Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) Reviews

The most common use of this solution is to connect to the database source and database target. Data in the repository constructs the mapping or programs to form the data into the target using the CAEM knowledge model. I'm a data warehouse analyst. 

The CAEM is very useful, particularly in its modularity and portability. We can also use real-time transformation to build and load data. It works more quickly than other ELTs and it's very simple and modular. It can be used for all integrations, not only AIT or ELT.

Reverse engineering is complicated when reversing from the database to the repository. It's pretty challenging to manage.

I've been using this solution for four years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable.

To date, we haven't needed customer support. 

The initial deployment is very simple and we carried out the implementation in-house.

I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

Our ODI usage is expensive and is mainly for the extraction transformation and loading (ETL) of data from multiple sources to a data warehouse.

The most valuable feature of ODI is the to use of the whole ETL to create a data lake.

We have been using Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) for approximately five years.

At this point in time, we are not satisfied with the stability. However, this is not because of the solution, but because of the deployment which was done in 2017, and the maintenance and upgrades that needed to be done, which were not done over time.

ODI is a scalability solution as long as you are keeping it up to date with all the upgrades and patching, you can scale it a lot.

We have approximately five engineers who direct users of ODI, and there is a great number who use the solution.

We used technical support and they are good.

We did not use a tool prior to ODI.

The initial setup of ODI was straightforward. The full implementation took us approximately two months because of our architecture, it was not the fault of the tool.

We used a third party to do the implementation of ODI.

We have approximately five engineers that do the maintenance and support the solution.

There is a standard license to use the solution but there are other costs in addition, such as hardware and operating system.

I rate the price of ODI a three out of ten.

My advice to other people implementing this solution would be it is good as long as the context of the systems that they are using it. For example, if they are using a lot of Oracle technologies, then it makes sense to have ODI, otherwise, there are other tools that could make more sense.

I rate ODI a seven out of ten.

Very large and complexes environments implementation, 10000+ users with 24x7 global operation and multiple EPM tools working in sync.

For the EPM environment, the ODI is the key to transforming a good project into a great project. With ODI, we can make all the EPM tools work together as one and we can create a puzzle that will increase the performance and capability of all EPM tools. We can have an integrated environment and decrease the close time from two days to one hour.

It's the best tool for data integration. It can do anything you want, but the only downside is that you need to know what you are doing. You can take 10 times longer to do the same thing if you don't know how to use the tool.

You have to know how to change the KM, how to use the dynamic coding, how to create dynamic models, and so on. In a lot of places, I see people using ODI wrongly, but the good thing about the tool is that isn't hard to fix common mistakes. With this you can improve performance, and in some cases, more than 10 times.

Right now, we have two very different GUIs - 11g and 12c. 11g is faster to develop than 12c as it takes more steps to do exactly the same as 11g, but you have a lot of things that you need to do yourself.

12c implemented some things for which you have to use some specialized code automatically, like parallel data load, but it is slower to develop. For me, the best thing would be to merge the GUI from 11g into the capabilities of 12c.

More than 12 years.

There were issues mainly because of a Java memory leak.

We have had no issues with scaling it for our needs.

The technical support for EPM is bad. I don't remember anytime that the service support helped me with something. The problem is bigger when you have an environment with more than one product like Hyperion Planning and ODI.

This happens because the products have different owners within Oracle and then different supports, and because of this, if you open a trouble ticket of loading data to planning and you say the words ODI, you'll be pushed around the two separate support teams indefinitely, even if your company has an Oracle support director just for you.

Neutral

The bigger the environment, the bigger the challenge is you need to face. Maybe one day Oracle will integrate all their tools. It'll be easier, and the good thing is that I saw a lot of improvements over the years.

All tools are expensive, but I think ODI is the most expensive since it depends on your sources and target databases. I think the best way to go is by doing packages and try to include free tools (if you buy Planning you have an ODI for BI licenses for free) or try to get discounts from your Oracle supplier. It's always good to explore what could happen if you get another tool or hardware together. Sometimes, you get more for less than if you get just one tool. Just be careful to not buy things that you won't use.

I'm a consultant and my only evaluation was on the database. I decided on Oracle because of the database and during my career, their other tools are starting to come naturally.

