Recently I have begun work on a project for my company, Thoughtcorp. On this project we are implementing a Campaign Management Tool for a marketing organization. The project is one that is reasonably complex, and one that will ultimately provide new value to the company. It is always exciting to be involved in projects where you get to see technology, most of it Oracle technology at work. My project is using Oracle 11g as its database and as a result of this choice the project is also using Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB).
OWB has been around Oracle for a long time. This was the ETL tool that Oracle developed to enter into this market. Since that time the product was released in 200o, it has undergone many changes and evolutions. In addition Oracle also purchased a product named Sunopsis, which has since become Oracle Data Integrator (ODI). The goal is to merge much of the functionality of OWB and ODI to provide options in ETL choices while providing robust implementation options. Since OWB was released in Oracle 10g Release 1, its functionality has been available to the Oracle database community. This functionality has been lurking within your database and for my project it is time to use it.
The approach when starting a new project is to determine what tools you will be using to develop your solution. In many situations these choices are already made for you when you first start. The database is often a standard, like Oracle, the reporting tool, the ETL tool and others are often defined. In a scenario like my latest project was one that had a database and reporting infrastructure defined, but no ETL tool had previously been used or purchased. The solution could have taken two distinct paths, we could have gone out and acquired a new ETL tool, as there are many options, but the decision was to leverage the existing investment in Oracle and use OWB to act as our ETL tool. This decision provided the organization with a solid tool that is part of Oracle integration direction of the future and one that can support the requirements of our loading effort.
This decision is one that we now are working with and one that so far has shown to be a solution that can support our project’s and the organization’s ETL needs. It’s great to see Oracle’s wide breadth of technology to help to solve our challenges in a way that truly is cost effective. By leveraging the technology contained within our existing investment, we can help our organizations to be more effective without spending any new monies and in these times that could provide a very compelling reason to adopt this type of technology.
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