Oracle Warehouse Builder - what does the future hold?

I have a client implementing an analytic solution which uses OWB for ETL. I have concerns over OWB's future given the Sunopsis acquisition which they now call ODI (I think). Part of the appeal of OWB is it's low cost, I'm assuming that advantage will diminish as Oracle pushes ODI. Anyone else using OWB and concerned about it's future?

Very valid concern. I recently downloaded ODI as well as DP,DQ component of the ODI. I do not think that there is any formal announcement from Oracle for one or another. I do see ODI closely tied to fusion middleware. I guess future versions of ODI are going to have best from OWB and Sunopsis, again this is my best guess.

There is a statement of direction by Oracle on this

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oracle-data-integrator/sod.pdf

Basically over the next couple of years the two products will merge and you will get the best of two worlds. There will be upgrade paths etc. for both products, so your investment will be secured whichever product you choose now.

uli @ www.business-intelligence-quotient.com

The SOD to merge the best features and functions into one product is good but at what cost? I'm not sure of the current pricing but I believe OWB is low cost or even included with the RDBMS?? I see there is an Enterprise version of OWB, what additional features does that include and at what sort of cost increment?

What does ODI cost now? I'm not looking for exact pricing but order of magnitudes, is it tier 1 pricing (100's K) like Informatica and Data Stage or is tier 2 pricing (say under 100K), or what I'll call tier 3 pricing like SSIS or OWB?

Rob

http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/technology-price-list.pdf

As far as I see it is 23 K per processor on target DW plus around 5K support

Of course, this is before any discounts are applied, which you should get in the current climate...

Thanks for that.
I noticed OWB was not listed, is it considered part of the enterprise database product?

As far as I know OWB core is licensed as part of Oracle Enterprise Edition.

There used to be three separate OWB Enterprise options around Data Quality, Connectors to ERP systems, and I think advanced features such as SCD2 support and use of Control Centres in deployment. Apart from the connectors these have disappeared from the price list, so I presume you don't need a separate license for them anymore.

I would check with your local Oracle sales guy. He should know. All this licensing is a bit like rocket science. I remember in one of my workplaces we had a consultant just dedicated to advise clients on Oracle licensing... The devil is in the detail here.

uli

Uli, Excellent feedback much appreciated. Have you used both OWB and ODI in anger?
Aside from cost how would you compare the two?

Rob

I have used both, but ODI not in action (just for an internal pilot).

Both are very good products. I really like the whole E-LT approach. All your transformations are transparent in SQL & PL/SQL. So you don't have to upskill here on some proprietray language etc. Also you don't have to purchase a separate server, as your ETL tool sits on top of your DW server(s). From a performance point of view SQL will always beat some proprietary language as it was written to deal with huge data sets.

If you are an Oracle only shop I would recommend OWB.

However, if you are in a heterogenuous environment where you need to extract from different source technologies I would go for ODI. The problem with ODI at the moment is that documentation is very thin and you won't find many skilled people. So you will pay exorbitant rates.

I hope they do a better job then BusinessObjects. There first integrated BO-Crystal product (XI) is a nightmare for BO users to upgrade to.

Where in your BOBJ upgrade did you have issues?

ubethke wrote:Where in your BOBJ upgrade did you have issues?

They completely changed the security model, making it more flexible but also more complex. This combined with a poor management interface made the upgrade very hard (should be better in the new version). Also, it is nearly impossible to get info out of the metadata repository.