An area for improvement in Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) is real-time integration. Currently, my company has a workaround to implement real-time integration, an area on which Oracle must focus more. Real-time integration should be easier in Oracle Data Integrator (ODI).

Another area for improvement in Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) is integration with more publishers and subscribers rather than just database integrations.

Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) has features that support at least ninety percent of my organization, so it's only real-time integration that I'd like to see in the next release of the solution.

There is an automated method for handling errors in the load process. However, at present, when multiple steps are executed in parallel in the load plan and errors occur, the error handling mechanism does not function correctly. This issue can be improved.

ODI could improve the ease of use. There is a steep learning curve to use the solution.

ODI could improve by focusing on streamlining its features without unnecessary overhead. It could also enhance seamless integration with data catalog and other tools, similar to what IBM offers with Infosphere. Additionally, strengthening integration with Oracle Analytics Services would be beneficial.

In the next release of ODI, I would like to see a focus on fixing existing features and ensuring that bug fixes from previous versions don't reappear. Improving metadata management could also be beneficial. Overall, a stronger commitment to software quality and release consistency would be a major improvement.

The tool should improve its pricing. It prevents the application of Oracle ODI on small and medium projects in countries like Croatia, Germany, or the US. While there are no technological obstacles to using it, the high price makes it unfeasible for projects with smaller budgets.

Error handling can always be improved with ODI. A lot of the errors are generic, but I will say that with a little experience, you can decipher the errors to help you fix them. In fact, I find myself not using the debugger that came out with 12c, just because I have learned to read "ODI-login-eze."

If there was a way to keep the basic user from creating a monster SQL that kills a system on execution, that would be great as well.

Reverse engineering is complicated when reversing from the database to the repository. It's pretty challenging to manage.

If you have something like Cisco on top of it, you will have endless problems.

Also, the price and integration could be improved.

Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) is already good as a solution. Still, it needs some editing of its preview package, or if the package is upgraded, that will make Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) even better.

The price needs to be lowered. It's too expensive. 

There are a few other tools that can do what Oracle does. It's not necessarily the leader in the space. 

As far as what I have learned from other people, I've heard that the Oracle console is big and confusing. If it was less complex, it would be easier to customize.

ODI could improve by being more user-friendly. Informatica, which is also an ETL tool, similar to ODI, but Informatica is very user-friendly, easy to use, and simple to integrate, compared to ODI. ODI has many features, put them all together, and sometimes we get confused about which ones to use, which ones not to use.

In our company, we haven't tried consuming services from IoT in our company yet, and I would like to know if the solution will support IoT services in the next release. Specifically, I'd like to see if the solution will support us in acquiring data from our databases.

They need to work on the multiuser development environment and include the ability to comply with different kinds of SDLCs.

I would like to see in the next version/release the ability to scale a package workflow or data flow process during the execution at run time. Once a workflow is developed, a snapshot of the code is taken and a scenario is created. It is the scenario that is executed during run time. In order to add a step to the package workflow, you must modify it and re-create another scenario. Thus, making such changes to package workflow can impact other packages that are dependent.

Stability could be improved because some operators have issues.

The initial setup is a bit complex compared to other tools.

Right now, we have two very different GUIs - 11g and 12c. 11g is faster to develop than 12c as it takes more steps to do exactly the same as 11g, but you have a lot of things that you need to do yourself.

12c implemented some things for which you have to use some specialized code automatically, like parallel data load, but it is slower to develop. For me, the best thing would be to merge the GUI from 11g into the capabilities of 12c.

It has been very good. Just recently, I've faced an issue, but I solved it somehow. While integrating with a file, I faced an issue where I wanted output files, and I had used the text field limited quotations, but at the end of the file, there was a line breakage for the last column. So, we just removed the text field because it was not working correctly for us.

The interface of ODI could be improved. For example, navigating and finding functions can be difficult. For example, you have to know which step you need to go to look at where your job status is. The logical step is a bit complex compared to other tools. It's much easier to get a graphical view, but with ODI, it's graphical, plus you have to know all the other pieces that fit around it. You have to think about the logical and physical aspects.

