Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) Reviews

It is an ETL tool, which does the extract, transform, and load. 

At this point we are seeing what we need, so I don't know if there is anything, any big improvements that are needed. This is basically just transforming and loading the data. It's doing its job.

I rate it a seven out of 10 because there is room for growth because ODI is still new, in comparison to Informatica, which is a mature product.

We have been using it now for two years.

So far it has provided what we need, it's working fine.

It's scalable. Right now, we have a pilot project that we started with ODI, which went fine. We will be ramping that up for the other integrations and hopefully that will all go fine.

I think the support at Oracle is tremendous. We have a whole stack of Oracle products and the support with Oracle has always been very good.

We chose ODI because we have the Oracle Stack and we wanted to be in the Oracle space. We wanted a tool that will work long-term for Oracle, so that's why we chose ODI.

All ODI, all the ETL tools, they have mappings and knowledge bases and the like. Based on that, I don't think it is too complicated. It is fine. There is a learning curve, but this is going to be orchestrated by IT, not by business users, so I think it's fine.

I would definitely recommend the ODI. The reason is that now Oracle, after a long time, has put its weight behind an ETL tool, which is ODI, and so Oracle is going to stand behind it, which means that it has a long life. That's another reason which we chose it. 

Informatica is a gold standard in ETL and, before ODI, Informatica used to be the king of the ETL. Now, because Oracle is putting its weight behind this tool we think that, long-term, ODI will have a better future. When we had the option of choosing an ETL tool, we went with ODI because we wanted to choose something for the long-term.

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.

It can do so much more than just load data. It can basically automate any task that you can think of, such a executing scripts for servers outside of your Oracle environment, executing any task that the IT team wishes to execute can be done via ODI. I created a button on a user’s machine once, this button executed only her job in ODI regardless of all the other jobs that were created. I love working with ODI because it tests your thought limits and creativity and the possibilities are endless when it comes to innovative tasks.

I work in a consulting role but I believe that by implementing it a lot of organizations’ manual processes have been automated

With ODI there is a lot of manual work to be done with the initial setup.

I've been using it for four years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We've experienced no issues with performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

99% of the time we do our own trouble shooting.

I started with this product.

The initial setup was rather complex but I knew what I needed to do to achieve the end result. There are also allot of reading material on these products if you get stuck

We used an in-house team. My advice would be to know what you want to achieve with the tool because it is very flexible.

In my opinion the notable difference between ODI 10 and ODI 11 is the possibility to keep multiple interfaces open at the same time. This makes it very comfortable to work with. Another technical feature that I like, is the possibility to create a dataset. This is the Oracle set operator inside the interfaces such as UNION, INTERSECT, MINUS. It has a friendly interface where you can see all tools very clearly because the designer tab shows the operator, topology and security workflow together and you can access them at the same time without any problems.

With ODI 11, I have spent time developing different interfaces at the same time instead of developing them one by one. ODI doesn't have an interpretable language in its architecture, so if you know Oracle you can write mapping SQL statements that you need for getting the data. This allows you me to have a greater adaptability.

I would like more different tools of transformation. In the current version I have only worked with lookup and filter, and sometimes is not good enough for what I use it for.

I've been using it for seven months.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We had issues with the early versions but lately the product is performing well.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Oracle provides good support for this tool.

The initial implementation was simple, and there are no issues to report.

I tried PowerCenter a few months before Oracle Data Integrator. I wanted to try the Oracle ETL to compare it with the tools of PowerCenter.

ODI is a great ETL tool that you can use for implementation. It’s not complicated to use, and with knowledge of SQL and PLSQL you can customize it a lot.

We use ODI to integrate data from the OLTP database to the data warehouse. The source database systems including Oracle, MySQL, flat files... Our business background is OTA and the total data is about 100T.

In our DW/BI solution, ODI is the main tool to integrate the data as a daily batch. Besides loading data, we do most of our transformations in ODI. ODI is quick to use.

Most of the functions are very straightforward, like the data model, mapping, package, and load plan. Thus, a new user could get started very fast. 

The ODI scheduler for agent sometime fails with no sign, which impact the ETL solution severely.

The property window in the ODI studio always does not refresh as it should. 

Sometimes, the mapping or package automatically gets edited.

The stability of the ODI studio is not strong enough. It crashes occasionally. 

Informatica and SSIS are also good ETL tools besides ODI.

The installation of the client tool: ODI studio is easy.

Basically the ETL tools is determined by the database.

Heterogeneous technologies can be integrated with ODI, including the latest web services.

I feel that Oracle provides users with the best functionalities from ODI by constantly improving the functionalities in all areas.

Any IT company that relies on data coming from its clients or internal users requires data maintenance. All that collected data should be able to provide insight into the various behaviors of the clients across different platforms. For us, ODI has been key in collecting, transforming, and storing information from our various sources.

The two areas that I see for improvement would be the UI and the procedures for accessing it.

I have been using ODI for the last seven years starting with 10g. In my experience, Oracle has spent a lot of effort in improving the tool.

I never faced issues with the deployment since 11g. Oracle has made very good improvements in terms of the deployment. DBA objects take more time than the code deployment, which are the easiest and quickest ones. There is no room for errors when we have an environment in production.

We have had no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues scaling it.

5/10 - Technical support needs to be improved.

I haven't used any other solutions since this product has the potential to provide a solution for any complex requirement.

It's straightforward to set up.

We implemented it through a vendor.

I definitely recommend using this for any data warehouse project.

Our primary use for this solution is a data integration and merging tool. It easily connects to many databases like MySql, SQL Server, etc. It's completely user-friendly. We can easily manage packages, ETL, and Procedures.

Before adopting this solution we used to work hard. We now feel better because our manual work is completely over. 

We can easily create ETL processes and schedules. We can check logs on a daily basis. It handles multiple routines very smartly.

Overall the product is fine, but sometimes its reports unknown errors while we compile ETL scripts.

My impressions are good in terms of the stability.

I find that the scalability of this solution is good.

Interaction with technical support is not my area.

Before this solution, we were using SQL Server.

I think that the initial setup is amazing.

We used a completely internal team to implement this solution. 

We found that the cost compared to other integration tools is a little high, but the solution works great.

We evaluated SQL Server prior to choosing this solution.

I'm not very comfortable with ODI, but it is one of the Oracle product that we use. I know the interfaces and that it's used for financials. The ODI client can be configured so that Excel data can automatically be pumped into Oracle Forms directly.

It requires a client, which I don't think is the best way to go about connecting data. Basically, you need to establish a connectivity between the client and the database, so when you launch something through Reports, in can be shown in the Excel.

Also, I think they should have something like Google Docs, where an engine opens up a document directly instead of having to depend on a client for connectivity. That would make working with it much more efficient and better.

If you are applying it on more clients, it becomes a thick client because to have the client installed, it needs memory from the desktops. This slows down deployment.

If it has a client that demands more thick clients than thin clients, that means that you need to give more memory and more CPU for your desktops that are also using those same resources.

We haven't had problems with scaling it.

I wasn't involved in the implementation, but I haven't heard that it was particularly complex.

I believe we implemented it with our in-house team.