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IDG News Service - A new version of Oracle Corp.'s Data Warehouse Builder will make it easier for database developers and administrators to tie together information from different data stores within an enterprise, the company announced yesterday.
Version 9.0.4 of the Oracle9i Data Warehouse Builder (OWB) includes a number of enhancements from previous versions, according to Oracle.
Those enhancements include:

• A new SAP Integrator that makes it easier to extract information from SAP R/3 systems by SAP AG.


• Better workflow features and a more user-friendly interface that simplifies the process for creating extract, transform and load (ETL) processes.


• Support for industry standards such as XML Metadata Interchange and Process Description Language to simplify the process of integrating OWB with third-party products.

Oracle9i Warehouse Builder is used to pull data from disparate sources such as financial and accounting databases into an Oracle9i database. Once data is in a predictable format within Oracle, it can be accessed by more sophisticated analytic tools such as customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning applications, according to Mark Shainman, a senior analyst at Meta Group Inc.
OWB competes with similar "native" ETL tools from Microsoft Corp., which offers its Data Transformation Services (DTS), and IBM, which sells Warehouse Manager, according to Shainman.
By making it easier for database developers to pull data into a specific database environment such as Oracle or SQL Server, native ETL tools are competing with more expensive, but "database agnostic" tools such as those by Cognos Inc. and Informatica Corp.
Database vendors are investing heavily in ETL tools, hoping to drive adoption of their databases as platforms for centralized data warehouses, according to Shainman. "People want to know what's going on in their businesses. The database licensing sales and momentum are behind decision support and data warehouses. That's where the spending is," he said.
Gregory Richard, chief technology officer of Canadian company DecisionsToday Inc. in Hull, Quebec, said that his company uses OWB in addition to Microsoft's DTS and Cognos' Decision Stream to build tools that accelerate the process of building data warehouses. Decisions Today's software does analysis of an organization's business databases and systems, automatically generating a data warehouse model and ETL routines to supply it. The software is licensed directly to database vendors and sold to large enterprises, Richard said.
Due to limitations in OWB's scripting environment, Decisions Today was prevented from integrating with prior product editions. Version 9.0.4 of OWB fixed that problem, and Decision Today is now using OWB to build and automate ETL processes for Oracle, Richard said.
The product's user interface isalso much improved in the latest version, Richard said. "It used to be quite cumbersome to use. You had to pop in and out of dialog boxes a lot."
The product's new interface brings it more in line with competing products, providing a diagram to represent an overall build and "point and click" support for editing object properties.
Version 9.0.4 runs on a variety of platforms, including Linux, Sun Solaris and Windows. The product is being offered for $5,000 per Named User Plus as part of the Oracle9i Developer Suite, according to Oracle.
Despite its focus on deploying to the Oracle environment, OWB offers a powerful and relatively inexpensive alternative to other solutions, Richard said. "When you look at price per feature, OWB blows the others away," he said.