One aspect I always struggle with is there's no single view to see which jobs are going to run or what time. You have to look around, it's very clunky. If you had a couple of agents, you can't see everything in one place. You have to go and look at an agent schedule and look at that, and then, go to another one to look. There's no single view that gives you the whole picture.

What would be nice for us is, if ODI can easily integrate to GitHub, to allow us to have all our source code in GitHub rather than within ODI. This would be a very good feature, everyone is using GitHub.

There is always room for improvement, even when something is really good, but I think ODI is one of the best ETL tools in the market. However, I've always waited for the web service feature to be improved in next versions, so at last the 12C version the web service has been improved, some of the limitations of the 11g version were solved. Also, it would be really good if Oracle considered enabling the tool to integrate with some other platforms that are deprecated simply for commercial reasons, although it looks like the cloud option offers some extra connectors (for example, in Salesforce CRM).

One thing that is included, and it's going to improve, is the integration with a configuration management tool. Right now, they integrate with Subversion. And we know in the future, there's going to be more tools implemented there for configuration management and some new features there. So right now, it's kind of one of those features that, it's been released, but it's sort of a beta version of that feature where a lot more functionality will be coming down the line.

There are certain things where it can be improved. Initial solution setup seems a bit complex at the start, it should be improved because it becomes bit tough for a novice to get started on this. Sometimes error description is not helpful to understand the problem it gives some generic type of errors which are at times not that helpful to understand the underlying root cause of the issue. 

Error descriptions should be easy and specific to actual problems rather than generic lengthy descriptions. Also, another main feature that should be readily available is that there should be a source component available that can extract data from a source based on the custom query rather than giving a source data store only in the mapping. 

The resource management aspect of the solution could be improved.

The migration process could be easier.

Technical support could be better. They're okay, however, their service could improve a bit.

The solution could be more reliable.

There needs to better support of external version control software, currently only SVN is present, but I hear the GIT is planned in future patch.

From a DevOps point of view it would be useful to add better separation between ‘code’ and ‘executable’ exports, at the moment a piece of code will contain the embedded executable which bloats any source control objects (this may only be relevant to those the develop their own source and code control processes).

It would be nice to improve reconciliation. Additionally, better external authentication support through Microsoft Active Directory would be useful. Right now, it doesn’t support this very well. You have to buy Oracle’s special product instead.

The user interface is a little slow. When compared to Informatica, the UI is more intuitive, but because it is Java based, it does hang at times. This can be tuned, but it is something that could be streamlined.

I think that job scheduling can be improved.

The performance of the user interface is in need of improvement.

Perhaps more learning resources related to ODI would be helpful. I'm not sure if that's what restricted the buy-in. Even though the product has been out for 4-5 years, there are still a lot of people who aren't using it or have opted to stay with Informatica. It could be because there aren't enough self-study or self-research resources related to the product. That surely could be improved in the near term.

I am personally satisfied with current version, however, I think they should be able to provide a feature where we can easily use a configuration tool for TFS, GIT etc. This is essential for code management.

It needs more robust functioning and ease-of-use for development using reusable jobs.

I would like to see them make some more improvements on the troubleshooting side, to help with the troubleshooting because right now, the errors are not very clear. I think they are already working on it; it's in the latest release, but yet to be included in the BI Apps bundle.

I think that the product as an overall solution is good. I would only point out some minor bugs or glitches in the development interface (ODI studio), but I do not think that any of them are worthy to be reported here.

In my opinion, ODI should connect to ALL Oracle products out-of-the-box, but currently that’s not the case for all of them. Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) is one of the Oracle products for which Oracle decided to remove its ODI support in its last product version. In other words, if you wish to use ODI and HFM together, both from Oracle, you will need to create custom code, which does not make any sense to me.

Another area to improve would be the development life-cycle, which did improve in the latest ODI version, but needs further improvements.

The initial setup could be easier and it would be helpful if they'd reduce licensing costs.

• Click intensive on mapping
• Lots of mouse clicking
• GUI could be improved.
  

With ODI there is a lot of manual work to be done with the initial setup.

The GUI is Java based, and is less than friendly. It feels a little bit like being in the late 1980s when I started using it. So I would say: hey, Oracle guys! Improve the GUI. Make it more intuitive. Snappier. Sleeker.

