Book Image

Getting Started with Oracle Data Integrator 11g: A Hands-On Tutorial

Book Image

Getting Started with Oracle Data Integrator 11g: A Hands-On Tutorial

Overview of this book

Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) is Oracle's strategic data integration platform for high-speed data transformation and movement between different systems. From high-volume, SOA-enabled data services, to trickle operations ñ ODI is a cutting-edge platform that offers heterogeneous connectivity, enterprise-level deployment, and strong administrative, diagnostic, and management capabilities. "Getting Started with Oracle Data Integrator 11g: A Hands-On Tutorial" provides you with everything you to get up and running with Oracle Data Integrator, and more! Following an example scenario, the book covers essential information about the ODI architecture and using ODI across different databases (Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL), and file types such as XML, before covering Orchestrating Data Integration Workflows, Error Management, Operational Management and Monitoring, and beyond. "Getting Started with Oracle Data Integrator 11g: A Hands-On Tutorial" begins by describing the Oracle Data Integrator architecture and teaching you to install the product following best practices. You'll then be introduced to some of the key concepts of ODI such as the Knowledge Modules. Later topics include moving and transforming data from sources to targets including the Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Flat files, and XML files, each with illustrated hands-on examples for the different technologies. Your learning experience will be made all the more rich with chapters introducing, explaining and leveraging additional ODI functionality such as variables, reusable procedures, temporary indexes and more. Finally ODI's workflow and task orchestration capabilities are explained before introducing you to Error Management with ODI's built-in 'error hospital' and 'error recycling' capabilities for non-compliant data, not to mention tackling ODI Studio, ODI Console and Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Getting Started with Oracle Data Integrator 11g: A Hands-On Tutorial
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
10
Creating Workflows—Packages and Load Plans
13
Concluding Remarks
Index

Chapter 8. Integrating File Data

While databases are obviously extremely significant in the realm of data integration, a large amount of data is held in flat files.

In this chapter, we'll be taking a look at how ODI plays a significant part in simplifying the integration of flat-file data using concepts and approaches that are identical to those used with database-hosted data, thereby dramatically reducing the learning curve. It also helps simplify the developer skills needed to use some of the specialized bulk data import/export functionality that databases provide, since that specialized functionality is encapsulated in Knowledge Modules.

Specifically what we'll cover in this chapter is:

  • Extend the ODI Topology definition to refer to some input files and then reverse-engineer the input file metadata from both fixed format and delimited files

  • Integrate data from a file using Oracle External Tables as the mechanism for the data import

This will give us the skills to get started with using files...