Earlier this year, I co-hosted a webinar with Charles Feddersen, Principal Group Program Manager, Azure Synapse Analytics, talking about the latest developments coming out of our partnership with Microsoft Azure. Microsoft is an investor in Incorta via its M12 fund, and Incorta was named Microsoft US Startup Partner of the Year in 2020.
In the webinar, we explore the unified data experience we are co-creating for Microsoft customers looking for a more practical way to analyze their Oracle EBS and Oracle Cloud ERP data. With these latest developments, companies no longer have to choose between migrating to a cloud platform like Azure and having direct access to their Oracle data.
How does this new data experience work and why should you care?
If your company is like many today, you have some amount of critical business data sitting inside Oracle databases. Oracle has some of the most highly regarded ERP offerings in the market, with countless businesses relying on some flavor of Oracle ERP to run their business. But regardless of whether it’s stored on-premises with Oracle EBS or in Oracle Cloud ERP, you’re still facing the same cold hard facts about the data you have sitting inside Oracle applications:
- You are dealing with an extremely complex data model that requires a ton of expertise to demystify. Make even the smallest mistake and all of your numbers are wrong. For example, if you join two tables together using the wrong path, your queries return radically different results.
- After painstakingly getting the data out of Oracle applications without breaking anything, you then face yet another monster challenge – making it business friendly. In other words, translating the data from the 3NF source model (Third normal form, which is how the data is originally stored inside the source application) into a more business-friendly form that allows the data to work inside a product like Microsoft Azure Synapse. Once again, experts are required every step of the way. Some single tabular reports gather data from 45+ tables. What business user wants to engage with hundreds or even thousands of tables to get their job done?
- If you are using Oracle Cloud ERP, there is yet another layer of complexity to wrestle with. Oracle does not offer direct JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) APIs for Oracle Cloud ERP databases, which means you need to figure out some other way to connect to the database and interact with the data.
The antidote? Incorta Intelligent Ingest for connecting and synchronizing data between Oracle EBS/Oracle Cloud ERP and Azure Data Lake in a matter of clicks. The low-code/no-code approach makes it easy to pull objects, configure incremental updates and ensure business data is always up to date. The power behind it is impressive too: Incorta’s proprietary parallel ingest processes can load the largest of tables (think billions of rows) in minutes, including the classic Oracle EBS behemoths, AP_INVOICE_LINES_ALL and XLA_AE_LINES.
But, even when you successfully bring in these large tables, the harder work is making sense of how these things relate and how to extract the business data from these models. Our Incorta Intelligent Ingest offering has all this metadata for the table structures already defined allowing for you to start accessing, querying and learning from your data from day one.
When it comes to demystifying the Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Cloud ERP data models, Incorta Blueprints can help. Blueprints guide you through loading the appropriate tables, identifying the necessary joins, and creating business-friendly semantic layers with one click. The semantic layers allow Microsoft Azure Synapse users to perform additional functions, such as data science, machine learning or analytics on their EBS data.
Seeing is Believing
All of this means that companies now have more choices for accessing their Oracle data outside of the Oracle ecosystem, and more options for analytics than existed before. I love working on projects like this one. The best part is when people realize what they can see the data in meaningful ways on day one.
Ready to see it for yourself? Watch the full replay on demand – and be sure to make it to the 36-minute mark to find out how to take advantage of the free proof-of-value offer we’re making in conjunction with Microsoft.