Because Oracle products are development frameworks, your final results are as good as the people that implemented it. Make sure that your implementation team is the best it could be, at least for the first implementation. If something is implemented incorrectly at the start, it'll cost you a lot more to fix than to build a new system from scratch. Sometimes it can be so badly designed that it is impossible to fix.

I've been working on implementations for 21 years and I have seen bad implementations everywhere. In fact, I have seen the same tools implemented in the same team by two different people, with one being a success and the other a failure. In the same company, one department says that the tool does not work for them and another says that the tool is the best. The only difference was the implementer. Make sure you get a good team to implement it. The tool has its flaws but most of time (99%) it is the implementer's fault that you have a bad or slow model.

The use case involved integrating a GMI-specific solution, which was a customer requirement. We used the software provided by the customer for this purpose. However, within our organization, we consumed some of the services by using Oracle.

I will need to involve the integration team to elaborate on the features, as they can provide input. I work mostly on the functional-technical side. However, in Oracle Data Integrator, the governance, especially the service governance, is good. There is also a schedule-based data-pulling mechanism. The message-pulling mechanism in the solution is good, and we can define threshold limits on top of the services. For instance, if I publish some equipment gateway or email gateway, the end user can consume a specific number of services from the solution.

In our company, we haven't tried consuming services from IoT in our company yet, and I would like to know if the solution will support IoT services in the next release. Specifically, I'd like to see if the solution will support us in acquiring data from our databases.

I have been using Oracle Data Integrator for the past two years in a customer implementation process where the solution was required. Also, I have experience with the solution's commercial version. I am a solutions consultant.

Stability-wise, I rate this solution a seven out of ten.

In our organization, we have not checked whether Oracle Data Integrator is scalable, including whether it is vertically or horizontally scalable or can scale automatically. However, we can deploy and configure it. We have only worked with Oracle Data Integrator in one of the deployments. At the same time, we were involved with Pentaho Data Integration for the other deployments. To ensure the solution's maintenance, we require a staff of three technical experts, including an integration expert and an ESB expert.

We haven't had any experience with the solution's technical support team. Also, technical support-related affairs are taken care of by a different team.

We have used WSO2 Integration for a proof of concepts (POC) in our organization. We have also used Red Hat Fuse and Pentaho Data Integration. So, we have worked on these tools from an ESB point of view. Also, commercial ESBs like Oracle Enterprise. We primarily used Red Hat Fuse for APM and ACM, deployed specifically for one of our customers between 2015 and 2016. So, our recent experience is with Pentaho Data Integration and Hitachi Pentaho Data Integration.

The solution's initial setup is straightforward, especially compared to Mule, which our team has worked with before and found to be a bit more complex in terms of setup. Pentaho Data Integration and Hitachi Data Integration are also good.

Since the deployment of Oracle Data Integrator has already been done, the customer provides the platform or software. Another team is responsible for maintaining the solution while we have published some of its services. It takes around three months to deploy the solution.

Our company didn't have to pay for the license of the solution since our customer had already paid for it.

Based on the customer's requirement, I would recommend the solution to them. In our company, we have prior experience with ESBs. We can suggest multiple ESB options that are best suited to the customer's needs. Overall, I rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Several projects benefited from the ODI data integration capabilities such as Loading OLTP system's data to Data warehouses, pulling data from cloud-based databases and loading to on-premises DW, for example: extracting data from a SQL server which is based on Azure infrastructure. 

Perform data integration from cloud to cloud.

Data migration between OLTP systems. 

Event-based integration such SOA, for example, BPEL performed calls of ODI scenarios based on EBS events.

All projects where I have implemented ODI solution highly benefited of high data volume integration.

There are several very important features that we use daily.

• All our systems can be widely integrated by ODI, such as transactional systems, our data warehouses, and B2B integration.
• ODI is really powerful for BI projects with traditional star-schema loads. For example, we integrated Salesforce to an Oracle data warehouse with it.ODI is a platform agnostic, you may have any data source and any target to integrate and ODI will enable you to connect.
• It facilitates real-time data replication from Microsoft SQL Server to an operational database sitting on Oracle Database.
• It provides for legacy systems integration. It integrates any SQL server database.

