Oracle Warehouse Builder to go into retirement. What to do?

October 25, 2011

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What I had predicted in my post OWB vs ODI: What to do, what to do? a couple of years ago, is now official. Oracle Warehouse Builder will be no more. At the time I had recommended not to embark on any new OWB implementations going forward. I hope you have stuck to this advice.

Anyway, as per Director of Software Development for Oracle Data Integrator, Robert Costin Velisar, OWB 11gR2 will be the final release of Oracle Warehouse Builder. There will be support for the last OWB release throughout the Oracle 12c life cycle. However, Dani Weber from Trivadis raises some serious questions on the way forward for OWB customers.

We are again at crossroads. Once more the question: what to do?

There is no easy way out. Personally I see two options

– Hope that Oracle will provide an official migration path over the next couple of months/years. A migration from OWB to ODI while technically difficult is not impossible. With the new ODI 11g SDK this should actually be quite doable. I personally know of a few shops that have migrated from other ETL tools to ODI using the SDK. Painful and expensive but doable.
– Be a bit more proactive and investigate a ‘roll your own migration’ path. It is certainly possible with the new ODI 11g SDK and there are third party tools that can assist.

No matter which route you pursue you should start to prepare your staff for the transition and provide training in the new technology asap.

The good news is that the ODI family will get bigger now. Not such bad news for the best ETL tool in the world.