Peter C. Boyd-Bowman
Foreword
The May 26, 2011 edition of the Economist magazine cites a report by the the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) about data becoming a factor of production, such as physical or human capital. Across the industry, enterprises are investing significant resources in harnessing value from vast amounts of data to innovate, compete, and reduce operational costs.
In light of this global focus on data explosion, data revolution, and data analysis the authors of this book couldn't have possibly chosen a more appropriate time to share their unique insight and broad technical experience in leveraging Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) to deliver key data integration initiatives across global enterprises.
Oracle Data Integrator constitutes a key product in Oracle's Data Integration product portfolio. ODI product architecture is built on high performance ELT, with guiding principles being: ease of use, avoiding expensive mid-tier transformation servers, and flexibility to integrate with heterogeneous platforms.
I am delighted that the authors, six of the foremost experts on Oracle Data Integrator 11g have decided to share their deep knowledge of ODI in an easy to follow manner that covers the subject material both from a conceptual and an implementation aspect. They cover how ODI leverages next generation Extract-Load-Transformation technology to deliver extreme performance in enabling state of the art solutions that help deliver rich analytics and superior business intelligence in modern data warehousing environments. Using an easy-to-follow hands-on approach, the authors guide the reader through successively complex and challenging data integration tasksfrom the basic blocking and tackling of creating interfaces using a multitude of source and target technologies, to more advanced ODI topics such as data workflows, management and monitoring, scheduling, impact analysis and interfacing with ODI Web Services. If your goal is to jumpstart your ODI 11g knowledge and productivity to quickly deliver business value, you are on the right track. Dig in, and Integrate.
Alok Pareek
Vice President, Product Management/Data Integration
Oracle Corp
About the Authors
Peter C. Boyd-Bowman is a Technical Consulting Director with the Oracle Corporation. He has over 30 years of software engineering and database management experience, including 12 years of focused interest in data warehousing and business intelligence. Capitalizing on his extensive background in Oracle database technologies dating back to 1985, he has spent recent years specializing in data migration. After many successful project implementations using Oracle Warehouse Builder and shortly after Oracle's acquisition of the Sunopsis Corporation, he switched his area of focus over to Oracle's flagship ETL product: Oracle Data Integrator. He holds a BS degree in Industrial Management and Computer Science from Purdue University and currently resides in North Carolina.
Christophe Dupupet is a Director of Product Management for ODI at Oracle. In this role, he focuses on the Customer Care program where he works closely with strategic customers implementing ODI. Prior to Oracle, he was part of the team that started the operations for Sunopsis in the US (Sunopsis created the ODI product and was acquired by Oracle in 2006).
He holds an Operations Research degree from EISTI in France, a Masters Degree in Operations Research from Florida Tech, and a Certificate in Management from Harvard University.
He writes blogs (mostly technical entries) at http://blogs.oracle.com/dataintegration as well as white papers.
Special thanks to my wife, Viviane, and three children, Quentin, Audrey, and Ines, for their patience and support for the long evenings and weekends spent on this book.
David Hecksel is a Principal Data Integration Architect at Oracle. Residing in Dallas, Texas, he joined Oracle in 2006 as a Pre-sales Architect for Oracle Fusion Middleware. Six months after joining, he volunteered to add pre-sales coverage for a recently acquired product called Oracle Data Integrator and the rest (including the writing of this book) has been a labor of love working with a platform and solution that simultaneously provides phenomenal user productivity and system performance gains to the traditionally separate IT career realms of Data Warehousing, Service Oriented Architects, and Business Intelligence developers. Before joining Oracle, he spent six years with Sun Microsystems in their Sun Java Center and was CTO for four years at Axtive Software, architecting and developing several one-to-one marketing and web personalization platforms such as e.Monogram. In 1997, he also invented, architected, developed, and marketed the award-winning JCertify product onlinethe industry's first electronic delivery of study content and exam simulation for the Certified Java Programmer exam. Prior to Axtive Software, he was with IBM for 12 years as a Software Developer working on operating system, storage management, and networking software products. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Masters of Business Administration from Duke University.
Julien Testut is a Product Manager in the Oracle Data Integration group focusing on Oracle Data Integrator. He has an extensive background in Data Integration and Data Quality technologies and solutions. Prior to joining Oracle, he was an Applications Engineer at Sunopsis which was then acquired by Oracle. He holds a Masters degree in Software Engineering.