Item: Oracle Data Integrator (ODI)
Rating: 7
Author: Federico Shortrede

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We’re currently using Oracle Data Integrator for integration purposes between legacy systems and eBS, and also to populate a couple of data marts from information in Oracle.

Pros and Cons

For us, it is particularly good for batch loading processes, because it is quite easy to connect different sources.
Great for ETL processes, since it allows you to extract data from very different sources, perform some transformation, and load it to your final system.
It was not difficult for our technical team to learn and adopt the tool.

The main problem for us is that, from time to time, and for reasons we still were unable to discover, ODI loses the connection, and integration processes fail.
I think there’s some room to improve the controlling of this process, but I don’t think they will perfect ODI in this way because Oracle has other licensed tools.

Return on Investment

It quickened our development of interfaces.
Allow us to replace some interfaces based on TXT files with direct connection, and thus turning our environment more safe and SOX compliant.

Alternatives Considered

We thought IBM was too expensive and more difficult to use. With Microsoft, since we have our main application running with Oracle DB, we understood it’d be easier for us to work with ODI.

Other Software Used

Oracle eBusiness Suite, Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management, Oracle BI Foundation Suite

Likelihood to Recommend

Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) is great for integration between different Oracle data bases, and it also works well taking data from sources like Excel or SQL Server.

We’re not so sure about ODI’s performance when origins are “very far away”, for instance, in different servers connected through an MPLS, or between one “on premise” server with another “cloud server”. But perhaps it is due to lack of knowledge.

ODI – cost effective tool for integration purposes

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Data Integrator