Ø  With the Oracle Utilities Application Framework based products there are a number of tools provided that can be used to transfer data from one environment to another.

Ø  There are three main tools that implementations use:

§  ConfigLab - A configurable copy facility is metadata aware and therefore understands the relationships between objects and by invoking the relevant maintenance objects validates the data copied. This utility uses the object validation to help ensure data integrity. Basically it is a set of configuration tables and a set of batch jobs to perform the migration of data.

§  Bundling - A configurable release management tool that allows exporting of Advanced Configuration Environment based objects (business services, business objects, UI Maps etc) from one environment to another.

§  Blueprint - An Oracle Utilities Software Development Kit (SDK) based tool to import metadata from the development environment to your initial testing environment. The utility is command line based and basically uses a text based configuration file to drive the utility on the source and target sides.

Ø  Each tool has a role in an implementation but you must be careful to use the right tool for the right job within an implementation. The suggestions are as follows:

§  Only use the Blueprint tool for migrating data from your development platform to your initial test environment. The blueprint tool is not designed to move large amounts of data and certainly is risky, if not used correctly, and can potentially break the integrity of your data.

§  The SDK provides the configuration data that it is used for (mainly meta-data). This should not be extended as, while it can perform data migration on any data, it is not efficient and risky for certain types of configuration data.

Ø  Additional information can be found in the following whitepaper:  Oracle Utilities Application Framework - Release Management - Software Configuration Management on MyOracle.com