Oracle Warehouse Builder: How Did The Product And Its Associated License Requirements Develop Over Time?

A datawarehouse environment is typically the largest and one of the most important database environments within an organization. Many end users make use of Oracle’s datawarehouse features as part of their database infrastructure, but they are often confused when it comes to proper license requirements, depending on the specific version and/or features that are used. Is the functionality part of Internet Developer Suite? Or is the functionality a separate licensable option of the Oracle Database Enterprise Edition? Or is it a stand-alone product which requires separate licensing? This article aims to provide an overview of the development of Oracle’s Warehouse Builder functionality and its associated license requirements.

Oracle Warehouse Builder was developed to address the requirements of Oracle data warehousing, starting with basic data warehouse design and extract, transform and load (ETL) code generation, and expanding over time to address more complex use cases, and deployment, execution and auditing of ETL jobs.

Warehouse Builder 10.1 covered the basics of these. Warehouse Builder 10gR2, 11gR1 and 11gR2 each introduced new major functionality around data warehouse and ETL design, data quality and data integration.

Up to the 10.1 release, Warehouse Builder was licensed as part of Oracle’s Internet Developer Suite. As of the 10gR2 and 11gR2 releases, Oracle introduced changes to the licensing and packaging of Warehouse Builder, to reflect the new functionality added.

The following diagram represents the major feature groups in Warehouse Builder 10gR2 and later:

Basic ETL, or Core ETL:

It provides the essential building blocks for building data warehouse ETL solutions on the Oracle database. In general, the Basic ETL feature set is a superset of Warehouse Builder’s 10.1 release’s capabilities.

Enterprise ETL:

It extends Warehouse Builder to a full-featured data warehouse-centric design and data integration tool, integrated with Oracle’s Business Intelligence tools (Oracles Discoverer and Oracle’s Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition).

Data Quality:

It provides data profiling, data cleansing and data governance features tailored around the data quality issues associated with ETL, data warehousing, and business intelligence, and integrated with the rest of your Warehouse Builder design and ETL metadata.

Application Adapters:

Provide business-level views of data from ERP applications to eliminate the need to design ETL around obscurely named base tables.

• “Core ETL Features”  are the improved features that were made available in version 10g release 1 of Oracle’s Warehouse Builder. End users do not need to license these features separately, as these features were provided as part of the Database Standard Edition, Standard Edition One or Enterprise Edition licenses.
• “Enterprise ETL”  included the new feature of Oracle Warehouse Builder which allowed end users to install their repository on a Real Application Cluster system. If they wanted to use it, they were required to obtain a license of “Warehouse Builder Enterprise ETL” which was a so called Oracle Database Enterprise Edition Option of the Oracle Database Enterprise Edition with a list license fee of 10.000 USD per Processor.
• “Data Quality”  covered data profiling, data auditing, audit ETL jobs and automatic corrections. If end users wanted to use it, they were required to obtain a license of “Warehouse Builder Data Quality” which was a so called Oracle Database Enterprise Edition Option of the Oracle Database Enterprie Edition with a list license fee of 15.000 USD per Processor.
• “ERP/CRM”  connectivity included the connectors for Oracle’s E-Business Suite, Oracle’s Peoplesoft and SAP. “Warehouse Builder Connector” was licensed at 20.000 USD per Connector per platform.
• As a result of this big change, Warehouse Builder was no longer part of the Oracle Internet Developer Suite licenses. Instead, it became part of the Oracle Database itself. If an end user purchased Internet Developer Suite licenses prior to May 12th, 2006 – the date on which Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2 was published – and he was still paying support maintenance for its Internet Developer Suite licenses, then the end user still had the right to upgrade to the latest Oracle Warehouse Builder Application Adapter for SAP licenses, as long as the end user had enough Internet Developer Suite licenses with an active support maintenance contract to cover the OWB developers working with the SAP Adapter.

2006 - Oracle announced the acquisition of Sunopsis, a French data integration company.

2008 - Oracle announced its plans to release a data integration product which would include all the features of both Oracle’s Warehouse Builder and the acquired Sunposis software: Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition.

2009 - Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition (ODI EE) was introduced by Oracle.

2010 - Oracle announced to no longer put through any major enhancements for Oracle Warehouse Builder beyond the Oracle Warehouse Builder version 11, release 2. Any and all further developments were continued to be done on Oracle’s new product: Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition.

Over the years, Oracle Warehouse Builder went through a lot of changes. As the product developed over time, the associated licensing changed as well. As an end user, you are responsible to continuously keep up to date with how the changes in bundling of features and/or components may or may not impact your license compliance position.