Archive for October, 2019

ODI Hidden Gems – Target Load Order

Posted in Gems, ODI 12c, Tips and Tricks with tags , , on October 14, 2019 by Rodrigo Radtke de Souza

Hi all!

Today’s gem is related to a very nice surprise that all ODI developers had when they were migrating from ODI 11 to ODI 12, which is the ability to load multiple target tables with the same ODI mapping object. You may have a very large mapping and “split” (with Split object) the result set into multiple targets, or you may just copy the same result to different target tables, mapping different fields in each of the targets. This post is not about what you can do when loading multiple targets (which is kind a lot due to this feature in ODI 12c), but how to control the order which those target tables are loaded.

Let’s start with the following example:

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If you execute this mapping, this is what it will look like in Operator:

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You can see that it loaded the tables in an order that was decided by ODI, probably in the same order that you dragged and dropped the models into the mapping. Now imagine that you want to have control over the order and need to load Table B before table A. The classical example where you would use that is when you retrieve a source dataset and you want to derive both the dimension and fact information out of it. In this case, you would want to load the dimension table first and the fact table second.

Luckily, ODI allow us to change the order, but its not too intuitive.  In the Logical tab, you need to click in any area that does not contain an object (any white area will do). This will display the “Target Load Order” option:

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Click on the “gear” icon in the far right and a menu will popup:

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Now you may configure it to have any order that you want, let’s say table B, C and then A. If you save and run the mapping now, this is what you get:

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That’s it folks! See ya!

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ODI Hidden Gems – Begin/End Mapping Command

Posted in ODI 12c, Tips and Tricks with tags , on October 7, 2019 by Rodrigo Radtke de Souza

Hi all,

Today’s short post is about a simple, but very powerful feature that often is overlooked: Begin/End Mapping Command. These options are in the Physical tab and, as their name suggests, they may issue any kind of command before a mapping begins and/or after it finishes.

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Pay close attention to the detail that they may execute ANY command from ANY technology that ODI may handle and that’s why it is so powerful. You may run anything from Oracle DML statements, a piece of Java code, trigger OS commands and so on. This gives you a lot of flexibility.

A very common example that we may use those are to “track” some mapping in a separate log table. Although you have ODI Operator that contains all the log information on it, sometimes we may get a requirement to track all the executions of a particular mapping, so people know for sure when it ran and that the logs will not be purged by accident from the Operator by someone. Let’s see how we may accomplish logging the start and end times of a execution.

Let’s start with “Begin”. First you select which technology and logical schema that command refers to. In this case, we will insert the name of the mapping, the time that it started, and which was the session number that it was assigned to in ODI.

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Let’s do the same with “End”:

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Let’s run the mapping. When we go to Operator, we may see that two new tasks were created, one before and another one after the main mapping:

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We may double click it to see the code that was executed:

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If we query the LOG_INFO table, we will see two entries, one for begin and another one for end:

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This was a very short example as you may do way more than that. You may send emails to alert that a critical mapping has completed, you may zip and move a file after it was just loaded by the mapping, you may run an OS bat file that will prepare your enviroment before a data load and so on. These two options are a great alternative for us to get all these “small” codes inside the ODI mapping object itself and rely less on small ODI procedures.

See ya!

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