Database Reference
In-Depth Information
it all becomes a bit like ouroboros, the snake of greek mythology that eats its tail,
except in oDI's case, it is not a metaphor for the circle of life, but is just a mess
instead.
2.4.6.2 Load Plans to the Rescue
oDI 11.1.1.5 introduced a new way to link together
steps in a global sequence: Load Plans. Think of Load Plans as oDI's list-based way of
addressing multistep complex processes with hierarchical steps, in-built parallelism
(think of the scripting pain of kicking of parallel loads to an ASo load buffer—all
auto-magic in a Load Plan), ability to restart, and exception handling. Additionally,
there is a unified operator execution reporting view.
Load Plans are exclusively based on Scenarios, the compiled output of variables,
Interfaces, Procedures, and Packages. The act of dragging any one of those uncom-
piled objects into a Load Plan forces compilation on the fly removes the manual
design-time step.
Alas, Load Plans do not support looping like the Package Pkg_LoopAndLoad does.
This seems an insurmountable issue. This chapter's solution explicitly rejects linked
Interfaces in favor of a code-based Package. What to do?
As you have likely noticed, oDI is flexible, almost to a fault. That flexibility and resul-
tant plasticity extends to Load Plans. With that in mind, use Load Plans where hierar-
chy, parallelism, and in-built exception handling is important, i.e., practically always.
When a process requires looping, such as in Pkg_LoopAndLoad, or other functionality
a Load Plan does not support, continue to use Packages.
The Load Plan PLAn_ASosamp in Figure 2.20 shows the steps that correspond to
the four Slay Bad Data steps in the Project.
1. “Extract Essbase to SQL” links the individual dimension extraction Interfaces
and extracts ASosamp's metadata to the Dimensions table.
2. “Load missing hierarchy” executes the Package Pkg_LoopAndLoad (remem-
ber, this is the looping process that cannot be translated to a Load Plan) to iden-
tify and load missing dimension data.
Figure 2.20
Load Plan PLAN_ASOsamp.