I don't know if this is because of us or because of the tool, but sometimes I had a problem with the agent getting held up. I would come in and my jobs would be failing. Now I have implemented a script to bounce the agent nightly and this problem no longer occurs.

v12 has good features, but it needs to be certified with Hyperion EPM. Also, the Knowledge Module needs to be improved because it is the backbone of ODI. When we change the Knowledge Module, Oracle will not support the change in production.

It lacks a suite of tools suitable for fully processing data and moving it into decision support warehouses.

At this point we are seeing what we need, so I don't know if there is anything, any big improvements that are needed. This is basically just transforming and loading the data. It's doing its job.

I rate it a seven out of 10 because there is room for growth because ODI is still new, in comparison to Informatica, which is a mature product.

Overall performance needs improvement. Especially when running ODI clients on Windows desktops. ODI seems to generate a lot of network traffic.

ODI Studio can be very slow. Objects (mappings, packages, tables, etc.) can take minutes to open for editing when you are running ODI Studio on a Windows client when you have your repository database running on a server. It gets even worse when you are working on the same repository with multiple developers, which is not uncommon. :) The solution to this problem is running the ODI Studio in a virtual desktop on the same database server.

It requires a client, which I don't think is the best way to go about connecting data. Basically, you need to establish a connectivity between the client and the database, so when you launch something through Reports, in can be shown in the Excel.

Also, I think they should have something like Google Docs, where an engine opens up a document directly instead of having to depend on a client for connectivity. That would make working with it much more efficient and better.

I would like more different tools of transformation. In the current version I have only worked with lookup and filter, and sometimes is not good enough for what I use it for.

The main problem with ODI is that you have to create each step of the transformation as a new interface. A big data flow can have more than 100 interfaces, which can make it difficult to trace the data. However, in v12, this approach changed to become more flexible.

Another complaint is with the user interface performance -- as the work repository gets bigger, issues arise.

- Development Lifecycle

- native REST integration

- Easier security

The two areas that I see for improvement would be the UI and the procedures for accessing it.

I think Oracle should add more functions to improve optimization. Automation should be improved to enhance the product. Some of our customers carry out data comparisons between Oracle and other features and Oracle is lacking in some of those tools and features.

Overall the product is fine, but sometimes its reports unknown errors while we compile ETL scripts.

The ODI scheduler for agent sometime fails with no sign, which impact the ETL solution severely.

The property window in the ODI studio always does not refresh as it should. 

Sometimes, the mapping or package automatically gets edited.

The integration between the Oracle Repository and versioning tools like TortoiseSVN.

An area for improvement would be the lack of SQL compatibility - ODI has no ability to interact with SQL unstructured types and data types.

I think that the Oracle Fusion Middleware stack could be improved.

ODI's "in-memory RDBMS" is still a black box for programmers as there are no tools/dashboards to monitor/administrate this in-memory database. As a result, inconsistent data processing issues generally force us to restart the ODI server.

• ETL process registry solution is missing.
• To manage dependencies between loading packages.
• Versioning logic and release process are not well supported.

When I do a BI type of project, I like to pick the simplest declarative solution that I can find. So ODI appeals to me at a base solution level, but that sometimes puts a lot of burden on me personally to fix all of the nuances of the platform that I am integrating to and from. Some might argue this is just a part of the job, but if there is an add-on tool to hide the performance issues and solve them for me, then I might be interested in that as it provides me value. I can see a great deal of value of ODI plus an add-on solution that might know how to avoid performance issues on the target database with, for example, the proper use of SQL functions.

The software is developed on Java so it is very hardware dependent. You will need enough hardware to run the software otherwise you will struggle with it.

Enhance export/import features and add more features (I think they enhanced it in the 12c version)

There are a couple areas for improvement. First, it needs better error handling (i.e. messages, debugging). Second, it also needs the ability to perform more complex interfaces (i.e. multiple sources to targets).

Although we're satisfied with its overall performance in terms of integrity, scalability, and usability, it could be improved by including a separate UI for viewing the session runs through the operator layer of ODI. They could also reduce the complexity of having to move between tabs in the same window.