[Oracle Tips] Changing Default End Date in SCD KM

ODI has an IKM for Loading SCD Type 2 dimensions. The IKM is 'IKM Oracle Slowly Changing Dimension'. The default value for Slow Changing Dimension (SCD) Type 2 End Date is "01 January 2400".
You may need to change this End Date value because of the source data that you are using to populate the Slowly Changing Dimension. In a recent project, I had to deliver an integration between Oracle Fusion HCM and an on-premise DWH. The End Date for Fusion HCM objects is "31-December-4712". So, if you want to use the ODI IKM to create SCDs you need to customize it.
To do so, first you need to create a copy of the default IKM.

Then open the duplicated object and locate the steps where the default End Date is used.
The step that needs to be customized is 'Insert flow into I$ table'. Edit the Target code to replace '2400-01-01' with '4712-12-31' or whichever value you want to use as End Date.

 

Once it is done, then you can use this customized IKM in your interfaces for populating SCDs Type 2. 

ODI Tip: Generating flat files with spaces in column names

I had a requirement of generating a .csv file with header out of a database table.
I had created the model as follows:

• File Format: Delimited
• Record Separator: Unix  
• Field Separator: , (comma)

In the interface, I had placed the file as Target Datasource and used 'IKM SQL to File Append' with the following options:

Unfortunately, the header columns were truncated at the first space and adding double quotes did not help. The column header were all truncated after the first space found.
After investigating, I came to the conclusion that there is was no quick or easy way to deal with spaces. I guess the only way is creating a custom version of the IKM.
Therefore, since I have very little time, I have replaced the spaces with underscores and added a OdiOSCommand in the package to replace the underscores with spaces in the output file.

ODIOSCommand is a more flexible version of OSCommand and allows you to invoke a sed command to do the replacement in place (-i) of the underscores with spaces.

sed -i 's/_/ /g' <filename>