Database Design, ETL Tool Introduces New Features

July 26, 2006
Oracle has announced the general availability of Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2, the database design and Extraction, Transformation and Load (ETL) tool that helps customers manage the life cycle of data and metadata from design to deployment and maintenance.

Oracle has announced the general availability of Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2, the database design and Extraction, Transformation and Load (ETL) tool that helps customers manage the life cycle of data and metadata from design to deployment and maintenance. This latest release introduces significant new data quality, integration and administrative features, among others, for customers seeking an easy-to-use tool for rapidly designing, deploying, and managing data integration projects and business intelligence (BI) systems.

Oracle also introduced new pricing and packaging for Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2. The core database design and ETL capabilities of Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2 are now included with Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Enterprise Edition, Standard Edition, and Standard Edition One at no additional cost. Newly available options and connectors for this tool now provide customers with increased capabilities to help meet their broad range of ETL and data quality needs.

"With the proliferation of data, and growing demand for better quality systems, organizations now more than ever require tools that help them rapidly design data structures and efficiently integrate data from disparate repositories," said Ray Roccaforte, vice president of Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Platform, Oracle. "Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2 represents a major investment by Oracle in data integration, and by including core capabilities with Oracle Database 10g at no extra cost, organizations of all sizes can easily turn raw data into quality information to help meet their users' requirements."

Ensuring high data quality is crucial to organizations seeking to optimize business performance and ensure better decision-making. To address this requirement, Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2 offers enhanced features designed to improve data quality including name and address cleansing and match-merge (de-duplication) functionality

Organizations require not only high quality information, but also need information to be stored in a format that can be drilled into, manipulated, mined, and pivoted within their BI applications and decision support tools to yield information in the right format. Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2 includes the ability to design relational and OLAP database structures, making it easy to store data in a common Oracle Database repository and offer users a choice of BI tools such as Oracle Business Intelligence Suite, spreadsheets, and many others.

Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2 also now includes support for targeting non-Oracle Databases, allowing users to choose where their data are ultimately stored. "Experts" is a new feature that helps save users time and costs. It enables organizations to encapsulate their own development standards and best practices as wizards, and also allows a broad range of users, including end users, access to Oracle Warehouse Builder's declarative functionality.

The aforementioned features comprise a small portion of the core functionality bundled with Oracle Database 10g Release 2. Two new options are now available that build on the core capabilities in Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2. In addition, new connectors are available to ease the transformation of data from disparate application repositories.

The Oracle Warehouse Builder Enterprise ETL Option supports multi- environment deployments typical of enterprise data warehouse projects by enabling improved performance and scalability of ETL processes. Included in this option are a new, highly interactive lineage and impact analyzer, user defined objects and associations, and a change propagator that facilitates rapid response to changing metadata. The Oracle Warehouse Builder Data Quality Option promotes a comprehensive and systematic approach to data quality by offering data profiling, data rules, data cleansing/auto-correction, and data auditing in one tool.

New Oracle Warehouse Builder Connectors enable customers to extract data quickly and easily, and in some cases, target data to and from their core CRM and ERP applications including the Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise. The existing Oracle Warehouse Builder Connector for SAP has been enhanced and now supports variable substitution within ABAP and direct deployment and execution of ABAP code.

Atlanta-based Global Payments Inc. is one of the world's largest transaction processors and offers worldwide, world-class electronic transaction processing services through its high-speed, robust electronic information networks. Its networks process billions of business and consumer payment card and money transfer transactions annually for customers in the United States, Canada, Europe and Latin America. Global Payments has accelerated development efforts on several internal high profile projects involving the manipulation and movement of data using Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g.

"We are committed to developing software that is efficient and maintainable," said Larry Mandras, vice president of Internal Systems, Global Payments Inc. "Oracle Warehouse Builder has helped us to achieve this goal. The tool enables us to re-use code easily, integrate custom code, and to produce code that is maintained in an easier fashion because it is managed with the UI."

Voice your opinion!

To join the conversation, and become an exclusive member of T&D World, create an account today!