Oracle introduces 11g data integration products

Wednesday, September 15, 2010 by Helena Schwenk

Oracle recently announced two new products as part of its Data Integration Suite: Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition (ODI) 11g and Oracle GoldenGate 11g. The announcement not only aligns the company’s data integration tools under the 11g banner but demonstrates it is continuing to deliver on its strategy of building a heterogeneous data integration platform while also embedding data integration technology and pre-built content within its own applications, middleware and database. With ODI 11g and GoldenGate 11g Oracle has a strong and robust set of data integration capabilities covering real time and batch data transformation and integration scenarios which demonstrates the company’s ongoing commitment to integrating its acquired and home grown technology assets within a data integration suite. It is however still a work in progress.

A two part strategy – remaining open yet integrated with Oracle

Oracle’s data integration strategy aims to provide both a standalone, heterogeneous, enterprise data integration capability and one that is also integrated with the Oracle technology stack. ODI 11g builds on the first of these core aims by introducing new features such as LDAP security integration, high availability and clustering, a simulation mode for debugging data transformations and a unified look-and-feel with JDevelopers (Oracle’s IDE).  Tying in with this enterprise data integration theme, GoldenGate 11g includes new features such as time-outs for long running transactions, operational reporting with E-Business Suite, Peoplesoft and JDE and support for data sources such as JMS message queues and log based capture for MySQL and IBM DB2 v9.7.

In parallel the company’s data integration strategy also focuses on lowering the overall cost of data integration within Oracle environments by embedding ODI and GoldenGate pre-built content within the company’s technology stack.  For example as part of 11g, ODI metadata is pre-integrated with Oracle Business Intelligence allowing for data lineage and impact analysis; likewise ODI content is pre-integrated for the Oracle Database and Exadata (its high end data warehousing appliance) and with Oracle’s ERP and CRM applications. This is a sensible move since providing out-of-the-box data integration content optimised for an application or database platform can help reduce some of the overheads and cost involved in the back end data integration effort.

 ODI acts as the cornerstone of Oracle’s data integration strategy

This announcement also reaffirms ODI as Oracle’s strategic product for batch heterogeneous data integration. Since its 2006 acquisition of Sunopsis, Oracle has steadily built up a comprehensive set of data integration capabilities that consist of acquired technology (including GoldenGate and Silver Creek) as well as home grown and co-developed products. While the company’s focus prior to the Sunopsis acquisition focused on Oracle database-centric data integration with its Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) tool, this has changed fundamentally since the addition of Sunopsis.

This broadening of scope culminated in the release of Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition (ODIEE) in early 2009, a product bundle that combined the Sunopsis technology (renamed Oracle Data Integrator) with features from the OWB product within a single license. This allowed Oracle to bring together the best of its ODI database-independent E-LT architecture (a variation on the traditional ETL paradigm) with the Oracle database-centric functionality of OWB. The advantages of an ELT architecture are that it removes the need to process data on a middle tier by pushing it down to the target database and hence allows organisations to take advantage of their existing data warehouse investments. Subsequent releases of ODIEE continue to tighten up integration between ODI and OWB while providing features that can help maintain the technology investments made by both sets of customers (this includes extending support of OWB until 2018). The eventual plan is to converge both products into a single, unified data integration platform which MWD estimates to be sometime in 2011.

Its aggressive acquisition strategy means Oracle is building a strong and comprehensive data integration suite covering batch and real-time data movement, transformation, synchronization, and data quality. The latter capability comes through its acquisition of Silver Creek for product data quality and through its development partnership with Harte-Hanks Trillium. For example, as part of its data integration suite the Oracle Data Quality for Data Integrator product is based on Trillium’s TS Quality software, while Oracle Data Profiler is based on Trillium’s TS Discovery product.  In the longer term we suspect adding its own customer data quality piece to sit alongside its other tools will be a key consideration for Oracle.

Real time data integration comes to the fore

Real time data integration continues to be a core component of Oracle’s 11g data integration strategy.  GoldenGate(based on its 2009 acquisition) provides excellent support for low impact data capture and realtime delivery of transactions through its replication and change data capture capabilities. It supports various usage scenarios including realtime migration and upgrades, and synchronising operational data for realtime BI. Similarly GoldenGate can be used alongside ODI to support operational BI. In this scenario for example GoldenGate can provide the fast data capture and realtime movement, but passes control to ODI for more heavy duty and complex transformations and rolling transactions into the data warehouse at planned intervals (what Oracle terms a micro batch architecture). While enterprises currently need to understand the distinction between the use cases of GoldenGate and ODI and when you need to use them separately or together, Oracle is continuing to beef up integration between both products. For example as part of the 11g release administrators can now create GoldenGate deployment files within the ODI user interface. In the longer term we believe that like OWB, GoldenGate will eventually be integrated into the ODI platform.

Clearly there are a lot of moving parts at work here but these announcements demonstrate that Oracle is working hard to deliver on its strategy and piece together an enterprise class data integration suite that functionally stands up to rival information management offerings.

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