Our project at work has a bunch of data that we load into the system on a yearly basis. In the past, we had some UNIX shell scripts and C programs which handled this load. Over time the code was ported to Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB).Another company has won the software maintenance contract for our project. So we are transitioning out. Our OWB developer has already left the project. We are planning to turn the OWB source code over to the new contractor. They were looking for some OWB training from us. However we were only obligated to provide them with the source code. It is not in our statement of work to provide technical training to our replacement. This is just tough luck.
If I were working for the winning contractor, I would take these OWB projects and move the code into something more common. Personally I would recommend straight Oracle PL/SQL and maybe some Korn shell scripts. You don't want to be locked into some little used tool that nobody knows how to use. This is a recipe for trouble. Heck. You could even convert the projects to a common programming language such as Java. The problem is that there is not a strong business case for this effort. In the end, the customer will just get something that does what the existing OWB project does. No net benefit other than ease of maintenance. I wonder what the future holds for this annual loading software.
