Embarcadero is answering the clustering craze, putting out an update to DT/Studio—its ETL technology—thats been re-architected in its design piece, its engine and its management console.
The company on Tuesday will announce DT/Studio 3.0, an update that features new, advanced data modeling capabilities, improved performance and scalability, and extended task management and monitoring.
With clustering worked in throughout the product, customers will be able to crank up the amounts of data they churn through the extraction, transformation and loading tool, according to Glen Hawkins, product manager of data integration solutions.
“We have customers dealing with hundreds of gigabytes of data,” he said. “Before, they would have separate engines running separately but not in clustered mode.”
DT/Studio 3.0 combats that scenario with clustering and parallel processing capabilities in order to meet large data load demands, improve server efficiency and ensure future scalability, he said.
In addition, its new ability to do dimensional modeling provides an organized, flexible way to capture de-normalized metadata, allowing for the capture and representation of all aspects of dimensional models in order to shed light on data sources and to ease communication.
Also, import/export metadata allows users to leverage standard formats such as CWM and XML in order to ensure consistency and compatibility when collaborating and exchanging metadata between tools and applications.
The focus on dimensional modeling is a reflection of how Embarcadero Technologies Inc. is zeroing in on data warehousing and the data mart world, Hawkins said.
Whereas normalized models represent regular databases, dimensional databases have a different metadata associated with them.
Regular modeling is used to represent a regular, operational database, whereas dimensional modeling is used to generate the reports that have become so popular with all the new dashboards and business intelligence functionality entering the market.
The new version also adds extended database connectivity, leveraging native bulk facilities in the latest version of Teradata for improved performance, but also supporting ODBC and JDBC options.
The product also supports Oracle 10g. Native support for SQL Server 2005 will come in the next point release, probably due around January, Hawkins said.
Another feature of DT/Studio 3.0 is the ability to automatically restart if a target database goes down, with the tool picking up where it left off in the case of moving a group of records, for example.
And, giving a sneak peek at where Embarcadero is going with the tool, another new function allows users to understand not just their data structures, as is the case in the update, but also the quality of data, Hawkins said.
Thus in the update users can determine if there are duplicated records or if Social Security numbers are valid, for example, and they can then use business rules to remove Social Security numbers or whatever else they want to do, Hawkins said.
DT/Studio is available now.