DataStage comparison to Oracle OWB

tonystark622 · Post by **tonystark622** » Mon Aug 23, 2004 7:15 am

One of our sites is evaluating ETL tools. They apparently favor the Oracle OWB tool. I've never seen it, but I can't imagine that it is as flexible as DataStage. Obviously, I'm trying to influence their decision, but without any first hand knowledge, I'm at a disadvantage. Can anyone here give me some comparison of features between DataStage and the Oracle OWB tool?

I appreciate your help,
Tony

chulett · Post by **chulett** » Mon Aug 23, 2004 7:21 am

How tight are your PL/SQL skillz, Tony?

kcbland · Post by **kcbland** » Mon Aug 23, 2004 7:22 am

Well, consider that Oracle is giving it away for free. What does that tell you? It tells me that no one will buy it.

I've use it, I consider a piece of junk. It's method is "do everything inside Oracle". You have little or no incentive to structure things in a well-staged manner. It's highly graphical and not designed to deal with dirty data or external data sources, IMO.

You can evaluate for yourself the quality of the toys they give away for free in McDonalds Happy Meals.

tonystark622 · Post by **tonystark622** » Mon Aug 23, 2004 8:51 am

Well, consider that Oracle is giving it away for free . What does that tell you? It tells me that no one will buy it.

Actually, believe it or not, that is one major advantage to the people that are evaluating it. They've already got the Oracle license and won't have to pay anything extra. The folks that are evaluating the tools aren't experts in ETL or DW

How tight are your PL/SQL skillz, Tony?

Not as good as I would like them to be

. Fortunately, I won't be using it. This is for another site/city in our company. Our project is using Datastage (yea!).

Do either of you have any specific points that I can forward to my co-worker on the evaluation team (he's the one with DataStage experience) other than

I've use it, I consider a piece of junk.

I will pull the your comments, Ken and forward them to my co-worker.

Thanks for your help,
Tony

ogmios · Post by **ogmios** » Mon Aug 23, 2004 11:12 am

I've used both, and you can create good stuff with both and you create sh** programs with both.

If you're working in a total Oracle shop, have people with the necessary Oracle skills and have some QA people (with big sticks) using OWB shouldn't be a problem. For some parts they will even do it faster in development and processing time than you can with DataStage.

Tools help but they only represent a small part of a project in my opinion. If you've got your design right it doesn't matter whether you do it with DataStage, Informatica, OWB or even Perl. You will still be finished faster than with an wrong design.

Having that said that... if you have hammer every problem looks like a nail

TCO for OWB may be much better than DataStage considering you don't have to pay yearly license fees (even if development is a little bit slower than using Datastage). The only disadvantages I see is that the more tools you have in a company the more training people will need.

Ogmios

bibhudc · Post by **bibhudc** » Mon Aug 23, 2004 12:27 pm

I don't know if its true now, but when I worked with OWB (about 5 yrs back) it only worked with Oracle databases. It would just generate Pl/Sql code and run it on the oracle engine.

vmcburney · Post by **vmcburney** » Mon Aug 23, 2004 11:06 pm

You would expect all the incumbent Oracle resources to be pushing for OWB over a new and laregely unfamiliar tool. Gartner have given a more positive rating to recent versions of OWB but there remains the potential show stopper questions: are you only looking for a DW load tool? Are you only writing to Oracle databases?

The main thing DataStage has to offer are usability and the extra functionality. You would need to emphasise the ERP packs for PeopleSoft and SAP, the parallel extender version, the real time services, the support for mainframe files, ability to write to most database types etc. If they are not interested in any of that then they will probably go with OWB.

peternolan9 · Post by **peternolan9** » Tue Aug 24, 2004 6:38 am

Tony,
free software does not mean 'free' or 'cheap' project. When a vendor like Oracle (who has something of a reputation for over charging for software that they can sell) gives something away for free you can be sure that there is considerable expense attached to the use of the tool....

For example, with OWB it generates PL/SQL and if you write your ETL in PL/SQL you can forget ever getting a discount on your oracle database license ever again. You are wedded to the database.....and in my opinion, being tied to a database for ever and ever amen has never been a good idea.....I always suggest to people t hat they keep an eye out on being able to move databases or at least play the database vendors off each other in order to maintain reasonable pricing per cpu for the database licenses......

tonystark622 wrote:
Well, consider that Oracle is giving it away for free . What does that tell you? It tells me that no one will buy it.
Actually, believe it or not, that is one major advantage to the people that are evaluating it. They've already got the Oracle license and won't have to pay anything extra. The folks that are evaluating the tools aren't experts in ETL or DW

Tony

tonystark622 · Post by **tonystark622** » Tue Aug 24, 2004 7:52 am

Thanks everyone for your responses. I've been (and will continue to) feeding your responses to my contact on their evaluation team and he has passed back his thanks.

It seems to me that the other members of the evaluation team have a very narrow view of ETL and can't see beyond their immediate requirements. I believe that they see Oracle as their vendor for the forseeable future, so they don't see a problem in going to bed with them by selecting OWB. I guess we'll see.

FYI, I understand from my contact on the evaluation team that now OWB can read from multiple sources (I think that's through ODBC) and write to flat files and even supposedly XML files, as well as Oracle tables. This appears to satisfy their immediate needs.

I really do appreciate everyone's comments. You all make this forum into a great tool for everyone.

Thanks!
Tony

KeithM · Post by **KeithM** » Tue Aug 24, 2004 9:03 am

I worked with Oracle Warehouse Builder for the past three years and honestly, I prefer many of the features of OWB over Datastage. We were able to do everything that we needed using OWB to develop a fairly complex data warehouse.

That being said, I would never pick OWB to develop a warehouse again. The biggest problem that we encountered was ongoing support of the OWB mappings. Maintaining separate development, testing, and production environments was a nightmare with OWB. This was all done through the import/export utility that Oracle provided. If you didn't do everything in the proper order maps that worked fine in development suddenly were invalid in test.

Another problem that we had was dealing with the upgrades. Oracle came out with a lot of upgrades to provide new functionality but rarely provided a decent mechanism to upgrade any of the projects that you currently had. Our library included hundreds of maps. Every upgrade became a project that was almost as big as the initial development.

OWB is a great toy. It is not a viable tool to create and run a production data warehouse.

gh_amitava · Post by **gh_amitava** » Wed Aug 25, 2004 2:16 pm

Hi,

I have worked in both of them. I feature wise DataStage offers lot more but I am not sure how many of them really works or works perfectly because we have opened a lot of tickets to Ascential but yet to receive any concrete solution for many of them.

Regards
Amitava

gh_amitava · Post by **gh_amitava** » Wed Aug 25, 2004 2:17 pm

Hi,

I have worked in both of them. Feature wise DataStage offers lot more but I am not sure how many of them really works or works perfectly because we have opened a lot of tickets to Ascential but yet to receive any concrete solution for many of them.

Regards
Amitava