An introduction to Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC)
The principal aim of writing this blog is to publish the most frequently used real-time industry use cases where OIC is used.
OIC – Oracle Integration Cloud is a cloud based Integration tool. It seamlessly integrates on-prem applications with Oracle Cloud (SaaS) or other Cloud Apps (as Workday, Salesforce etc.) to other Cloud Apps. Like any other integration tool in the market (as Dell Boomi) – OIC relies on ADAPTERS to create connections with the end points. End Points mean source and destination entities between which data is to be exchanged.
Imagine OIC as a pipe capable of transforming, mapping data between two discrete entities – Adapters connect to these entities. In OIC – data is read, mapped, transformed, orchestrated from Source via Connection Adapters with usual stuff as fault Handling (local and global) available and is transferred to the Destination again via Connection Adapters.
OIC is a PaaS service as available from Oracle.
Frequently Used Design time Components in OIC
- Connections – We need to create Connections by using the Adapters available. Adapters are available for SFTP, ATP Databases (for connecting to Cloud Autonomous Data Waterhouse ADW Database), Salesforce, Workday, Miscrosoft Outlook, Local Databases, Local File Servers, SOAP, REST, Oracle SaaS Applications etc.
- Agents – Agents are used by OIC to connect to on-prem entities such as a local database or a local file server (not FTP/SFTP).
- Lookups – They are like SOA’s Domain Value Mappings or in simple terms “KEY-VALUE” pairs. We define a lookup say COUNTRY LOOKUP with the values:
US – United States; UK – United Kingdom; IN – India
In the integration, we would invoke look up with the key, say US and get the value United States. Lookups are very handy when migrating integrations from one environment to the other where the values will keep changing. So all such dynamic values will be maintained in the Lookups and referred to in the integration and no need to make changes in the integration post migration.
4. Integration – Now this is the main component i.e. the Integration itself. It will be covered in the next blog.
Understand Integration as the main process that does the fetch, transform, mapping and data transfer between source & mapping.
Use-Cases in Industry
Use SFTP, SOAP, REST, ATP Adapter connections to integrate applications, understand how to invoke Oracle SaaS (HCM/Financials) FBDI/HDL and load data, understand how to kick of ESS programs in SaaS from OIC, understand how to launch BI Publisher Reports in SaaS and extract data to OIC.
The intent of this blog was to explain OIC,since most of the content present on the web is in cryptic language ,and we wanted to explain OIC in a language that is easier to understand.
Author: Bipul Shukla is the Lead Integration Architect at Fusion Practices
