If you haven’t had a need for utilizing Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) as an ETL (or E-LT source as ODI advertises itself) then you wouldn’t know that it is actually somewhat of a beast of a ETL tool. The interface leaves a lot to be desired and I could really get picky but again it is a beast - very powerful. I recently read a great review by the good folks at BI Quotient about ODI. They did a 3 part series on the topic and really covered some areas not mentioned in most ODI write-ups. I consider myself well versed in ODI but these guys threw in some great ancillary discussion with links to awesome tools such as PolePOS and SQuirrel SQL that I did not know about. And, we know that I am a big fan of open-source software so this was a great discovery for me.
Okay, well the article by Uli Bethke might not be the “Best ODI Review…” but it is really solid. I like how he keeps HyperSQL at the forefront of the article. Since HyperSQL (HSQLDB) is really at the core of ODI you know that ODI has the potential to be powerful as an ETL tool. As you know, HyperSQL is at the core of another very well known software suite, OpenOffice.org so clearly it works pretty well.
The article introduced me to PolePOS which a database benchmarking tool. I’ve yet to get it a go but you can see the possibilities there, especially since it is free. Could this be used against OBIEE as a source?
Lastly, in part 2 of the article Uli takes an investigative look at the in-memory synopsis memory engine of ODI against one of the Microsoft SysInternals tools to see just how severely the server’s memory gets consumed as an ODI process executes. For some this is not a common-sense benchmarking approach but subtly suggest strong performance tuning technique when working with such an application.
Just to wrap it up, no the article did not provide an immediate tutorial or a step-by-step solution. John Goodwin and some others have some killer articles like that. However, this one seemed to be one of the first ODI articles that I’ve read that touched on the tool as a part of whole not just the whole itself. Give it read if you have the chance.
I’ve been integrating SalesForce.com with OBIEE and some other data warehousing projects for clients for some time now and had a moment to throw this tutorial together. Also, I mentioned earlier in the year that I would definitely be providing a few blog posts on this topic of SalesForce.com integration. And, What better way to start off than by explaining with another tutorial video? Since the Informatica Video series is the most viewed post on http://www.artofbi.com right now, I figured I’d keep that trend going.
Below is the video tutorial which will be a precursor to the full OBIEE / SalesForce.com integration. Today I am showing the quick and dirty ability to connect to SalesForce.com via Informatica 8.6 PowerCenter in order to push up some new account data. I’ll get into the weeds sometime down the road.
Informatica is a great tool for ETL and clearly the only way to fly with the OBIEE pre-builts. This video tutorial shows one how to get rolling with their own base integration using one of the many SalesForce.com objects, Account. If you have any questions, or comments, post them as usual and I’ll try to get back to you as soon as I can.
After my recent post on the Content Accelerator Framework and preparing for my deeper dive into the tool, I have begun looking at the inner workings of how to automate the tool for daily or weekly maintenance tasks. This effort got me looking at some possible linkages between CAF and some existing OBIEE executables, nqXUDMLGen.exe and nqXUDMLExec.exe that reside in the ORACLEBI_HOME\Server\bin\ directory.
Andreas from Trivadis has done a spectacular job detailing the usage of XUDML in OBIEE, here. I have also mirrored it here.
I should be posting my additional CAF findings this month.
Trivadis also has some other cool docs on BI which I have mirrored below:
As a nice side note, I am referrencing a video that I recently found on YouTube for installing Informatica 8.6x on a Linux server. Later I will post more detailed screenshots from my own installation but for now I figured this is great insight to be shared.
My name is Christian Screen, a Business Intelligence mastermind working with mainly Oracle and Microsoft technologies. The views expressed here are my own and do not reflect the views of Oracle, Microsoft, or my employer.
