Retek ETL for Oracle 8i won't work with 10g
March 16, 2009 6:00 AM Subscribe
Anyone out there familiar with Retek ETL?
At work we run a fairly old Retek data warehouse on AIX 4.3.3, Oracle 8i. A large part of the nightly load is handled by the ETL program that comes as part of Retek's package.
In an effort to enter the 21st century, we've begun a project to migrate our data warehouse to Oracle 10g running on AIX 5.1 (and, maybe sometime in the future, change to Oracle on Linux).
What we've noticed is that when we try to use the Retek ETL to load data onto the 10g database, it fails with a series of error messages, and we can't figure out why. We haven't moved the ETL binary - it's still operating under AIX 4.3.3. All we did was modify the pointer to the database (in Retek's config.env, in case you're interested).
It seems like the ETL must do some backdoor dealings with the Oracle 8i database that don't work with Oracle 10g. The version number of the ETL (obtained by typing rfx -h) is 10.2.1 build 888.
We can't really upgrade to the latest version of Retek because a) it's too expensive, and b) we've customized our data warehouse pretty thoroughly.
Can anyone give me some insight into what might be going on with Retek's ETL?
At work we run a fairly old Retek data warehouse on AIX 4.3.3, Oracle 8i. A large part of the nightly load is handled by the ETL program that comes as part of Retek's package.
In an effort to enter the 21st century, we've begun a project to migrate our data warehouse to Oracle 10g running on AIX 5.1 (and, maybe sometime in the future, change to Oracle on Linux).
What we've noticed is that when we try to use the Retek ETL to load data onto the 10g database, it fails with a series of error messages, and we can't figure out why. We haven't moved the ETL binary - it's still operating under AIX 4.3.3. All we did was modify the pointer to the database (in Retek's config.env, in case you're interested).
It seems like the ETL must do some backdoor dealings with the Oracle 8i database that don't work with Oracle 10g. The version number of the ETL (obtained by typing rfx -h) is 10.2.1 build 888.
We can't really upgrade to the latest version of Retek because a) it's too expensive, and b) we've customized our data warehouse pretty thoroughly.
Can anyone give me some insight into what might be going on with Retek's ETL?
Response by poster: A typical example of the error messages received isposted by Ritchie at 6:02 AM on March 16, 2009
It might just not be compatible with Oracle 10g. The release notes for Retek ETL version 11 state that's it's only certified for Oracle 9, so I'd guess 10 isn't certified for Oracle 10g either. There probably is no simple solution to your problem.
posted by dhoe at 7:09 AM on March 16, 2009
posted by dhoe at 7:09 AM on March 16, 2009
Response by poster: Okay, it's true. Version 10 of the ETL is not compatible with Oracle 10g. However we were able to download version 13 of the ETL from Oracle (who own Retek), and install it on the AIX 5.3 box (it won't run on AIX 4.3). After some fiddling, we got it to connect to the database and perform some basic operations.
So, we're back in business, albeit with some modifications to our original project plan.
posted by Ritchie at 6:54 PM on March 18, 2009
So, we're back in business, albeit with some modifications to our original project plan.
posted by Ritchie at 6:54 PM on March 18, 2009
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