Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) Reviews

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.

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!

- Development Lifecycle

- native REST integration

- Easier security

5 years

A bit unstable and buggy in the 12.1.2 release, but most of it is fixed in 12.1.3, so I would definitely recommend to jump to that version.

I used Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) which is now at the end of its life. ODI is much more flexible and has the great advantage to be able to connect to a lot of different source or target technologies.

It was quite straightfoward.

We did a migration for Oracle Warehouse Builder to Oracle Data Integrator 12c using the migration tool provided by Oracle. And I've to say I'm surprised to see a migration tool working so well!

In-house

It allows us to use many languages to develop and to integrate practically all the technologies of the Oracle suite as well as those from non-Oracle vendors.

My organization develops solutions using all the Oracle EPM products, and ODI has helped us to integrate all the different technologies.

I think that the product as an overall solution is good. I would only point out some minor bugs or glitches in the development interface (ODI studio), but I do not think that any of them are worthy to be reported here.

There are some difficulties in moving a repository from an environment to a different one due to the internal numbering through which ODI references the objects belonging to a repository. This often causes troubles in the porting, and for this reason you always must pay attention during this operation.

I encountered many problems with the ODI web agent (service that actually executes all the integration tasks) in the 11g version, which was not stable. For this reason, I always suggest using the standalone agent instead of the web one, mostly due to the fact that they do not have significant differences.

Scaling issues depend mostly on the tools that ODI uses to integrate the technologies. For example, if the number of records inside a table, which is the source of an integration task, increase greatly, the performance of the ODI integrating flows may degrade a lot. Their tuning, by the way, depends on the database (i.e. table partitioning, indexes or hints).

I only experienced once the customer service provided by Oracle on ODI and was supported by capable and helpful people.

The level of technical support is quite good. Apart from the first approach used to identify if the problem you are pointing out is a real issue or not, the second level support is really efficient and comprised of competent and clever people.

The initial setup is not really easy. To use ODI you must:

• Install the ODI studio (client)
• Create and configure a master and a work repository to develop on them, being sure that they can reach the database schemas you’ll work on (relational structures involved in the integration)
• Install and configure an agent (if you need to communicate with more than a server and to schedule integration tasks), choosing properly where you need it and opening all the communication doors to allow it to reach all the parts of your architecture

I implemented it with an in-house team, since my company is a consultancy and also an Oracle partner.

Even if ODI allows implementing a very smart solution with an high level of customization, I think that keeping the model of what you are developing as simple as possible is always the best choice. This is due to its future maintenance. Keep in mind that, even if you may be a very keen developer and you can propose the best and most parametric solution ever, if another (less expert) person inherits the responsibility of what you have developed, they may encounter difficulties in solving problems. For this reason, the easier you keep the complexity or technicalities of what you have created, the better it is.

This is also valid for performance - one of the basic rules of the informatics development is “divide et impera”, which means that you should always try to create “objects” as small as you can to improve performance and to be able to identify quickly where a problem is.

Being an ODI developer, I never had to pay for this product. I know that the pricing/licensing is not really low, but the product is really good.

I tried many integration tools, both Oracle and other vendors. I think that ODI is one of the most complete and open solutions, since it can work with almost any technology and it gives you the ability to develop the same solution in a wide variety of ways depending on the one you prefer.

Always keep in mind that ODI offers a huge number of solutions to any task you are developing. There is not a best practice in solving a problem; being able to identify the best solution for your particular problem is up to you and it may also be difficult to identify. This does not mean that the solution you have in mind is not correct.
Always try to maintain an ordered environment, keeping only what you really need, and perhaps organizing the items in different projects or folders, or even different work repositories.

Provides us with a relational database.

It needs more robust functioning and ease-of-use for development using reusable jobs.

We have used this solution for one year.

There were no issues with deployment.

There were no issues with stability.

There were scalability issues.

Customer service is good.

Technical support is good.

We had a vendor team help us with the implementation.

We looked at FDMEE.

It needs improvement with reusability.

I have found most of the Oracle Fusion middleware and hardware to be valuable.

We are Oracle partners. We have our clients and they need this solution. We implement it according to the clients' requirements.

