Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) Review

We mainly use ODI to integrate all of our EPM applications, which includes Essbase ASO/BSO cubes, Hyperion Planning, DRM and HFM applications. Also it is used to manage a custom data warehouse developed in Oracle DB which is used as source for OBIEE reporting.

We use ODI to integrate all Oracle EPM suite used in our financial area. ODI is the core engine used to move data across different applications every day. It’s by far the most important architectural element in our BI/EPM environment since all data passes through it.

ODI has the ability to connect to virtually any technology out there. If it does not connect out-of-the-box, we can very easily add a new technology into it. This flexibility gives a tremendous developmental advantage to its users, which can use ODI as the official ETL tool for any kind of integration project.

Its Knowledge Modules (KMs) may abstract the “how” portion of integrations, allowing the users to focus on the “what” that needs to be done. It can be easily used by either young ETL developers or expert professionals.

For resumes, the ease of use for young professionals and its great development flexibility for expert professionals make it a great product to be used for every ETL project out there.

In my opinion, ODI should connect to ALL Oracle products out-of-the-box, but currently that’s not the case for all of them. Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) is one of the Oracle products for which Oracle decided to remove its ODI support in its last product version. In other words, if you wish to use ODI and HFM together, both from Oracle, you will need to create custom code, which does not make any sense to me.

Another area to improve would be the development life-cycle, which did improve in the latest ODI version, but needs further improvements.

ODI 11 version is very stable. It can manage several parallel executions/large volumes without much trouble. I do see some complains about ODI 12 version, but I cannot share any opinion since I’m not currently working with it.

ODI scales very well.

This is a delicate subject. My experience with Oracle support has both great and very bad situations. If the problem that you are facing is only related to ODI, then your chances of having a great Oracle support experience are good. But if your problem involves multiple technologies, like ODI integrating EPM apps, then it is probably going to be a nightmare (and, unfortunately, most of the problems that will require support assistance will involve “multiple technologies”).

This happens because Oracle supports different technologies with different teams and the communication between them seems complicated sometimes. Several times I was in a situation where teams would keep discussing who should fix the problem instead of actually fixing it.

I've always worked with ODI for ETL development.

The initial setup is extremely easy and straightforward.

ODI was the only option we considered.