What Is Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Integration?

These days, you often hear people talk about how their company tries to gain a competitive advantage by being data-driven.  They are all trying to keep their company relevant in today’s world using data and technology.  They want to use data to engage with customers through digital channels to share information, make transactions, and provide support.  When customers decide to buy something from their mobile devices, the company’s operational systems need all the necessary information to execute and complete the transaction.  If a customer calls about a problem, support needs the most current data about the person to provide the best service possible.

Being data-driven requires organizations to access all available data and convert it so that analytical apps understand the information.  Data engineers and developers have to wrangle data into a useful format quickly for organizations to make informative decisions. This requires easy-to-use user interface that can prepare and ingest data into data lakes and decision science applications.  Data Engineers can’t wait for DBAs to help write integration code or modify database tables with new columns to add meaningful information.

 

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Integration is a cloud native, serverless ETL (extract, load, transform) service on the Oracle Cloud.  This simplifies integration within the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure eco-system.  It ingests and manipulates large volumes of structured and unstructured data faster into Oracle cloud autonomous databases, as well as data lakes.

A new intuitive, no-code, graphical user interface simplifies all of this. Data engineers can easily design the data flow to discover and connect sources and targets.  They can build data flows and rules to convert information into a meaningful format.  It automatically validates connections and handles schema drift to ensure that database sources and targets are connected and the integration flow code is designed correctly. With an easy-to-use user interface, organizations can complete integration projects more quickly with the assurance that the process is correct and runs resiliently.    

 

Why Do We Need Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Integration?

When organizations want to become more data-driven, they need to gather, convert and store data into useful formats. Some of the data is transactional from operating systems and some is unstructured customer data from hundreds of Big Data sources. You’ll need to discover and connect many databases, then extract, map, transform and move it to the right places.  As data volumes grow, information needs to be loaded efficiently into target systems.

The job of extracting and transforming data is often done by developers writing code manually.  Imagine having to manually maintain and update the integration code every time a schema or API changes. Today, it is all about speed because the competition is just a click away.  If your product catalog shows old or incorrect information and prices, customers will find other storefronts.  When support can’t find the cause of a problematic transaction, customers become frustrated and your goodwill suffers.

 

Simplify Data Capture

For the past two dozen years, organizations have been building data marts and data warehouses to analyze relational data coming from operational systems.  These systems are pre-defined to answer specific questions like “sales by region.”  The information is structured for fast queries from historical, transactional data.  They were designed for reporting and analysis.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Integration is designed with a graphical, no-code user interface that guides you through building the integration code. Also, you get the benefits from being able to:  

  • Validate the data flow to make sure all the nodes are connected and configured properly and integration logic is written correctly.
  • Visually preview results of the transformation at any time to see if the joins and merges are done correctly to give meaningful results. You don’t have to run the entire integration project to see how the design is working.
  • Make changes on-the-fly until it’s perfect.
  • Be confident that an optimizer automatically generates the most efficient executable code for more resilient data transfer.

   

 

Make It Easier To Build Data Lakes For Data Science 

Data lakes are hugely important in a digital economy because they let you integrate relational data with unstructured data from social media, mobile apps, etc.  Preparing the data requires flexibility because the integration must handle different data formats and unpredictable types of queries from analytical or machine learning apps. 

Schemas can easily change over time, and this schema drift can break a data flow.     Some integrations are hard-coded and it is impossible to maintain because there can be hundreds of connections and thousands of data flows. The maintenance effort is huge because you have to unravel this tangled web of data flows. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Integration comes with rules-based integration that automatically adapts integration logic to an evolving schema. It has a flexible designer so you can map by the exact name or part of the name of the data field; for example, you can tell OCI Data Integration to map cust* to *cust. This minimizes the headaches of maintaining the integration flow.  You can even re-use these rules to integrate other data sets with a different schema.

 

Data Integration Is More Than ETL 

A data-driven organization means aggregating different types of data into a useful format for analysts and users to make actionable decisions.  Moving the data is only one part of the solution, you’ll also need capabilities that help get more value by preparing and cataloging data to make it trustworthy.  The data needs to be stored on a platform that is powerful, safe, and scalable to meet unpredictable demands.  Competition is only a click away, if data is not available, customers can freely go to other vendors to find whatever they need and make their transactions.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers you the best-of-breed computing, networking, scalability, and security.  It gives you a broad set of services running on the same cloud to move, cleanse, replicate, and catalog data on the same platform running on the same secure and scalable infrastructure as your databases.     

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers you the best-of-breed computing, networking, scalability, and security.  It gives you a broad set of services running on the same cloud to move, cleanse, replicate, and catalog data on the same secure and scalable infrastructure as your databases.  Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Integration is a key foundation for moving, transforming, and loading data in the cloud. Imagine your transactional data integrated with big data, flowing into the right systems, getting there in the right format and with minimal effort.  Together with other Oracle Cloud management solutions, Oracle makes it easier to ingest data into cloud databases for analysis and machine learning.  Don’t wait for your developers to write integration code, the intuitive graphical user interface allows more users to connect and transform data faster into data lakes and data warehouses so you can get mroe value from data. Learn more about Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Integration.