Posts Tagged ‘Centerprise Astera ETL Data Integration Data Conversion Dataflow Workflow’

Slowly Changing Dimensions in Centerprise 5

Friday, June 11th, 2010

Maintaining dimension tables in a data mart is quite a chore. We have talked to customers who spend a great deal of time writing SQL scripts, stored procedures, or other code to perform this function. Often, the code is written or duplicated for each dimension table and must be modified regularly to accommodate changing business requirements. Typically, this custom code performs poorly for all but small tables. I am sure that this brings a great deal of excitement to their working day.

Well, I guess they will have to find that excitement elsewhere because with Centerprise 5, we are taking all that fun out of dimension table maintenance. Centerprise’s Slowly Changing Dimension Write Strategy automates this function and eliminates all that work. All you need to do is to set up your SCD structure using a simple UI. SCD Strategy supports Type 1 and Type 2 slowly changing dimensions and provides support for multiple row versioning strategies including effective/expiration dates, current row flag, and version number. The following screenshot shows an example of SCD definition.

As you can see, all you have to do is specify the role that each field plays in the dimension table. These roles can be surrogate key, business key, SCD1 value, SCD2 value, effective/expiration dates, active value field, etc. That’s it. Once the roles are defined, you can use Centerprise’s preview feature to see exactly how the incoming data would be processed by the SCD strategy. Here is a preview of the dimension table update in the above screenshot.

Centerprise’s SCD Strategy is powered by a high-speed, parallel engine that compares incoming data against the data in the table and, based on the differences between the values, performs an SCD1 update, an SCD2 update/insert, a simple update, or skips the row if no material changes were found. The engine is designed to efficiently process even the largest of dimension tables.

Here is a simple dataflow

I encourage you to try this firsthand using the trial version of Centerprise and you will see the ease and speed of this component. Please contact us at sales@astera.com or 1-888-77-ASTERA begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              1-888-77-ASTERA      end_of_the_skype_highlighting for a trial download.

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Centerprise 5 Beta Release is now available

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

I am pleased to announce that Centerprise Data Integrator 5 beta is now available for download. This release represents a major upgrade and adds sophisticated dataflow and workflow designers. We are very excited about this release and the great deal of value it can add to our customers’ business.

Centerprise 5 represents an attractive alternative to exorbitant cost of traditional data integration vendors and not-ready-for-primetime products offered at the lower end of the market.

Over the past year, we have had extensive discussions with customers from a variety of industries including financial services, pharmaceutical, healthcare, utilities, and government. Centerprise team used this feedback and other research to develop and improve product from many perspectives. Usability, always a hallmark of Centerprise, has been improved further with the addition of flow designers that provide drag and drop capabilities, unlimited undo/redo, cut/copy/paste, and parameterization, among others. Performance has been enhanced by further increasing parallelism and optimizing a number of areas including database writes and file reads. A new set of APIs enables customers and partners to extend Centerprise by adding new sources, destinations, transformations, and custom functions.

Here are the key features:

  • A Dataflow designer that supports complex data integration flows and features full complement of transformations including lookups, expressions, functions, aggregate, sort, join, normalize, denormalize, union, route, filter, and others.
  • Subflows to create reusable dataflow components that can be plugged into dataflows or other subflows.
  • Single-click WYSIWYG data view capability to preview data at any stage in data flow.
  • Integrated data quality validation and profiling.
  • Integrated drag and drop environment with unlimited undo/redo, cut/copy/paste, automatic layout building, auto map creation, one click element addition, and more.
  • A visual Workflow designer for defining job orchestration. Workflow designer provides the functionality to define job sequence, routing, and dependencies.
  • Restart capability to resume a job from the point of failure.
  • Workflow provides built-in tasks to run Dataflow, Workflow, SQL, or other programs, perform file systems actions, FTP actions, send mail, and others. Additional tasks can be created using Centerprise APIs.
  • Built-in job scheduler to start jobs at recurring intervals including hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly. Jobs can also be triggered based on file drop and through APIs.
  • High-performance parallel processing engine optimized to deliver the performance and scalability required to efficiently process very high data volumes.

If you would like to participate in Centerprise beta program, please register here:

Or you can call us at 1-888-77-ASTERA begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              1-888-77-ASTERA      end_of_the_skype_highlighting (1-805-579-004) or email sales@astera.com.

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Upcoming Centerprise Upgrade

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

We are working on developing the next generation of Centerprise platform. Since launching Centerprise in early 2008, we have made continual improvements to the product incorporating feedback from customers in numerous industries.

The next version, code named “Hermes”, represents a major upgrade of the product providing high-end dataflow, workflow, and data quality features. We have used feedback gathered over the past two years to redesign the user interface and introduce a number of new concepts and features.

High performance and superior usability have been the hallmarks of Centerprise from day one. Every feature is continually tested for usability and refined to ensure ease of learning and use. The server features a parallel processing engine to deliver high performance and scalability. Hermes continues that tradition.
We are targeting Q3 for the production release. Preview releases are planned for early May. Initially, we will be working with select customers and later on expand the preview program to a larger group.
Over the next few months, Centerprise team will use this blog to discuss various aspects of the product including discussion of features, performance and scalability, programmability, and technology.

Here are the key characteristics of the upcoming release:

• A scalable and multithreaded engine that represents state of the art in parallel processing. The engine has been designed to support massive parallelism with minimal blocking or starvation. This means that Centerprise scales to support ever increasing volumes and take full advantage of today’s multicore and multiprocessor hardware.

• Drag-and-drop Dataflow Designer enabling creation of sophisticated dataflows. Dataflow features include join, sort, merge, union, route, normalize, high speed database loading, slowly changing dimension support, change data capture, and much, much more.

• Workflow designer to support job sequencing and dependencies.

• Intuitive and clutter free user experience greatly improves productivity and affords a short learning curve.

• Extensive data quality features including rule-based data quality checks, data correction, data profiling, access to error information while mapping and more.

Over the next few months, the team will be discussing these features in greater detail.

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