Oracle Virtual Directory

Posted by David Yahalom under ETL, General IT, Oracle

Another presentation I’ve made not too long ago at an Israel Oracle User Group meeting (sponsored in part by Xpert-One1, the consulting and solution provider company I work for) was about a relatively little known product (at least by Oracle terms) called Oracle Virtual Directory.

OVD allows for Enterprise Level LDAP without synchronization.

Oracle Virtual Directory provides LDAP and XML views of existing enterprise identity information without synchronizing or moving data from its native locations.

OVD can connect to pretty much anything JAVA can connect to and expose several different LDAP directories and RDMBS data repositories as a single LDAP tree.

Think about it. You can virtually “unify” all the different directories in your organizations (be it RDBMS servers or LDAP directories) as a single directory service - which is so much easier to work with. And without any sort of synchronization.

Very very cool.

You can get my presentation here.

OVD is availiable for download, free, from OTN. 

DTS in Oracle

Posted by David Yahalom under ETL, SQL Server, Oracle

If you are an SQL Server DBA you are probably well aware of the power and simplicity of Microsoft’s DTS.

DTS stands for Data Transformation Services and is a part of SQLServer 2000 Enterprise Edition (also called Data Integration Services in SQLServer 2005).

DTS is a powerful and simple to use ETL engine making complex data transformations jobs about as easy as using a mouse. I found myself using DTS almost exclusively everyime I had to move data between different database vendors. There are other, more complex and powerful packages (such as IBM’s DataStage), but because DTS is bundled with SQLServer 2000 EE it was always the most accessible tool for me.

Many DBAs are unaware that Oracle also has a very good ETL package called “Oracle Wearhouse Builder“. I have seen many DBAs installing SQLServer in a strict Oracle environment solely for the purpose of using DTS. If you qualify as one, have a look at Oracle Warehouse builder first as it just might suite your needs.

For more details.