Reviews

I have been reading up on Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) since Oracle announced that as their strategic direction for data integration and have done some reviews. There's some good stuff out there on ODI.

Books

Packt Publishing published a good introductory book on ODI, Getting Started with Oracle Data Integrator 11g: A Hands-On Tutorial an excellent introduction to ODI written by people at Oracle directly involved with it. I've reviewed it on Amazon.com.

Videos

Packt Publishing has recently published a video introduction to ODI also, Oracle Data Integrator Essentials [Video] by Andreas Nobbmann. If you want an excellent introduction to ODI then you should check it out. It is divided into 8 sections:

The ODI Core Concepts [24:15 minutes]

Developing in ODI – the Core Objects [21:47minutes]

Your Data Transformation Strategy – Knowledge Modules [11:06 minutes]

Workflows in ODI [19:08 minutes]

Data Quality and Delta Detection [15:08 minutes]

Version Management and Deployment [13:06 minutes]

Operating and Maintenance [12:51 minutes]

Additional Supporting Functions [11:11 minutes]

The Core concepts gives a good introduction to the basics of ODI, key concepts, the different between ETL and ELT, exploring the graphical user interface, basics of ODI, defining your strategy and the ODI staging area. I found it to be well presented. The author uses a mix of standard slides and showing some hands on demonstrations to describe the information. He did not just read from the slides which I found to be very refreshing. The only issue there was a slide or two I didn't finish reading before he moved on, but thats what the pause button is for.

The video assumes you already have ODI installed. The explanation of logging in to the studio has all the connection information prefilled in, which you'll have after you've filled it in manually the first time and doesn't cover the installation of the repository and setting all that up. That's not a negative since it is not a video for administrators of ODI.

The video has good tips, like hiding topologies that are unused and an excellent concise description of the topology navigator and the physical and logical schemas along with the context that ties them together. That was one of the hardest things for me to grasp when first exposed to ODI, having come from the OWB world and the video makes excellent sense of it.

There is a lot of information covered so there isn't a lot of time to go too indepth in all the topics so you'll definitely want to supplement viewing the video with the documentation for more details or buy a book on ODI. An excellent feature of the video is the inclusion of references to written documentation, white papers, etc, where you can go for more detailed information, like at the end of the knowledge modules chapter if you want to build your own knowledge modules.

I like the little suggestions thrown in here and there for real world application to help you out in development like making sure to include a description of your interface when you create it just to help out developers who follow after you. It's totally optional and such a minor thing that so many tutorials just ignore it, but having worked on many projects before where I've had to deal with other peoples mappings with no explanation as to what the purpose was, some comments would have been very welcome.

The video runs for 2 hours and 8 minutes total and you can skip around from section to section or chapter to chapter as needed. With so much information included, there was no mention of debugging an interface. There are always trade-offs when producing something like this, what to include, what not to, that you can't get everything in. I saw debugging mentioned on a couple of slides in chapter 3 on data transformation strategy and knowledge modules but the author never got to a discussion of it and probably had to just leave it out due to time. I think that would have been good to include. Thats the only minor suggestion I'd have about the video. Overall, it was an excellent introduction to ODI and worth your time to check it out if you need a quick introduction.