ODI review by an integrator consultant
Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Data Integrator
In my organization, my department develops business intelligence solutions for our worldwide customers, whose business can be in any kind of sector. In this scenario, ODI is being used to integrate data among all the pieces of the software architecture, connecting Oracle and non-Oracle technologies.
In my 6 years experience, I used ODI to:
- feed up relational environments, like Data Warehouses or Data Marts models with reporting purposes
- feed up Hyperion Planning, Hyperion Essbase, Hyperion Financial Management or INFOR applications, for our customers' controllers
- read data from Oracle and non-Oracle technologies (i.e.: SAP, SQL Server, INFOR, and many other), thanks to all ODI's connectors and interpreter
- schedule tasks and workflow, independently from the operating system, thanks to ODI's agent (the service that controls all the tool's tasks).
ODI helps integrating data across different sources and targets, executing operating systems command, managing mistakes or discards, logging all the operations performed by the integration flows and scheduling those flows.
Pros
- Is simple and easy to learn, thanks to the low number of development objects that it has (mainly: interfaces, procedures and packages, plus variables).
- It allows you to integrate data from and to any kind of technology. This is a strong point since it's able to connect practically to any technology, Oracle and not.
- It allows you to create integration flows that manage through steps on any task.
- It provides both an automatic and a customizable management of integration mistakes.
- If you feel stronger in developing through hard code, ODI allows you to integrate anything through procedures.
- It supports almost any kind of developing language, like SQL, PLSQL, Java, Javascript, C#, and so on.
- It's easy to backup, since it provides a native way to export all the developments but also its relational repositories (master and work) can be exported from the database where they reside.
Cons
- The newest version (ODI 12c) has been released with some minor bug related to environment stability (i.e. connection loss).
- After some time that you develop on ODI studio, you need to restart the program, since it tends to occupy a lot of RAM.
- The ODI studio may need a machine with a lot of resources, otherwise it may become slow.
- It's a quite expensive product, and its costs can be absorbed in some time, but it grants stability and great flexibility.
- It can be used as a main tool to integrate data on different platforms and purposes, granting a greater Return on Investment by limiting the expenses on other more specialized products.
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