ETL4ALL Product Folder

Content of this page :

1. Overview

ETL4ALL is a software solution for enterprise wide, engine driven data extraction, data transformation and data delivery. It enables knowledge workers, analysts and other end users to turn rough operational data into valuable business insights.

ETL4ALL can provide both online/real-time and batch data processing. It provides a more effective means of giving end-users access to data they need for analysis - wherever data is located. It allows users to access information from any back-end data source, data mart or spreadsheet, integrate it and move it into any target environment for reporting. ETL4ALL offers an unparalleled performance in highly heterogeneous environments, being able to integrate an unlimited variety of data types for reliable, on-time business intelligence.

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2. Key benefits

More than ever before organizations are faced with a myriad of heterogeneous information systems that have been deployed throughout their organization, both locally and internationally, which may contain both structured and unstructured information. Using ETL4ALL organizations will be able to dynamically access and leverage this distributed information, along with external information no matter where the information is coming from - in less time, with fewer resources.

Key Benefits :

  • Create your own data-driven document
  • Intelligent business decision making
  • Increase the elapsed time of the BI project
  • Manage the overwhelming stream of information
  • Integration with the standard information architecture
  • An open, flexible and scaleable solution

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3. High Usability

Everywhere, management information systems, reporting applications and other solutions measuring business performance need to tap in an ever-growing number of data sources. Their users - managers, analysts, and knowledge workers alike - need to transform rough data into ever-new reports, models and spreadsheets. ETL4ALL is the one solution that can meet all these requirements - in a single environment that is extremely easy to use. With ETL4ALL, users no longer need to have extensive knowledge of database source formats, integration rules and target application prerequisites. Virtually eliminating the need to address scarce and expensive IT resources, ETL4ALL is instrumental in leveraging returns on data warehouses, data marts, spreadsheets and reporting applications, while offering a low cost of ownership and a high usability.

Visual Composition of Transformations

The ETL4ALL client consists of an easy to use graphical user interface, equipped with a drag-and-drop functionality for building complex data integration rules, without requiring any manual coding. Visual mapping and transformation logic can be used to specify how data should be integrated and where it should go. Through a step-by-step process workflow, ETL4ALL guides the user through the mapping creation. Once created, mappings can easily be re-used in other processes.

Libary of pre-built Transformations

ETL4ALL maintains an extensive library of pre-built transformation functions that can be used in mappings as needed, thus saving the user enormous time and effort. The library consists of a collection of relational, mathematical, string, date, conditional and building blocks that are highly valuable when developing from the most simple to the most complex transformation.

Reporting as you like

ETL4ALL delivers unformatted reports that can be saved as Excel files, or imported into a third party report generator tool. Alternatively, it enables its users to create flexible and customized reporting, based on JFreeReport, an open source free java report library. Reports can be previewed on-screen, or saved in Acrobat PDF, Excel or HTML.

Engine Driven

As ETL4ALL is engine driven, users are no longer confronted to the potentially complex configuration issues of a code generator, as these are solved when the engine is installed. Moreover, the engine maintains a central repository of metadata and transformations, so developments can easily be shared across users.

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4. Flexibility

Online/Real-time

Data Warehouses, spreadsheets and reporting applications are typically refreshed on a weekly or perhaps daily basis. Businesses are now beginning to feel that some of the operational data may need to be transferred to these reporting environments on a more frequent basis.

ETL4ALL allows users to extract this operational data in real-time, as events occur in the transactional systems. For this, all that ETL4ALL requires is a one-time definition of your business rules. After that the active data layer of ETL4ALL will poll constantly in the background looking for omissions against your business rules. Once an omission occurs, ETL4ALL will automatically start the process that you defined for handling the omission. This proactive assignment of rules enables you to really deploy your business rules throughout your organization with limited cost and effort, delivering real-time data.

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5. Scalability

Standalone...

In its simplest configuration, all ETL4ALL components run as separate processes on a single machine. This configuration is sufficient when the number of users is limited and the operational data is centralized.

...or as a distributed Application

When one of the specified conditions are no longer sufficient, ETL4ALL can - with a minimum effort - be reconfigured into a fully distributed application, with its different components running on one or more application servers. Existing repositories are kept, and all existing installations keep running.

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6. Openness

ETL4ALL's openness is guaranteed through the deployment of industry standards, including build-in and JDBC connectivity, web technology, SOAP, XMI and XSLT.

Built-in Connectivity

ETL4ALL has built-in access to Microsoft Excel, CSV-, XML files and XINDICE (an XML database).

JDBC

Any other data source is accessed using JDBC. Using JDBC has several advantages over using "native" access to data sources.

  • The range of supported data sources is virtually unlimited.
  • Commercial drivers are used tested by a huge amount of people, leading to an extremely high quality.
  • In recent years, the performance of commercial JDBC drivers has drastically improved, making them more then competitive to so called native data access.

Web Technology

The different ETL4ALL components can run as servlets, in an application servers servlet container. As a consequence, several important questions are solved :

  • Access control and security become non-issues since they are handled completely by the web server.
  • A full-featured application server provides clustering. This makes ETL4ALL an extremely scalable data transformation tool, as you can transparently combine the processing power of several clustered servers.
  • The different components can be physically spread over the world, as long as a simple internet connection exists between them.

SOAP

The ETL4ALL server is a SOAP server. As a consequence, any application running on any platform or environment can use it to perform its data transformations.

XMI

The ETL4ALL server maintains a central repository, which contains metadata, transformation procedures and programs. In order to make it as compatible as possible to existing tool active in the area, the ETL4ALL repository is XMI compliant.

XSLT

Data transformations are done at the ETL4ALL server. For this purpose, it uses XSLT, which transforms an XML document into another XML document, or another type of document. ETL4ALL can use a random TRaX compliant XSLT engine for this purpose.

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