Integrating Oracle Fusion Applications with OCI Data Integration: A Guide to Data Extraction and Integration

David Allan
5 min readAug 15, 2024

--

In today’s fast-paced digital environment, organizations rely on accurate and timely data to make informed decisions. Oracle Fusion Applications are a comprehensive suite of cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, offering robust functionalities across various business processes. However, to fully leverage the power of Oracle Fusion, businesses often need to extract, transform, and load (ETL) this data into other systems, such as Oracle Autonomous Databases or data lakes, for advanced analytics and reporting. This is where Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Data Integration comes into play.

OCI Data Integration provides a powerful, user-friendly platform to seamlessly extract data from Oracle Fusion Applications. It allows users to select specific attributes, subset the data by time, and integrate it with other data sources for a comprehensive view of the enterprise landscape. In this blog, we’ll explore how OCI Data Integration simplifies the process of extracting and integrating data from Oracle Fusion Applications, highlighting key features and best practices.

Understanding OCI Data Integration

OCI Data Integration is a fully managed, serverless ETL service that simplifies the process of building, deploying, and managing data pipelines. It supports a wide range of data sources, including Oracle Fusion Applications, Autonomous Databases, and various data lakes, making it an ideal choice for organizations looking to streamline their data integration efforts.

Key Features:

1. No-code Development: Users can design data flows with a drag-and-drop interface, reducing the need for complex coding.

2. Scalability: OCI Data Integration automatically scales resources to handle large volumes of data, ensuring optimal performance.

3. Seamless Integration: Easily integrates with other Oracle services, including Oracle Autonomous Databases, Object Storage, and Data Science.

Extracting Data from Oracle Fusion Applications

One of the core capabilities of OCI Data Integration is its ability to extract data from Oracle Fusion Applications. This process involves connecting to Fusion Applications, selecting the desired attributes, filtering the data by specific criteria (such as time ranges), and extracting it for further processing.

Steps to Extract Data:

1. Establishing the Connection:

- Begin by setting up a connection to your Oracle Fusion Applications instance. OCI Data Integration provides a straightforward interface to configure this connection securely, using credentials and endpoint details.

2. Selecting Attributes:

  • Once the connection is established, users can browse through the data available in Oracle Fusion. You can then view the attributes for that entity and select, the Attributes tab has this functionality;
Attributes panel has attribute selection capabilities

OCI Data Integration allows you to select specific attributes or columns that you want to extract. For example, you might want to extract sales data, including attributes like transaction ID, customer name, date, and amount. You can select attribute by attribute as follows;

Exclude by selection

Or use rules, such as searching for attributes ending with *Date or *By as below;

Exclude by filter rules

Or mapping into an existing target table will inform OCI Data Integration about the attributes you actually use;

Map attributes to target tables

Only the attributes actually used/referenced in a data entity are extracted from Fusion. As you know some entities have hundreds or even thousands of attributes, you can extract those if you want, but if you are only after a subset OCI Data Integration will take care of the code generation and just extract those!

3. Subsetting Data by Time:

  • To focus on relevant data, you can subset your extraction based on time. OCI Data Integration allows you to filter data by specific time periods — such as extracting only the sales data from the last quarter or the previous fiscal year. This ensures that you are working with the most relevant dataset for your analysis. You can do full extracts, but you can also extract incrementally through both managed and custom;
  • You can used managed incremental extract and OCI Data Integration will take care of the watermark management, so continual runs will extract increments!

4. Data Transformation:

- Before loading the data into the target system, you may need to perform some transformations. OCI Data Integration provides tools for cleansing, enriching, and transforming the extracted data to meet your specific needs. This could include data enrichment, aggregation, or filtering based on additional criteria.

Integrating with Autonomous Databases and Data Lakes

After extracting the necessary data, the next step is to integrate it into your target systems — whether that’s an Oracle Autonomous Database, a data lake, or another storage solution.

To ensure that your data is always up-to-date, you can schedule data extraction and loading processes. OCI Data Integration supports scheduling and monitoring of data pipelines, allowing you to automate the entire process.

Conclusion

OCI Data Integration provides a comprehensive, user-friendly solution for extracting and integrating data from Oracle Fusion Applications. By allowing users to select specific attributes, filter data by time, and seamlessly integrate with Oracle Autonomous Databases and data lakes, OCI Data Integration empowers organizations to make data-driven decisions with ease. Whether you are looking to enhance your reporting capabilities, drive advanced analytics, or simply streamline your data management processes, OCI Data Integration offers the tools and flexibility you need to succeed.

Explore OCI Data Integration today and discover how it can transform your data strategy!

--

--

David Allan

Architect at @Oracle The views expressed on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle.