Oracle Data Integrator Introduction & Architecture

Introduction:

Oracle Data Integrator provides a new declarative design approach to defining data transformation and integration processes, resulting in faster and simpler development and maintenance. Based on a unique E-LT architecture (Extract - Load Transform), Oracle Data Integrator not only guarantees the highest level of performance possible for the execution of data transformation and validation processes but is also the most cost-effective solution available today.

Here are the key reasons why companies choose Oracle Data Integrator for their data integration needs:

1. Faster and simpler development and maintenance: The declarative rules driven approach to data integration greatly reduces the learning curve of the product and increases developer productivity while facilitating ongoing maintenance
2. Data quality firewall: Oracle Data Integrator ensures that faulty data is automatically detected and recycled before insertion in the target application. This is performed without the need for programming, following the data integrity rules and constraints defined both on the target application and in Oracle Data Integrator.
3. Better execution performance: traditional data integration software (ETL) is based on proprietary engines that perform data transformations row by row, thus limiting performance. By implementing an E-LT architecture, based on your existing RDBMS engines and SQL, you are capable of executing data transformations on the target server at a set-based level, giving you much higher performance
4. Simpler and more efficient architecture: the E-LT architecture removes the need for an ETL Server sitting between the sources and the target server. It utilizes the source and target servers to perform complex transformations, most of which happen in batch mode when the server is not busy processing end-user queries.
5. Platform Independence: Oracle Data Integrator supports all platforms, hardware and OSs with the same software.
6. Data Connectivity: Oracle Data Integrator supports all RDBMSs including all leading Data Warehousing platforms such as Oracle, Exadata, Teradata, IBM DB2, Netezza, Sybase IQ and numerous other technologies such as flat files, ERPs, LDAP, XML.
7. Cost-savings: the elimination of the ETL Server and ETL engine reduces both the initial hardware and software acquisition and maintenance costs. The reduced learning curve and increased developer productivity significantly reduce the overall labor costs of the project, as well as the cost of ongoing enhancements

ODI Architecture:

ODI Studio: ODI Studio provides four Navigators for managing the different aspects and steps of an ODI integration project.

• Designer Navigator is used to design data integrity checks and to build transformations
• Operator Navigator is the production management and monitoring tool. It is designed for IT production operators. Through Operator Navigator, you can manage your interface executions in the sessions, as well as the scenarios in production.
• Topology Navigator is used to manage the data describing the information system's physical and logical architecture
• Security Navigator is the tool for managing the security information in Oracle Data Integrator. Through Security Navigator you can create users and profiles and assign user edit, delete, etc privileges on generic objects

Repositories: The Oracle Data Integrator Repository is composed of one Master Repository and several Work Repositories. Objects developed or configured through the user interfaces are stored in one of these repository types.

Master Repository: There is usually only one master repository. Master Repository stores following information.

1. Security information including users, profiles and rights for the ODI platform
2. Topology information including technologies, server definitions, schemas, contexts, languages and so forth.
3. Versioned and archived objects.

Work Repository: The work repository is the one that contains actual developed objects. Several work repositories may coexist in the same ODI installation

1. Models, including schema definition, datastores structures and metadata, fields and columns definitions, data quality constraints, cross references, data lineage and so forth.
2. Projects, including business rules, packages, procedures, folders, Knowledge Modules, variables and so forth.
3. Scenario execution, including scenarios, scheduling information and logs

Oracle Data Integrator Console: Business users (as well as developers, administrators and operators), can have read access to the repository, perform topology configuration and production operations through a web based UI called Oracle Data Integrator Console. This web application can deployed in a Java EE application server such as Oracle WebLogic.

Run-Time Agent: At design time, developers generate scenarios from the business rules that they have designed. The code of these scenarios is then retrieved from the repository by the Run-Time Agent. This agent then connects to the data servers and orchestrates the code execution on these servers. It retrieves the return codes and messages for the execution, as well as additional logging information