Oracle’s June 2023 EPM update included a very exciting new feature called ‘Pipelines‘. Data integration and data processing are major components of an organization’s overall EPM process. Many times the jobs associated with these processes follow a specific order. Pipelines allow for organizing individual jobs into one overall procedure directly within the application. Additionally, the Pipeline can include jobs across multiple EPM applications!
There are several benefits of this feature. First, multiple jobs can be executed in order (and across applications) without the need for a large scripting effort. Second, the need for a third-party tool to perform these tasks is greatly reduced. Third, as Oracle expands the Pipeline functionality to include more and more job types, customers will have one location to manage the overall data flows for their EPM solutions.
Currently, the following job types are available in Pipelines:
- Business Rule
- Business Ruleset
- Copy from Object Store
- Copy to Object Store
- Integration
- Open Batch – File
- Open Batch – Location
- Open Batch – Name
- Set Substitution Variable
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Jobs are organized into Stages within a Pipeline. Stages are “containers” for the jobs and allow for the addition, managing, and deletion of job(s) contained in each stage. Stages be configured to execute jobs serially or in parallel. Below is an example of a Pipeline with several Stages and Jobs.
As you can see, Pipelines provide an advancement in daily job processing. The ability to manage jobs across applications is a huge plus for organizations with multiple applications. Additionally, the visualization that Oracle is providing within the Pipeline screen helps customers to easily understand what processes are occurring and in what order! It will be interesting to see what new job types are added over the next few months.
