Oracle DRM Blog

Thought I’ll just have a quick blog on some of the questions I got over the past few days… Hopefully I have answered your questions, keep them coming.

• Oh yes I know, how can anyone find anything called DRM on the web? Digital Rights Management, Digital Restrictions Management, Data Reference Model, Data Resources Manager, Data Relationship Management. I hear you, maybe marketing can come up with a better name.
• Master Data Management is much more than a silo technology solution, it requires an ecosystem of technologies and processes to make it work. For example, we used to have hierarchies stored in Oracle 11i ERP and another set sitting inside Essbase cubes, that won’t work very well. The key is to make the relevant systems work together.
• SOA is a good question. Everyone is talking about it but my take is that SOA is still a buzz word. The service piece is often undefined. It’s one thing to talk about making RSS feed out of XML through a database and calling it a web service. It’s another defining real business processes that interacts between human and technology. It involves workflow, SOA and other glues. Fortunately, the glues are slowly maturing though there’s still alot being done in the custom, than the pre-build world. A real example is also quite a few MDM solution preaches SOA, they rarely provide a ready-to-go solution to work with the target system. You ended up having more system integrators working for the problem.

• DRM exports to Oracle of course. But you need to make sure you have an Oracle ODBC driver to do that. And it works pretty much like MS SQL Server.
• Oracle MDM products? You can search on the Oracle MDM page. I think they have the Product Information Management (PIM), Customer Data Hub and Data Relationship Management. Each one of these are solving different master data management problems. But my source tells me there’re several 4th generation products out in the market place also.
• Are there similar products like Oracle DRM? I think so. There’s one called Stratature bought by Microsoft and it’s part of the Microsoft Sharepoint product suite. The features are very close such as versioning and hierarchy management. Stratature is probably the closest match for the Analytical MDM space.
• Pricing. I don’t deal with that. You’ll have to approach Oracle for your needs. I think they have some product pricing info online.
• Creating a version “as of” maybe what you need to do and then do a compare to see if any changes had been made since. In future, it’s probably a good idea to setup better security scheme to prevent future issues.
• Import vs Automator. Personally I favor Automator, it takes longer and the discipline to do but it makes things more organized and straight forward. And your actions in automators are logged in transaction history too.