In my last post, I described the methods of reporting from Oracle Cloud (Fusion) Apps. In that post I illustrated the advantage of using BICS and Data Sync to provide a true Enterprise Data Warehouse due to its abilities to integrate data from all our your cloud, relational, big data and flat file sources. This post describes how the Data Sync and Cloud (Fusion) Application integration works and why this method is much easier than past ERP/HCM/CX to EDW integrations.
The main differentiation between traditional on-premise integration approaches and BICS integration is that BICS Data Sync is able to read the Oracle Cloud OTBI Metadata layer opposed to having to read directly from source tables. The OTBI Metadata layer abstracts the underlying source tables into logical tables. For those of you who have created source to target mappings from EBS or PeopleSoft transactional tables, this is a welcome change. Gone is the need to understand all of the various schemas, tables and composite keys needed to extract data from source systems. The OTBI Metadata layer simplifies this process by placing the data in logical tables such as “Supplier.” If you want your Cloud ERP Supplier information, you simply extract the “Supplier” logical table and load into the BICS cloud data warehouse. This process is very simple as illustrated by the diagram below.
The screenshots below show how straight forward it is to do a Cloud Application to BICS data extract. You setup a connection in Data Sync to the OTBI metadata layer using an OTBI login and then you can search for the tables you want to import or use a logical SQL query (a more advanced approach that I will expand upon in a future post). To import logical tables, go to Project -> Pluggable Source Data -> Data From Object(s). A search dialog box comes up; this is where you search for the table(s) you want to import and then click Import. The metadata will be analyzed and then Data Sync will create a Target Table definition and will automatically create a Source to Target mapping. You can now schedule this data load on the Jobs tab.
Learn More
If you’d like to continue the conversation and learn more about BICS capabilities, stop by Perficient booth #1715 at Oracle OpenWorld Sept. 18-22 in San Francisco.
