Wednesday 22 October 2014

OBIA Statement of Direction updated

Further to my last post on the ETL future of OBIA, Oracle have now posted an updated Statement of Direction for the BI Apps.

Here is the blog post linking to the Statement of Direction: OBIA SOD


 

Wednesday 8 October 2014

OBIA 11g - No more Informatica

I was interested to hear at Oracle Open World last week that Oracle have finished their development of the BI Apps using Informatica as the ETL tool. The last version of OBIA using Informatica is 7.9.6.4.

The message is clear : to upgrade to OBIA 11g, you will have to re-implement the ETL components using Oracle Data Integrator (ODI).

In my opinion, this isn't such a bad thing! ODI is a very powerful and incredibly flexible ETL tool that Oracle acquired from Sunopsis a few years back. The knowledge module functionality for example, is genius and have saved our team weeks of coding compared to developing the ETL using OWB! With the release of ODI 12c recently and the new 'mappings' functionality, Oracle have made big steps in also making the product a lot more user-friendly for traditional OWB developers. I'm guessing (hoping) that soon OBIA will be certified with ODI 12c also.

I've recently been working on a vanilla implementation of OBIA with ODI 11g and I can tell you that the ETL / DAC components are very different to the prior OBIA / Informatica setup. I'm assuming that Oracle must release a BI Apps 'Informatica to ODI migration'  utility at some point in the near future to ease the way forward so I am looking forward to seeing how that works.