Oracle Warehouse Builder

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Mapping editor in Oracle Warehouse Builder 11g OWB t10102.gif
Mapping editor in Oracle Warehouse Builder 11g

Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) is an ETL tool produced by Oracle that offers a graphical environment to build, manage and maintain data integration processes in business intelligence systems.

Extract, transform, load

In computing, extract, transform, load (ETL) is the general procedure of copying data from one or more sources into a destination system which represents the data differently from the source(s). The ETL process became a popular concept in the 1970s and is often used in data warehousing.

Oracle Corporation American multinational computer technology corporation

Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Redwood Shores, California. The company sells database software and technology, cloud engineered systems, and enterprise software products—particularly its own brands of database management systems. In 2018, Oracle was the third-largest software company by revenue.

Data integration involves combining data residing in different sources and providing users with a unified view of them. This process becomes significant in a variety of situations, which include both commercial and scientific domains. Data integration appears with increasing frequency as the volume and the need to share existing data explodes. It has become the focus of extensive theoretical work, and numerous open problems remain unsolved. Data integration encourages collaboration between internal as well as external users

Contents

Features

The primary use for OWB is consolidation of heterogeneous data sources in data warehousing and data migration from legacy systems. Further it offers capabilities for relational, dimensional and metadata data modeling, data profiling, data cleansing and data auditing. Whereas the core functionality is part of the Oracle database since version 10gR2, some of the latter features are sold separately as options. OWB uses a variant of Tcl over Java and PL/SQL called OMB+.

Data warehouse system used for reporting and data analysis

In computing, a data warehouse, also known as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW), is a system used for reporting and data analysis, and is considered a core component of business intelligence. DWs are central repositories of integrated data from one or more disparate sources. They store current and historical data in one single place that are used for creating analytical reports for workers throughout the enterprise.

Data migration is the process of selecting, preparing, extracting, and transforming data and permanently transferring it from one computer storage system to another. Additionally, the validation of migrated data for completeness and the decommissioning of legacy data storage are considered part of the entire data migration process. Data migration is a key consideration for any system implementation, upgrade, or consolidation, and it is typically performed in such a way as to be as automated as possible, freeing up human resources from tedious tasks. Data migration occurs for a variety of reasons, including server or storage equipment replacements, maintenance or upgrades, application migration, website consolidation, disaster recovery, and data center relocation.

Legacy system

In computing, a legacy system is an old method, technology, computer system, or application program, "of, relating to, or being a previous or outdated computer system," yet still in use. Often referencing a system as "legacy" means that it paved the way for the standards that would follow it. This can also imply that the system is out of date or in need of replacement.

History

Oracle Warehouse Builder was built from the ground up in Oracle, it was first released in January 2000 (release 2.0.4). The 3i release significantly enhanced the ETL mapping designer, then 9i in 2003 introduced the mapping debugger, process flow editing, integrated match/merging and name/address cleansing, multi-table insert, scripting, RAC certification to name a few. The 10gR1 release was essentially a certification of the 10g database, and the 10gR2 release (code named Paris) was a huge release incorporating a wide spectrum of functionality from dimensional modelling to data profiling and quality. The OWB 11gR1 release was a move into the database release stack, and included the server components being installed with the database and MDM connectors. [1]

The packaging as part of the Oracle Developer Suite ended in May 2006 with the release of OWB 10gR2 (10g Release 2), when the core functions were included in Oracle 10gR2 Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition.

Oracle Developer Suite is a suite of development tools released by the Oracle Corporation. The principal components were initially Oracle Forms and Oracle Reports, although the suite was later expanded to include JDeveloper amongst others.

With the introduction of Oracle 11g in July 2007 the OWB version was updated to 11gR1 (11g Release 1).

Version 11.2 (11g Release 2) was released with the 11gR2 Oracle Database in September 2009. Its features include support for Oracle OBI EE, and native access to an extensible set of non-Oracle platforms using customizable and user-definable code templates. [1] [2]

Oracle Database is a proprietary multi-model database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation.

Future integration with Oracle Data Integrator

As of 2008, Oracle plans to integrate OWB with Oracle Data Integrator (ODI), an ETL tool Oracle acquired when it took over Sunopsis in 2006. In the short term, OWB and ODI will continue to be released independently, with each release being closer to integrating the two products. The Warehouse Builder 11.2 code template support is in fact derived from and largely compatible with the Oracle Data Integrator Knowledge Module framework. [1] Oracle has publicly commented on plans to release a data integration product that will unify features from both of the current offerings. [1]

Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) is an Extract, load and transform (ELT) tool produced by Oracle that offers a graphical environment to build, manage and maintain data integration processes in business intelligence systems.

Sunopsis is a software company based near Lyon, France. It also has a United States headquarters in Burlington, Massachusetts. The company was bought by Oracle in October 2006. The new name of Sunopsis is Oracle Data Integrator - ODI.

UPDATE: According to Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle Warehouse Builder Statement of Direction (First Published January 2010, Updated May 2011):

No major enhancements are planned for Oracle Warehouse Builder beyond the OWB 11.2 release. OWB 11.2 continues to be available and supported by Oracle, and patches and bug fixes will continue to be offered at regular intervals. Oracle will continue to support OWB 11.2 for the full lifetime of Database 11g and the full lifetime of the next major database release (“Database 12”) in accordance with Oracle’s Lifetime Support Policies for Database releases. Future database releases beyond Database 12 would not be certified with OWB 11.2.

OMB+

Script everything.

Use older versions of Oracle documentation

Think lists

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Oracle Warehouse Builder Product Roadmap" (PDF). Oracle Corporation. July 2008. Retrieved 2009-04-15.
  2. ↑ "Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle Warehouse Builder - Statement of Direction" (PDF). Oracle Corporation. January 2010. Retrieved 2010-04-22.
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