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EBS ETL Off-shoring Pentaho Peoplesoft

Customers can only have one address …..

During my time converting PeopleSoft data to Oracle EBS, I remember being asked to create a spreadsheet output using Penataho for the dataload of customers with a number of tabs including:

  • Customer Info
  • Customer Addresses

This request came from the “off-shore” resource we had on-shore from India at the time. An EBS “expert” … or so we were told.

I was informed in quite a lot of detail which columns they wanted and some simple transformations/edits they needed performed on the data. The interesting thing about the Customer Addresses data they asked for was that there was no indication of the sequence the addresses should be in, nor how we should indicate (say) the primary address, the delivery address, the billing address etc.

I questioned this and was firmly told “just do it the way they ask for it – they know what they are doing”. I had my doubts.

But I did it.

The next day the EBS “guru” rejected my data file because it had duplicate addresses in it. When I questioned what that meant exactly, the guru said “there is more than one address for a customer”. I pointed out that the data was correct and that there were lots of customers with multiple addresses – in fact most of them had at least two. To which he claimed “in EBS a customer can only have one address”.

I think my face said it all really.

I suggested something along the lines of “RTFM”.

Note: It seems that the conversion approach taken by this off-shoring company was to load the data into staging tables they had created based on the EBS standard data load tables, but with only the fields they “thought” they needed. They then wrote scripts to populate the standard load tables from their customised tables. Clueless. A car crash waiting to happen … and it surely did.

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ETL

Pentaho Data Integration

The project I am currently on is using Pentaho Data Integration (aka PDI or Kettle) to migrate data from Peoplesoft ERP (8.4 SP2) to Oracle eBusiness Suite (11.5). Notwithstanding the obvious absurdity of this move (I am a Peoplesoft person … so I am biased), the Pentaho ETL tool is proving to be truly excellent for the task at hand. Whilst the approach to this data migration is best described as “atypical”, the tool is at least making things easier than they might otherwise be.

I have used PDI on previous projects to migrate Peoplesoft data to Agresso Business World and to migrate Peoplesoft data to Peoplesoft itself – modified of course. Check out the Pentaho website for more details.