There is always room for improvement, even when something is really good, but I think ODI is one of the best ETL tools in the market. However, I've always waited for the web service feature to be improved in next versions, so at last the 12C version the web service has been improved, some of the limitations of the 11g version were solved. Also, it would be really good if Oracle considered enabling the tool to integrate with some other platforms that are deprecated simply for commercial reasons, although it looks like the cloud option offers some extra connectors (for example, in Salesforce CRM).

I've never had any issues with stability.

I haven't had any issues with scalability.

Technical service is a 6, and Oracle needs to improve this.

Besides ODI I have used SSIS and Power Center Informatica, both are similar and typical ETL tools, ODI up until 11g version had some differences, for example in ODI 11g we call the integration object as"Interface" wheres in  Informatica it is called "Mappings" which has been implemented in the ODI 12c version.

I still could see the Oracle solution being more robust and more logical, not to mention when it comes to customization, in ODI I felt more freedom to develop and customize the built-in code and designer objects such as the models, interfaces, for example, you can run updates in the repository tables"SNP's".

Also, ODI handles high data volume more efficiently, of course, your database must be well tuned a good hardware helps a lot. The other difference is that you have more flexibility to manage the ODI metadata since everything is based on database .

Getting the right JDK during agent config on Solaris was challenging on one occasion. It needs a Solaris expert to do this but in general when one knows the bits and pieces of the tool it should be straight forward .

I was usually part of the implementation team to implement the product .

oracle would better provide these kind of information .

The setup of the environment requires experts on site, but it is very worth it since at first for customers it can be quite complex. The vendor needs to enable the customer on a frequent basis during implementation, but the results are great.

The biggest feature for ODI is the fact that it uses the power of the source or target database to actually perform the ETL processing. So a typical data integration tool might have its own ETL engine, and that would be an additional server, additional costs, something else you have to maintain. ODI actually has the ability to create and generate code that runs potentially on your Oracle database, or even on a big data target, on Hadoop or somewhere like that. So, you have that flexibility, and you don't have to have that additional cost in maintenance.

A couple other additional benefits of Oracle Data Integrator would be the use of what's called a knowledge module. So this is like a code template that uses the metadata that you have available within ODI, and within your mapping, to generate that code, that then can be executed, like I said before, on the source or target system. The code will be generated in the native format of that database or that technology. So, again, you have sort of a hands-off.

These knowledge modules are built in. They can be developed and modified. So, the biggest thing, I always think, with ODI is, it fits around your data warehouse needs. Rather than taking your production, or your business, and trying to make it fit a tool, you do the opposite. You make the tool fit your business.

One thing that is included, and it's going to improve, is the integration with a configuration management tool. Right now, they integrate with Subversion. And we know in the future, there's going to be more tools implemented there for configuration management and some new features there. So right now, it's kind of one of those features that, it's been released, but it's sort of a beta version of that feature where a lot more functionality will be coming down the line.

So ODI is actually quite a stable product. As a testament to the product team that develops it, they're not going to release something that is extremely buggy or things like that. So, I do see that often they will release features that are highly anticipated and highly sought after. And they might release them a little early. So there's definitely patching that comes into play there, to kind of get the full solution there.

As far as stability, the Oracle Data Integrator has agents that run either in WebLogic, as a Java deployment there, or on a server as a Java agent, or a Java deployment. As long as a client has had the product implemented, with no issues there. So that's kind of the key there, you don't want to have those agents have a blip or any issues.

So as far as scalability of Oracle Data Integrator, from the high availability standpoint, if you use WebLogic for your agent, you can use the clustering capability within WebLogic to create multiple nodes on different WebLogic servers. And then run your agent through that process there. So if something fails, if the main agent fails, it can fail over to the secondary agent or, again, another agent in your cluster.

I'd probably put them up there around an eight, yeah. Being a system integrator of Oracle products, typically I'm on behalf of a client. So oftentimes it depends on who your client is and what their level of support is, as far as response and how things go. But I've always had great response with those guys.

A lot of the projects I've worked on recently are Oracle VM apps projects. So, it's the folks that are in the Informatica version of VI apps, and looking at moving to the latest and greatest, which has Oracle Data Integrator behind the scenes. I'm not saying they're actually talking about using Informatica, they're just, that's what they have. And they're looking to migrate. Quite often where we come into play, ODI is typically chosen at that point. And then they call us in to help with it.

