dbt vs. Oracle Data Service Integrator

If you can load your data first into your warehouse, dbt is excellent. It does the T(ransformation) part of ELT brilliantly but does not do the E(xtract) or L(oad) part. If you know SQL or your development team knows SQL, it's a framework and extension around that. So, it's easy to learn and easy to hire people with that technical skill (as opposed to specific Informatica, SnapLogic, etc. experience). dbt uses plain text files and integrates with GitHub. You can easily see the changes made between versions. In GUI-based UIs it was always hard to tell what someone had changed. Each "model" is essentially a "SELECT" statement. You never need to do a "CREATE TABLE" or "CREATE VIEW" - it's all done for you, leaving you to work on the business logic. Instead of saying "FROM specific_db.schema.table" you indicate "FROM ref('my_other_model')". It creates an internal dependency diagram you can view in a DAG. When you deploy, the dependencies work like magic in your various environments. They also have great documentation, an active slack community, training, and support. I like the enhancements they have been making and I believe they are headed in a good direction.

Incentivized

Once Oracle Data Service Integrator is set up properly, it is quite simple to snatch data from a myriad of disparate sources and put them into a single repository. Due to cost factors, it is not for the faint of heart; however, if you can handle it, the benefits will quickly outpace the initial investment. To take full advantage of the power of ODSI, I would recommend the training that Oracle provides.

Incentivized

• user experience makes it easy to work with SQL and version control
• customer success team and the dbt (data build tool) community help establish best practices
• thorough and clear documentation

• Very easy to use. Very easy to just grab data when needed.
• Very robust and has so many features to move and transform data.
• Functionality is very easy to implement with other Oracle data products.

Incentivized

• Slow load times of the dbt cloud environment (they're working on it via a new UI though)
• More out-of-the-box solutions for managing procedures, functions, etc would be nice to have, but honestly, it's pretty easy to figure out how to adapt dbt macros

Incentivized

• If not bundled with other products, the price can be prohibitively expensive
• SAP connectors tend to be a little expensive and slightly difficult to use
• The audit module had some difficulties debugging failed instances

Incentivized

Most ETL pipeline products have a T layer, but dbt just does it better. The transformation is on steroids compared to the others. Also, just allows much more Adhoc solutions for very specific projects. Those ETL tools are probably better on the T part if you don't need too many transforms - also dbt is pretty much free dependent on how you work it, also extremely scalable.

Incentivized

While we tested and evaluated multiple data service providers, we came to choose Oracle Data Service Integrator since our infrastructure was so heavily dependent on Oracle software. The implementation would be easier and the difference in the number of features and performance wasn't enough to sway us in another direction.

Incentivized

• Simplified our BI layer for faster load times
• Increased the quality of data reaching our end users
• Makes complex transformations manageable

Incentivized

• It provided terrific bulk data movement and data transformation services which we desperately needed
• It allowed to reduce development costs and lower the total cost of ownership among disparate architectures
• The enterprise edition's ELT allowed us to generate native code for wildly varied RDBMS

Incentivized