When to Use FBDI or WebServices in Oracle Fusion Applications

I've been working through a really tough task recently and it involves updating Customer Data, more specifically to Contact Responsibility and Customer Class Profiles. I've had a lot of "mistakes"/shortcomings working on this task and I'd like to share this with you, so you can hopefully avoid it in the future.

This articles discusses when to Use FBDI or WebServices in Oracle Fusion Applications:

File-Based Data Import (FBDI)

• FBDI is faster because it's executed from inside the Oracle Cloud Server and can do Bulk Updates/Inserts.
• Troublesome to populate numerous Fields and Worksheets in the Spreadsheet.
• CSVs can really ruin your number and date formatting.
• Need to Extensive Effort to make sure Data Preparation is Accurate.
• Use FBDI when updating data in BULK (thousands of rows)
• DO NOT, use FBDI when updating data for Manually-Created Customers, because they do not have Original System References. This is an important field in the Customer FBDI template for some reason. This is the main point of my suffering for the past 2 months. :P

WebServices (SOAP or REST)

Specifically, I've only had experience with SOAP and i'm admittedly still not that good at it. But below are some tips that I can share based on what I've experienced so far and what I've researched on.

• Strongly consider using Web Services for Integrations between Oracle Fusion Applications and other platforms since Oracle Fusion already has the pre-built ERP Integration Service that can be used to perform outbound or inbound ETL.
• Consider using Web Services when you have small amounts of data to Update as WebServices aren't designed for Bulk Updates.
• Web Services are a row-by-row update and are triggered from either your PC (using a Software such as SOAPUI or ReadyAPI) or from a separate Server from Oracle Cloud.
• This means you would need constant network connection to process all the data, especially if you'll invoke the Web Services from your own machine.
• Since Web Services are row-by-row, it's understandably slower than FBDI.
• Would entail less data preparation compared to FBDI as you would only need to provide the mandatory tags, unlike in FBDI wherein you have to populate multiple worksheets.

In summary, I used to think FBDI was the way to go when doing Bulk Updates in Oracle ERP Cloud, but now, I think it's really troublesome and entails a lot of unnecessary work. I would strongly recommend that you first verify the data you'll be updating/inserting/deleting, before pursuing FBDI.

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