It's not too difficult. It's tough to look at it from the perspective of someone who hasn't been doing it for a while. And oftentimes, that's what you need to kind of make that determination. But as far as just getting up and running, you can get it installed, configure an agent, quite quickly. And then the next step would really be getting ready to build a mapping. And they actually introduced in the most recent release, or maybe even when 12C came out, they introduced a feature that would basically get everything, topology, the models, all the data stores, everything, ready to go for you, just in one simple wizard. And then you could actually start building mappings quickly.

A lot of it is when they have home-grown ETL processes. So they'll manually script their ETL code. It's basically something that's difficult to maintain. So we talk about how we can use ODI to keep everything centralized. And even if we're not using ODI to actually build out mappings within the product, we might still be able to run that PL SQL or whatever it is, the script for ETL, from within ODI.

So we still have everything consolidated and contained and then the other approach, or reason for moving to ODI, would be the need to get off of that middle tier integration server. That we don't need with ODI.

As far as why consider Oracle Data Integrator, I think the big thing is the ability to consolidate all of your ETL into one place. Whether it's an Oracle to Oracle, source to target load, or even Oracle to Hadoop, or anything in between. SQL Server, MySQL, XML. ODI can basically talk to all of those different technologies. From a consolidation of all of your data warehouse or your data integration, if you will. And also, just use the same approach for mapping and creating processes for all of those different types of solutions. You have everything logically defined. And so when you're developing, it actually doesn't look any different than an Oracle source, and target doesn't look any different than a Hadoop source and target.

So I would rate ODI a nine. And that's really because, just looking across the other ETL tools, so I mentioned Informatica, there's a lot of other ones out there. I've seen what ODI does from a sort of a declarative design approach, and the push-down of work to the source and target. I've seen that replicated in other tools that have come out after Oracle Data Integrator. That's a big key.

It puts it kind of at the top, if you're going to look at a scale across all of the ETL tools. The other aspect to that rating is how they're integrating a lot of the big data technologies now. And it's a big deal from an Oracle standpoint, it's kind of how things are going. And it also just makes sense to, again, keep everything consolidated in one place. You already have an investment in ODI, it makes sense to try to drive some of your other big data type Hadoop loads or whatever it may be from that same place.

We use the solution for getting transactions and BI reports for stakeholders.

Stability could be improved because some operators have issues.

I have been using Oracle Data Integrator for two years and a half.

We used the solution, and we didn't have any problems with that.

I rate the solution’s stability a six out of ten.

We didn't have a problem with the tool’s scalability. There are six to seven people using this tool in our organization. We don't have plans to increase the usage. It responds to all our problems.

We didn’t contact the customer support team. We figure it out by ourselves.

The initial setup is easy. It took about two and a half months to deploy.

We set up the tool in an environment because of data sensitivity.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

We are using the solution for ETL purposes for our data warehouse.

The product has an ELT approach. It is much faster than any other ETL.

The initial setup is a bit complex compared to other tools.

I have been using the solution for three to four years.

The tool’s stability is good. I rate the stability an eight out of ten. We need to do a lot of engineering to understand the ODI mappings, knowledge modules, and how to load them. We need to learn a lot of other things, too.

It is a native tool of Oracle. It has no problems with scalability and availability. We have around 12 to 14 users.

The support depends on the severity of the tickets raised. A P1 ticket might be resolved fast. P2 or P3 tickets take a long time. I rate the support for P1 an eight out of ten, but for P2 and P3 tickets, I rate support a five out of ten.

Positive

The deployment takes at least 30 minutes. The tool has a lot of prerequisites. If we don't have a consultant or expert to help with the deployment, we won’t be able to complete it within 30 minutes. It would take longer. We must install JDK and the OBIEE repository that contains ODI packets. The software setup is confusing. The installation can be done in-house if the SOP is clear with the prerequisites and steps to follow.

The solution is very expensive. If it is cheaper, more people can use it. Oracle licensing is complex to understand. We pay a yearly licensing fee.

Since the product is expensive, we are exploring other tools like Azure Data Factory to reduce costs.

People can use the tool if they don't have a limit on their budget. However, people generally have budget constraints. We need to understand the cost before we implement the product. Overall, I rate the solution a six out of ten.