Item: Oracle Data Integrator (ODI)
Rating: 9
Author: Jérôme Françoisse

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) enabled us to assist our customers loading their data warehouse and get insights from their data both in batch mode or in real-time. We helped customers in various fields: finance, gambling, telecom, transportation, education etc.

Pros and Cons

The EL-T approach that will first load into the target dataserver before doing the transfer is a great architecture improvement compared to standard ETL tools that use a staging area and usually process the data in Java. With ODI, almost all the job is pushed down on the underlying technology, for instance the Oracle Database or the Spark server.
The Knowledge Module approach provides an easy and reusable way to create our own integration strategies. It's easy to create these Knowledge Modules to connect to new technologies, for instance.
ODI is really the tool for any kind of integration because it speaks the language of the technology we connect. We can work with RDBMS but also in Hadoop, cloud services, flat files, web services, etc.

Continuous integration is missing and would be a really nice feature to enforce a good development lifecycle.
Better handling of files and folders, to be able to easily go through all the files of a folder.
Security setup is not easy to maintain.

Return on Investment

Thanks to the flexbility of the tool, we could build 3 mappings using variables and the substitution API in replacement of 300 mappings in Oracle Warehouse Builder. It's much easier to maintain.

Alternatives Considered

Oracle Warehouse Builder and Informatica Enterprise Data Integration

ODI is the naturel successor of OWB, adopting the same EL-T approach but supporting a lot more technologies as source and target. The overall product is much more stable and not tied to the Oracle Database.
Unlike Informatica, ODI generates all the code in the native underlying technologies used for source or target. This makes it easier to develop and usually faster to load.

Other Software Used

Oracle BI Foundation Suite, Oracle Database

Likelihood to Recommend

ODI can access a large range of technologies as source or target so it's suited for most of the loadings. For efficient change data capture and streaming, I would recommend other tools for the ingestion part though, like Oracle Golden Gate and Apache Kafka which are dedicated to that. File processing is not that easy in ODI so if it's your main use case you might want to look at another tool.

ODI: Flexibility, reusability and performance for data integration with various source and target technologies.

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Data Integrator