ODBC Access to Infor Data Lake

Legacy Contributor

Hi,

I have been exploring the Infor DL capabilities for data egress to external systems via the Compass API/JDBC and have the following questions

1. Does Infor provide/recommend a ODBC driver/JDBC-ODBC bridge for DL ? If not, then when is it expected to be Generally Available? 

2. What is the best way to handle real time data egress from DL to external applications e.g Azure DL, Azure Event Hub ?

Any KBs on the above topics will be of great help.

Cheers,

Vaib

Legacy Contributor

Hi Vaib,

We don't yet have roadmap timelines for an ODBC driver for Compass but we do see some customers using ODBC:JDBC bridges from OpenLink, EasySoft, and Progress. While we don't certify specific vendor solutions, customers have been generally pretty successful in using these bridges for a variety of use cases and we typically work to enhance the JDBC driver if users report logs and issues to support.

On real-time, it's good to note that Data Lake (and data lakes in general) are not designed to be real-time data platforms so much as they are big data platforms. Firstly, ERP applications typically micro-batch data for a period of time (e.g. 20 seconds to 2 hours) before sending it to Data Lake. Next, consumer clients typically run queries on a schedule to retrieve from Data Lake.

We do see some folks try to both replicate data ASAP and query Data Lake very frequently but generally, this isn't recommended and a really effective use of Data Lake.

There are a couple of approaches one could take today such as using Data Lake Flows (retrieval step) to schedule moving data objects from Data Lake to some client connection point such as a file service or API. Note that this is just data object delivery so the client would then need to handle the files and parse them appropriately.

All that said, we're actually working on real-time data pipelining solutions for ERPs to stream events and for pipelines to write this data real-time to cloud-based data warehouses and services. We'll likely see this early in 2022 but we'll have lots more information and demos available at Inforum. If you have specific technologies you're interested in seeing supported that you use in your solution architecture, give me a shout!