Sign up for more like this.