Oracle Aims for Real-Time Business Intelligence
Oracle on Thursday took the wraps off two new releases in its Data Integration product line, the fruit of its 2006 acquisition of ELT (extract, load, transform) technology specialist Sunopsis, and its 2009 acquisition of GoldenGate Software, a player in data integration.
The new products, Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) GoldenGate 11g and Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition 11g, are part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware product family and form the backbone of the Oracle Data Integration (ODI) product line.
“We are extending our leadership in the data integration market with the industry's most complete, integrated and open data integration solution,” said Hasan Rizvi, senior vice president for Oracle Fusion Middleware and Java at Oracle. “Oracle GoldenGate 11g and Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition 11g deliver better and broader support for Oracle and non-Oracle environments and further improve on the products' industry-leading performance.”
The new releases are a further milestone in a course Oracle plotted four years ago, according to Miranda Nash, vice president of product management at the company.
“Starting in 2006, Oracle really made the biggest change in our strategy, which was getting away from an Oracle Database-centric approach,” she said.
Instead, she explained, Oracle recognized that its customers exist in a heterogeneous environment in which Oracle products sit next to products from IBM, SAP, MySQL and others. Rather than fight it, Oracle set out to make itself the data integrator of choice.
“That was the beginning of this strategy,” she said. “The 11g release of these two products gives us something new, which is real-time data integration.”
The GoldenGate 11g product is focused on data capture. It offers low-impact, low-latency data acquisition, distribution and delivery capabilities and is certified for operational reporting solutions on a host of Oracle applications, including E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards. Additionally, it's certified with Oracle Exadata Database Machine and features native delivery to Oracle TimesTen databases.
Just as importantly, Nash noted Oracle has beefed up support for heterogeneous systems, including log-based capture from and delivery to IBM DB2 and JMS-based messaging systems.
On the performance front, Oracle said Oracle GoldenGate 11 for the Oracle Database offers improved transaction tracing, which allows customers to pinpoint bottlenecks more easily.
Meanwhile, Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition 11g provides high-performance bulk extract and transformation akin to typical ETL tools. However, unlike those tools, Data Integrator performs the transformation in the database itself.
“We use the database for transformation because that's how we get the best performance,” Nash said.
Oracle said Data Integrator Enterprise Edition 11g, which runs on Oracle WebLogic Server, provides integration with Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle Enterprise Manager, and also offers support for online analytical processing (OLAP) systems, SAP applications and extended APIs that can be embedded directly within custom applications. Using Oracle Data Quality for Data Integrator 11g and Oracle Data Profiling 11g, it also features multilingual client and tuning facilities for single byte and double byte, together with improved address verification across geographies.
Nash said Oracle's customers in a wide range of industries — retailers, telcos, financial services firms, healthcare organizations and more — are all moving toward an environment dependent on real-time business intelligence.
“That's really what we're going after with this announcement,” Nash said. “What we're really excited about is the uptake that we're seeing from our customers. We've got many customers going in this direction and we're just excited about how we can really support their real-time data integration needs.”
Thor Olavsrud is a contributor to InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.
