Real Time Operational Business Intelligence with GoldenGate

Oracle Golden Gate ArchitectureOracle Corporation’ (ORCL) acquisition of Golden Gate Software on July of 2009 was a big step for Oracle in its quest to build a open and heterogeneous product line that will be more appealing to enterprise customers with complex OLTP and data warehouse environments. You can find a detailed presentation of the considerations that were taken into consideration regarding this acquisition here. In the data warehousing space this is a welcome addition to the earlier acquisition of Sunopsis (now Oracle Data Integrator) a Extract-Load-Transform alternative to traditional ETL tools such as Informatica and IBM Information Server (DataStage) that plays nice in heterogeneous database environments and is significantly easier to use, and more stable than the displaced Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB). Key areas where Golden Gate can be of use in a heterogeneous database environment:

  • Simplifying disaster recovery by maintaining near-real time copies of transactional databases
  • Change Data Capture and extraction and staging for data warehouse environments
  • Real-Time operational business intelligence by means of a message queue and a Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) or Business Process Management (BPM) solution

 

Under the last scenario events can be fed into real time alerts or dashboard Key Performance Indicator’s in real time in addition to triggering additional events when the event is orchestrated via an enterprise bus. Here’s a link to a step by step installation and configuration demo at Oracle Technology Network (OTN). Stay tunned for additional product reviews and OBIEE tips and tricks that are coming soon and check my review of Oracle Data Integrator here..

Informatica being replaced by ODI in Oracle BI Apps 7.9.5.2

Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) Logo

In a long anticipated move among both Fusion Intelligence and Oracle BI Apps customers, Oracle has released the first versions of its packaged business intelligence solution that replaces the third party tools of previous versions (IBM DataStage or Informatica Power Center) with Oracle Data Integrator as the back end ETL tool. You can find detailed install and configuration instructions in the Oracle Business Intelligence Applications 7.9.5.2 Documentation Library.

 

It is important to note that this is a controlled availability release that mainly means the only data source supported is Oracle E-Business Suite 11.5.10, marts available in this release are:

 

  • Financial Analytics
  • HR Analytics
  • SCM and Order Managment Analytics
  • Procurement and Spend Analytics

Limitations notwithstanding, this is a key move that signals a long term strategy for BI Apps that will require customers and partners to develop additional skills and an important upgrade consideration for EBS customers. I personally hope that we will see Oracle implement Golden Gate at some point down the road in order to provide real time operational intelligence for a limited set of KPIs that lend themselves to be used in BAM applications.

Sunopsis seven years after it’s acquisition

Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) Logo

Oracle Data IntegratorOn October of 2006 Oracle acquired Sunopsis a sofware company whose flagship product was one of the up-and-coming players in the datata warehousing arena. Sunopsis for easy integration in environments with multiple database systems and differentiated itself by adopting an Extract-Load-Transform architecture that decreased the learning curve for database developers that were immediately able to create transformation using familiar SQL syntax. By utilizing the computing power in the target database Sunopsis’ ELT architecture potentially decreased the need for additional computing power in a dedicated ETL server. Fast forward five years and Sunopsis is now Oracle Data Integrator, it is a key component of the Fusion Middleware Data Integration product line and it’s looking good, a few features that large enterprise customers will find interesting are:

  • SOA enabled an can deploy and consume web services for data transformation and integration
  • Integrates well into your data cleansing (names, addresses) and Master Data Management framework
  • Out of the box CDC functionality with a Publish-and-Subscribe model implemented either via triggers or log mining (Oracle and DB2)
  • As previously stated, by utilizing the source and target database’s computing power ODI decreases it Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

It seems as if the merging of Oracle Warehouse Builder and Sunopsis’ functionalities has been beneficial to the end product and, in general, to the enterprise customer. Now it remains to be seen how aggressively Oracle”s sales force can take market share from ODI’s top competitors IBM Information Server and Informatica PowerCenter. Stay tunned for additional product reviews and, of course, OBIEE and Business Intelligence updates…