ODI 10.1.3.5 Now Available for Download

Dain Hansen reports that the new 10.1.3.5 version of Oracle Data Integrator is now available for download, with an updated data sheet and new features document also now available. So what's special about this release?

Well from a BI perspective, it's the first version certified for use with the Oracle BI Applications, meaning that in time you can use it instead of Informatica as your BI Apps embedded ETL tool. This initial release only covers loading from Oracle E-Business Suite into an Oracle database, so you'll have to wait a bit to load from SAP, Peoplesoft and Siebel and to load into non-Oracle databases, but it's a start and it'll certainly be of interest to customers looking to take on the BI Apps but who weren't too keen on adopting a non-Oracle ETL tool.

Of course a BI Apps-certified version of ODI is only part of the puzzle. Presumably we'll need to wait for a new version of the DAC adapted to work with ODI, and we'll also need to wait for ODI versions of all the Informatica mappings used to load data into the warehouse (and test them to make sure they've migrated properly). Still, it's the first piece of the puzzle and it wouldn't suprise me if we started to see customers using ODI together with the Oracle BI Applications early next year. I've also heard that the 7.9.6 and 7.9.7 releases of the BI Apps provide much more "out of the box" coverage of EBS when it comes to data loads, meaning that the upfront need for customizations to bring in budget data, for example, will gradually go away.

There's also a bunch of other new features including support for Oracle OLAP, Oracle E-Business Suite and a bunch of Application Server adapters; expanded data quality coverage; a web-based mapping designed (something I've been looking for in OWB for a number of years); concurrent changes control and so on. ODI 10.1.3.5 is downloadable now from OTN, looks like I've got something extra to surreptitiously play around with whilst I'm over at the in-laws at Christmas.