Oracle building a more perfect beast

Last week, Oracle announced the general availability of Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2, a database design and extraction, transformation and load (aka ETL) tool to assist in managing the lifecycle of data and metadata.

Also announced was that the core database design and ETL capabilities of Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2 are now included with Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Enterprise Edition, Standard Edition, and Standard Edition One at no additional cost.

Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2 promises enhanced features designed to improve data quality including name and address cleansing, and de-duplication functionality. Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2 also seeks to be able to design relational and OLAP database structures, easing in data storage in a common Oracle Database repository while simultaneously offering a business intelligence tools such as Oracle Business Intelligence Suite and spreadsheets.

In addition, new connectors are available to assist in the transformation of data from disparate application repositories. The Oracle Warehouse Builder Enterprise ETL Option seeks to support multi-environment deployments typical of enterprise data warehouse projects by enabling improved performance and scalability of ETL processes. The connecters are all about extraction of data and can even sometimes target data to and from their core CRM and ERP applications including the Oracle E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft Enterprise.

A free evaluation version of Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2 is available at www.oracle.com. The Oracle Warehouse Builder Enterprise ETL option is priced at US $10,000 per CPU or US $200 per user. Oracle Warehouse Builder Data Quality starts at US $15,000 per CPU or US $300 a user. Finally, the Oracle Warehouse Builder Connectors for the Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, and SAP are priced at US $20,000 per warehouse builder connecter.

This would typically be the space in which a blurb would be running describing firms mentioned in the blog entry running above. Here quoted verbatim is the Oracle story according to that firm’s PR: Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world’s largest enterprise software company.