I think that the Oracle Fusion Middleware stack could be improved.

I have used it for almost ten years.

I had some deployment issues. Sometimes, issues will be erased if the OS and the system do not meet the system requirements and prerequisites before deploying a specific application.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

I would give technical support a rating of 10/10.

We have always used Oracle because we are Oracle partners.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I performed the implementation. If there was something that I was unsure about, I contacted the support team for clarifications and update patches. Overall, it depends on the situation and the time frame.

I have seen a decent ROI for the Oracle and Veritas Backup Exec products.

We looked at alternatives, but they could not provide us with the complete set of features.

This is a good solution if they are trying to move to fusion stack.

Flexibility, ease of customization, extensive features, ease of deployment, and the ability to access to all kinds of different source system technologies. No need for extra hardware for transformation step. Easy to learn & develop.

Now, ODI has Cloud Service which you can deploy your repositories to Oracle Data Integrator Cloud Service for you to use both on prem, Big Data and cloud environments.

Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) can support any type of databases that has a jdbc driver in a native way. I have accessed and retrieve data from an Ingress database. Big data connectors are implemented to ODI 11.1.1.7 (out-of-the-box) and upper version that support many well-known Big Data architecture.

Knowledge Module architecture helps you to build your data integration activities with less effort.

You can switch to source, staging area or target to improve your querying performance. If you have to do a join from different source systems, you can decide which data to move to where and figure out the place for best output.

Variables can help you to perform loops and conditional statements in packages for helping ETL

It helped me to reduce a slowly changing dimensions type 2 with the same output, from 22,000 seconds to 168 seconds.

Loaded 10.000+ files to a table from 1000+ different sources under 20 minutes with approximate 300GB of data per day.

They need to work on the multiuser development environment and include the ability to comply with different kinds of SDLCs.

I've been using it for more than 10 years, since Oracle acquired Sunopsis.

There were no issues with the deployment.

I've experienced no issues with performance. Since sky is the limit, you can do what you want to do within ODI in several ways.

It's been able to scale for our needs. ODI will fit your needs.

10. I generally create a service request per year and they are being solved within a week.

They're very efficient.

We switched because of ODIs impressive increasement in development productivity.

It was straightforward and very easy. Almost the same as setup>next> next>next.

In-house.

Worth every penny.

There are various options in licensing, either per seat or per target core count. It depends how you want to use it.

We also looked at Informatica Power Center, AbInitio, Business Objects Data Integrator (BODI), and SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS).

If you want a robust, flexible solution with no extra hardware that is easy to learn, then ODI is the right product for you. ODI is a tool, that can talk or learn how to talk, with any database or operating system in its own language. This is the power of ODI.

The user interface for the data integrator tool is probably the most valuable piece. I'm a relatively newcomer to the ODI. We opted to use ODI instead of Informatica. Relatively, I do not have a lot experience with a lot of VARs, but I've been able to understand a lot more about the direction Oracle is heading through the tool. It was very intuitive. It helps to have a good background in data manipulation, but it's very intuitive and has given a good appreciation of what the tool can do.

We use ODI to extract and transform data to load into our data warehouse from our source system, which is Oracle EBS. We have found that it's very efficient; very fast. We can easily customize and review even out-of-the-box analytics that came with Oracle. We’re able to easily go in and modify and correct any anomalies that we have.

Perhaps more learning resources related to ODI would be helpful. I'm not sure if that's what restricted the buy-in. Even though the product has been out for 4-5 years, there are still a lot of people who aren't using it or have opted to stay with Informatica. It could be because there aren't enough self-study or self-research resources related to the product. That surely could be improved in the near term.

We've had it implemented for two years.

Any stability issues I've had, have been related to the data itself. It really depends on how whomever has implemented the product. If it stands up, it works well.

We get very good and very timely response from technical support. Maybe, we just don't have very complicated questions, but we get very, very good response; very quick answers.

We decided to move away from Informatica after we attended an Oracle conference about three years ago. We learned a lot more about where Oracle was going with it. One of the key reasons was not just moving forward with the newer technology; it was also because of the compatibility with the applications we use versus the applications that were available in Infomatica.

