Introduction

XML and web services are becoming common place in enterprise data integration, and ODI provides many features that allow organizations to take full advantage of their service oriented architectures (SOA). These features allow ETL developers to incorporate XML and their SOA infrastructure into their ETL processing. ODI and SOA directly complement one another; both can read, write, and transform flat files, XML, relational data, and so on, and both directly integrate with web services, however both technologies have their strengths. SOA is great at message-based integration, while ODI is great at performing bulk integrations and heavy transformations of data.

ODI is SOA native, and this allows ODI to take full advantage of existing SOA services. The SOA services do not need to be recreated in ODI since ODI can directly invoke web services; the opposite is also true. If there is a bulk transformation that already exists in ODI, this can easily be invoked from the SOA environment...