Oracle Warehouse Builder

I remember my first encounter with Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB). We were moving to a new database design. We were also moving to a web based system from a client/server one. The scope was huge. The timeline was short. This is the story of my life.

But back to OWB. It is a data warehouse integration solution. The goal is to migrate data from legacy systems and put it into a data warehouse. Sounds like it was just what we needed. OWB has some secondary goal: modeling, profiling, cleansing, and auditing of data.

It was first released in January 2000. OWB 11gR2 is the last released. It will be patched to work with Oracle 12c. But it scheduled to be integrated in Oracle Data Integrator (ODI).

OWB is a repository driven tool. That is, the metadata that describes the ETL is put into a schema. You develop mappings and design process flows with it. It deploys into PL/SQL packages. It runs under Control Center and the OWB runtime. Oracle has to be the target.

The system we were replacing using OWB and a web version of our application went live briefly. It had a bunch of problems. It was slow. It did not implement all of the requirements of the old system. I can't blame these problems on OWB per se. Others have tried to rewrite the huge legacy system without success, and they did not use OWB in their solutions.