Informatica OBI Applications ETL: the Slowly Changing Dimensions logic

One of the greatest advantages of buying an OBI Application – Project, Supply Chain or any other of the many Analytics flavours – is the set of predefined ETL mappings, sessions and workflows that come with it. Although there is a good chance that the OLTP data source is highly customised, the online Oracle documentation is full of information that can make the ETL developer’s life easier. That said, there are some important ETL tasks whose logic isn’t very easy to find. They are like black boxes: you customise them a little bit – some fields behind the X_CUSTOM placeholder here, a small datatype change in the target table there – and they operate their magic. So let’s reveal the truth behind the veil of a very important out of the box ETL logic in OBI Apps: the Slowly Changing Dimension management mappings.