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:
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.
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).
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.
Provide business-level views of data from ERP applications to eliminate the need to design ETL around obscurely named base tables.
We put together an historical overview of the most important changes that have taken place over the years with regards to the development of Oracle Warehouse Builder and its associated license requirements:
2000 - In May 2000, Oracle released “Warehouse Builder” and ”Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) Integrator for SAP”. As part of the „Warehouse Builder” license, Oracle granted end users the restricted right to make use of Workflow Enterprise Edition and „Transparent Gateways for IBM DRDA, Informix, MS SQL Server, and Sybase” to provide Non-Mainframe sources for data marts and data warehouses created by Oracle Warehouse Builder. In order to make use of Oracle Warehouse Builder Integrator for SAP for Oracle 8i, end users were required to license the Warehouse Builder separately.
2001 - Oracle decided to no longer sell Warehouse Builder and OWB Integrator for SAP as separate licensable programs. Instead, Oracle bundled both programs as part of its „Internet Developer Suite” licenses, licensed on a Named User Plus metric.
2006 - Oracle decided to bundle the Warehouse Builder Core ETL functionalities as part of the different Oracle Database Editions (Standard Edition One, Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition), and to separate the functionalities of Oracle Warehouse Builder into four different parts, each with its own license implications:
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.Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition is part of Oracle’s so called „Technology Programs” and can be licensed either by Named User Plus or Processor licenses. In case you license on a Named User Plus metric, a minimum of 25 Named User Plus licenses per Processor is applicable. If you would like to make use of the Warehouse Builder ETL, you are required to license the Oracle Database Enterprise Edition separately.
But do you need to count the processors of the servers on which the Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition is installed, as you would think that’s what you should normally do? The answer is no. This since for the purpose of licensing the programs listed below, only the processor(s) on which the target database is running are counted:
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.
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