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

Introducing the ODI JDBC driver for XML


As we've mentioned before, ODI uses JDBC in order to access data, so it needs a JDBC driver to access XML data. Fortunately it comes with an extremely sophisticated driver right out of the box. It will be essential for us to understand some of the characteristics and working methods of the driver for us to use it correctly and effectively, so we'll cover the basics here.

ODI and its XML driver—basic concepts

We now know that XML documents contain a hierarchical, nested structure of elements (each of which may have attributes), all of which are contained within a single root element.

We also know that ODI is a very SQL and relational-oriented tool that models things in a very table-like way.

The ODI JDBC driver for XML marries these two paradigms by representing a single XML file as a hierarchy of table-like datastores that are related to each other through primary, foreign key relationships:

  • Each XML element (tag) that contains subelements (nested tags...