PBS ETL Bridge

Automated migration of SQL Server SSIS packages to Oracle Data Integrator.

"From SSIS to ODI, automatically."

Executive summary

Organizations that grew on SQL Server accumulate hundreds of SSIS packages that orchestrate their data loads. When the data warehouse moves to Oracle, that work does not move with it: every flow, mapping and transformation has to be rebuilt by hand in Oracle Data Integrator. Across a portfolio of hundreds of packages that is months of engineering, and a subtle error can surface only once the load is already running in production.

PBS ETL Bridge is a solution built by PBS Studio and delivered through PBS Advanced Services. It reads each SSIS package, recreates its flows, mappings and transformations in ODI, and leaves the target environment ready. It is not a catalog product: it was born solving a real migration and matured in use.

Behind it is the backing of PBS Group, present in 24 countries: the solution is not offered by a one-off vendor but sustained by a regional organization with delivery capacity across the territory.

The challenge

A data-warehouse migration is rarely just a database migration. Around the warehouse sits the integration layer that feeds it: hundreds of SSIS packages, each tied to SQL Server's dialect, its data types and its way of connecting. When the engine moves to Oracle, that layer does not come along; it has to be rebuilt on Oracle Data Integrator, package by package.

Doing it by hand is precise but slow, and the cost grows with the size of the portfolio. A mis-translated transformation produces a load that runs without error yet writes the wrong data, the failure that hides longest. And what each package does often lives only in the packages themselves, accumulated over years.

There are two insufficient answers: fully manual migration, precise but without scale; and fully generative-AI conversion, which scales but is unpredictable and leaves no audit trail. The PBS way combines the best of both: AI to build the tool and a deterministic engine to run the conversion.

PBS Advanced Services and PBS Studio

PBS Group (Productive Business Solutions, part of Grupo Musson) is a regional technology integrator present in 24 countries, with in-house software and artificial intelligence engineering capability. Within its offering, PBS Advanced Services brings together the advanced engineering services — migration, modernization, data and analytics —. This is what the client contracts: solutions with outcomes, not boxed software.

PBS Studio is the innovation and research-and-development area where the company's artificial intelligence products are born: an in-house team that designs, prototypes and matures solutions under the PBS/Grupo Musson AI Governance Framework. PBS ETL Bridge is one of those products.

PBS ETL Bridge

What it does

• Inventories the portfolio: classifies every SSIS package by complexity, feasibility and automation coverage before any conversion begins.
• Reads both dialects: interprets the two variants of the .dtsx format (SSIS 2005 and 2012+) without manual configuration.
• Rebuilds the control flow: recreates the package's execution order and its conditional branches as equivalent ODI steps.
• Converts the work: turns data flows, SQL tasks and bulk loads into their ODI counterparts — mappings, procedures and packages.
• Translates the SQL: rewrites T-SQL logic into Oracle PL/SQL, preserving the intent of the original code.
• Stands up the target: leaves the ODI environment ready unattended — topology, models and data structures.
• Delivers two ways: artifacts as XML importable into ODI Studio, as direct inserts into the ODI repository, or both.
• Validates and reports: scores each ETL with a quality engine and produces a per-ETL analysis — flow diagram, risks and an engineer task list.

Engineering approach

The design turns on a version-neutral intermediate representation between the SSIS reader and the ODI generator. The analyzer translates each package into that model; the generator produces ODI artifacts from it. Neither side knows the other's format, so supporting a new ODI version or a new source technology does not force changes across the rest of the system. Mapping decisions live in declarative rules kept outside the code, so extending the conversion catalog is configuration, not reprogramming.

Two decisions define the tool. We weighed a language-model-based conversion against a deterministic pipeline and chose deterministic for production: every SSIS construct maps to an identifiable ODI artifact and the result is reproducible and auditable. And for column mapping we follow the one the package itself declares rather than inferring it by name or position; when source and target order differ, honoring that declaration prevents the silent data misalignment that only surfaces in production.

Figure 1. The stages of the process. The final step feeds back to the engineer with traceability and the patterns flagged for review.

What it automates and what the PBS team resolves

Governance and quality

The governance advantage is data sovereignty at run time: the tool connects to the client's own Oracle repository and sends no package content to external AI models. AI took part in building the tool, not in running it.

Quality rests on the PBS/Grupo Musson AI Governance Framework, consistent with the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, ISO/IEC 42001:2023 and the EU AI Act. Human oversight is built in: the tool does not auto-complete what needs judgment; it records it in a per-ETL task list so an engineer resolves it and the decision stays documented.

Application case

A regional organization with a corporate data warehouse on SQL Server, and a portfolio of several hundred SSIS packages accumulated over years, set out to modernize its integration platform onto Oracle Data Integrator. Rather than rebuild each package by hand, the PBS team ran the portfolio through PBS ETL Bridge: first an inventory to plan the effort, then the automatic conversion of most objects, each with the list of what it needs from an engineer before going into production.

Working with PBS Advanced Services

We offer this capability as a continuum within PBS Advanced Services, not as boxed software. First, applied within our migration and modernization services. Second, as a starting point for custom tools: the same methodology and governance framework with which PBS Studio built PBS ETL Bridge can build the one your specific problem requires. And third, as a multiplier of the speed and quality of our data engineering and consulting services. In every case, the client does not buy a binary: they buy a verified outcome.

About PBS

PBS Group (Productive Business Solutions), part of Grupo Musson, is a technology integrator with in-house software and artificial intelligence engineering capability and a presence in 24 countries across Central America, the Caribbean and South America. Through PBS Advanced Services and PBS Studio we help organizations in the region modernize their data platforms with solutions born from real projects and governed under a proprietary AI framework.