In an effort to capture the changes on some Oracle databases, we had to find out which is the best CDC tool with a low overhead load on the Production box and high throughput in terms of changes /sec. (Replication was used to avoid the load on the Production box, so that CDC can work on the Standby database).
We have evaluated Oracle Streams and Oracle9i Data Guard and all these CDC tools works closely with the Oracle Logminer when you have to capture the changes from Oracle. Our experience with Oracle CDC and custom-writing the ETL code, lead us to the Oracle Data Integrator or ODI.
The Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) is a data integration offering designed to help users make sense out of the incredible amount of information most frequently stored in various platforms and applications throughout an organization. ODI is optimized to work with Oracle's own database, application server, SOA suite and business activity monitoring software and the new version adds features that let users support packaged applications from IBM, Microsoft, Netezza, Sybase and others.
The software also lets users build data warehouses that can be accessed and analyzed by Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition (EE) 10g Release 3’s "hot-pluggable" or open-standards-based architecture gives it the ability to fit into any IT infrastructure and users can expect it to support the latest releases of IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server and NCR Teradata's data warehouse. Simply put, a "pervasive BI," that has the analytical capabilities that reach into all applications and data sources within an organization.
One of the most important features of ODI is its ELT (extract, load, transform) Architecture -- not to be confused with ETL (extract, transform, load) technology, which Oracle calls "previous generation." With ELT, one can do transformations in the source or the target systems. One doesn't require a separate ETL server. You can do the transformation and push out the data to the target source.
Another key feature of Data Integrator is its ability to support both batch and real-time data synchronization through its change-data-capture technology. What change-data-capture does is it allows us to monitor the log files of downstream legacy systems and databases to look for changing data. Once changing data is encountered these are raised as events to the Business Activity Monitoring tool natively, which in turn populates a dashboard."
To summarize the ODI software helps users extract specific bits of information from the warehouse, build data marts, and conduct analyses to determine the effectiveness of sales and marketing and other initiatives.
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