Am I Crazy? ETL for Everyone!
If you look at statistics, according to the research firm IDC, the biggest opportunity in the cloud is Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), providing desktop virtualization. Why? So employees can access any data, at any time, anywhere. What a shock!
But you can’t get there unless you allow each employee to move data between systems. Employees need to move data directly into their sandbox, and then they need a tool that joins it all together and includes automatic report analytics, fancy graphs, charts, pivoting, report sharing, and excel capabilities.
Moving data between systems is called ETL, which stands for Extract, Transform, and Load. The ETL team almost always does the moving of data because load scripts are easier to learn than Latin, transformation is more difficult than brain surgery, and computing resources are about as easy to manage as cats.
Fifteen years ago, I was one of only a handful of people who had a big enough reputation for working directly with Teradata, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, HP, Netezza, Greenplum, DATAllegro, ParAccel, and Redshift. I noticed then that each database vendor hated their competitors with a passion.
Netezza called Greenplum Sourplum, and Teradata called IBM I Be Gone. Microsoft called Oracle Snoracle, and each tried to scratch each other’s eyes out daily, with every vendor acting as if their solution was the only solution, and comparable to the holy grail. Tears welled up in each salesperson’s eyes when explaining that their new 2-phase commit feature could solve world peace.
That is when divine intervention took me over, and I came to realize that every vendor was so focused on each other that they were about to miss the future!
That future would be that no vendor would be able to house all of the data and that everyone would eventually want to access any data, at any time, anywhere.
It is a little like asking yourself after a Global Climate meeting, do you think one day that everyone will have an electric car? Well, yes, if we want to live, unless you talk with big oil or Volkswagon, and they show you their latest diesel tests.
At the time, my team was putting out the third generation of our Nexus Query Chameleon desktop tool, and we were developing for Microsoft, in which we had an OEM agreement so they could give Nexus to their Parallel Data Warehouse customers, which today is the Azure SQL Data Warehouse.
While still keeping our commitments to Microsoft, I formed a separate team of developers and gave them four choices:
- Learn Latin or automatically build load-scripts between all major systems.
- Go back to school and become a brain surgeon or automatically transform tables structures (DDL) and data types between all major systems.
- Tame cats to act like sheepdogs or find a way to manage the ETL compute resources.
- Solve world peace or build a Super Join Builder that allows users to point-and-click to perform joining of tables across all different platforms.
Ten years later, we have a solution that allows everyone to touch a couple of buttons and move data between any system. Our motto is, “Your Sandbox Awaits.”
We automatically build the load scripts and transform the data behind the scenes, and we completely manage the compute resources by allowing users to pass their credentials to a NexusCore Server, which moves the data for them, as them.
Once we built the ultimate ETL solution, we built the NexusSuper Join Builder, which allows users to drop and drag tables, views, or Excel spreadsheets and join data across all platforms, without even needing a sandbox.
No other vendor saw this coming! You can’t get that from Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Greenplum, or Teradata.
I understand if your company is still living in the past, but if you decide you want to take advantage of the future today, then give me a call.
I can have you and all of your employees accessing any data, at any time, anywhere, today!
Thank you,
Tera-Tom
Tom Coffing
CEO, Coffing Data Warehousing
Direct: 513 300-0341
Website: www.CoffingDW.com
Youtube channel: CoffingDW
Email: Tom.Coffing@CoffingDW.com
Tom Coffing, better known as Tera-Tom, founded Coffing Data Warehousing, where he has been CEO for the past 30 years. Tom has written over 90 books on Architecture, performance tuning, and SQL on all relevant systems. Tom has taught over 1,000 classes worldwide, and he is the designer of the Nexus, which celebrates 20 years of brilliantly integrating all databases.