Dt:23 Feb 2014
Its been a roller coaster of a year so far on the technical front.Two months gone by and with a young team conquering the world of OBIA with ODI for data support has been challenging to say the least.
When I started with ODI I had my reservations about how this tool would match up with Informatica which for so long has been taking on the burden of building the OBAW on its broad shoulders.My first hunch was that ODI would fail and fail miserably at that to make an impact.
As the days have passed by I have seen no major upsets though and the project has been running smoothly as if we never migrated from one ETL tool to another.But there are differences of course and ones which you have to get used to as time goes by.
For an Informatica developer working on OBIA projects, moving into the world of ODI .I would say that things are not that bad as they seem .They probably are a lot better.
Some of the comparisons that I can make now that I have worked for some time on ODI are,
For starters you do not have to write your queries.You got to validate them of course.
Odi has flows for everything so your multilevel lookups in Informatica would turn into two yellow interfaces in ODI. As the lookups are done on the database itself the query has to be generated as either a subselect or a join clause.Of course you need to be your judge as to what design you would prefer.
Another interesting thing that comes to mind is that the performance of ODI depends on the performance of your database as well .A slow source database may make you change your design .As you have the luxury of moving transformations to a quicker target database.
Load plans are generated in the BIACM .Need to look into more details as to how we can customize them.
Overall on the design front ODI seems to rock it .The next challenge seems to be in how it will be able to handle environment migration.
But I can surely say that ODI with OBIA is not going to be a let down for Oracle