We have the capability to extend it to other data sources, all of the non-standard data sources. We don't have to build out huge data structures in order to feed them in through Infomatica. We can read Excel spreadsheets and a bunch of other sources.

As a customer to a consultant team, I was involved in the installation and deployment of ODI. There were some challenges, which was probably due to the relative inexperience of the team that handled it. Eventually, they were able to get through it. Fortunately, my internal team as costumers were also able to do our research and participate in that discovery, too.

You would have to evaluate what your key purpose is, and your existing, internal talent and experience. It's my belief that you should always try to have internal talent that is very confident, rather than having to always rely on consultants. If your talent has the experience in Infomatica – I don't think Infomatica is going anywhere – then it might be the best choice for you. I don’t think your office will fall apart. I think you have to evaluate which one will work for you.

We were new customers to data integration, so we decided to go with newer technology that had already come from the same source.

The most valuable feature is being able to schedule the jobs, especially when they're multi-step.

I don't know why we have different database environments, but we do. The business wants the data to be collected in one place, so they can do reporting and so on.

I don't know if this is because of us or because of the tool, but sometimes I had a problem with the agent getting held up. I would come in and my jobs would be failing. Now I have implemented a script to bounce the agent nightly and this problem no longer occurs.

Now that I am balancing my agent, it's been running for 2-3 months without any issues. It's been pretty stable. Prior to that, the agent was falling. I was having to check it all the time to see if the jobs ran.

One other thing that I would like to be improved – it might just be me, probably user error – is when I try to set up the feature to have it email me the notifications of what happened; I haven't been able to figure that out. I set it up but I don't get an email when it does fail.

When I initially set it up, I did open several tickets with Oracle support. I'm going to give them a middle-of-the-road rating. There were a couple of tickets where I just closed and said, "Forget it". I found a workaround; I did it a different way. There were a couple of tickets where I got really helpful people and I was very happy.

Probably because of user error – as I’ve mentioned, I had no prior experience with it – my first attempt was a bust. I was fortunate enough that I worked someplace where they sent me to training. The second time around was very easy; maybe the training was what I needed. For somebody like me, I recommend training first.

I think some people have that ability to just look online. I thought I followed all the instructions, and it would not work. It might help that, the second time around, I used the more up-to-date version. I know they change things on the install process sometimes. Second time easy; first time headache.

When I came on board, I believe we had already purchased the licensing for this. I got to be the lucky person to implement it.

Good luck. I do think the training was beneficial but I know everybody doesn't have that as an option. If you do have the option to do some training, I think that could be a really big help; it helped me.

I don't feel like I am fully utilizing it but based on the things I do use, once you get the hang of it, it's a pretty cool data integration tool.

The most valuable feature is that it's bundled with all the other Oracle products. We use the ODI with BI Apps. It does all the ELT along with our data warehouse for BI purposes. That’s good. It comes as a bundled package. If we want to use the newest, latest version, we can install it separately.

It's very user friendly. We used to use Informatica; compared to that, it's easier.

The learning curve is a little less because if you are already in the ELT business, you know how it works. Overall, it's good.

I would like to see them make some more improvements on the troubleshooting side, to help with the troubleshooting because right now, the errors are not very clear. I think they are already working on it; it's in the latest release, but yet to be included in the BI Apps bundle.

It is still not as stable as the old BI Apps and ELT tools were, but it's getting there. BI Apps doesn't come with the latest ODI yet, but in the future, it might be better.

It works with Oracle Fusion, so it can be spread across the cluster. It's pretty scalable.

Technical support is good. That's the standard. It's good.

We upgraded because the old version was no longer supported. The new version comes with ODI, so we didn't have a choice. But, we like the product.

It didn’t come with any other option. However, even if we had another option, we would have gone with Oracle, because we are a big Oracle shop.

Initial setup is straightforward. If you are from a technical background, it's pretty straightforward.

We didn't actually look at anyone else. We looked at different Oracle partners who provided this software, but the product was Oracle from the start.

We learned some lessons, such as how to plan out the entire process, and so on. Oracle documentation is good. If you follow that, you should be fine.

When I’m choosing a vendor such as Oracle, support is the most important criteria.