1. Superior Usability

While consumer products have made major strides in improving product usability, business software products still lag behind in that area. Increasingly, companies are realizing that superior product usability results in shorter learning curves, makes the product more approachable to a broader audience, and results in substantial productivity improvements.

Centerprise is designed from the ground up to be a single, unified integration environment with a streamlined user interface and flow. A visual drag-and-drop user interface makes it easy to develop and test your integration jobs. Features such as single-click data preview, unlimited undo/redo, and cut/copy/paste promote experimentation and enhance testing and debugging.

While SSIS is primarily designed for developers, most Centerprise users are data analysts and business users. Empowering business users to work directly with data management and integration brings enormous benefits to the organization by eliminating the translation layer and leveraging data and business expertise without an intermediary.

2. Native Connectivity

Centerprise provides native connectivity to over a hundred data sources out of the box. These include major databases such as SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, Sybase, MySQL, Teradata, Netezza, Access, and more. Centerprise native connectors provide high-performance bulk loading, data partitioning, and connection pooling. Furthermore, the ODBC interface enables connectivity to an unlimited number of data sources.

Centerprise connects to all common file formats such as fixed length, delimited, Excel, COBOL, XML, and PDF and supports all encodings.

Out of the box application connectivity includes Microsoft Dynamics CRM, QuickBooks, and Salesforce.com. Connectors for Microsoft Dynamics GP, NV, and AX are scheduled for release in the second half of 2012.

3. Extensibility Microsoft.Net APIs

Centerprise is developed from the ground up in Microsoft.Net. Centerprise is designed as an open framework and provides extensibility using the published .NET APIs. Customers can add custom sources, destinations, and functions. Additionally, customers can also use APIs to interact with the server to start, stop, monitor, or schedule jobs.

4. Excellent Support

Astera’s support consistently receives excellent marks from customers for its responsiveness and knowledge. All of Astera’s support is provided from its offices in the United States. Support feedback is used to continually improve and refine the products.

5. Higher Productivity

While SSIS works from within Microsoft Visual Studio, decidedly a programmer’s tool, Centerprise is designed along the line of the  Microsoft Office user interface. This familiar user interface promotes rapid learning and adoption by customers. Hundreds of short-cuts, drag-and-drop commands, debugging aids, automation, and thoughtful integration of various modules results in productivity that is several times that of competing products.

It is not uncommon for developers to struggle with the idiosyncrasies of SSIS for hours just to get a semi-complex dataflow to work. With Centerprise’s clean-cut interface, well-known ability to deal with poor quality data and one-click preview capability, there are no mysterious errors.

6. Built-In Transformations and Functions

Out of the box, Centerprise delivers an extensive array of transformations that can be used to develop the most complex of data integrations. These transformations include the common ETL fare such as join, merge, normalize, denormalize, lookup, expression, as well as more sophisticated transformations such as tree join, tree node query, slowly changing dimension management, and change data capture patterns. Centerprise also features over 200 built-in functions to enable any type of data processing including string and date manipulation, regular expressions, name and address parsing, data validation, and more.

7. Scheduling, Automation, and Monitoring

Centerprise’s integrated scheduler and server manager enable you to build and manage your scheduled jobs with a few clicks. The scheduler provides the ability to schedule jobs multiple times an hour, hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly. Jobs can also be triggered based on specific file drops.

You can use Server Manager to monitor and manage queued, running, or completed jobs.

This approach of enabling creating, scheduling, and managing jobs from a single environment eliminates the need to install, manage, and learn multiple toolsets.

8. Data Quality Features

One of the strongest aspects of Centerprise is its ability to work with data of suspect quality. With Centerprise, you can create data quality rules to validate incoming data and route records with errors to alternate paths. Centerprise provides a ‘Data Quality Mode’. This feature enables users to treat data quality errors as data that can be mapped to onward transformations and destinations. Using this feature, you can create custom error logs and data profiles to quantify and fix data quality issues.

Integrated data profiling enables you to build detailed profile of data at any step in a dataflow. The built-in data profile provides a range of statistics about your data, including error count, warning count, min, max, average, standard deviation, variances, distinct and duplicate counts, and much more.

When you work with SSIS, poor quality data often results in mysterious error messages or sudden job termination.

9. Unstructured Data Support

Centerprise provides built-in support for unstructured and semi-structured data. This data can be in the form of a text report or a PDF file. Using Centerprise unstructured data features, you can extract data from files that do not fit a fixed or delimited pattern.

When it comes to hierarchical data such as complex XML, COBOL, or custom hierarchical files, most integration tools treat it as an afterthought or cannot deal with it at all. With Centerprise, working with hierarchical data is as easy as working with flat structures. Centerprise provides the ability to parse incoming hierarchical files as well as build hierarchical destination files.

10. Lower Total Cost of Ownership

Yes, that is correct. Centerprise offers lower cost of ownership than SSIS.

But SSIS is free!

In data integration, the up-front cost of software represents a small part of the overall cost. Gartner estimates that for every dollar spent on integration software, companies spend more than 5 dollars on services. Cost of developing, managing, and maintaining integration projects, therefore, represents the largest component of any integration effort.

Centerprise’s unified development environment enables you to achieve a manifold productivity increase in developing, maintaining, and managing your integration projects. By enabling data analysts and business users to work directly with the tool, Centerprise reduces the need for expensive development resources on your integration projects.

Name Parsing and Gender Determination

Centerprise integrated name component accepts free-form names and then automatically splits them into standard components: Prefix, First, Middle, Last and Suffix no matter what the original format. Next, gender is determined using a built-in name dictionary.

The component can process all styles of names including inverse, natural order, hyphenated and multi-part last names.

Address Parsing and Cleansing

The address parser component parses free-form United States addresses into individual components. USPS compliant address lookup component can be used to correct, complete, and normalize incoming addresses. This component performs all the operations locally and does not need connection to a service. This architecture delivers high performance and is capable of handling large data volumes. There is no limit for data volumes or per unit charge.

Insert an action after another action

You can add a new action after an existing action by dragging the item from the toolbox and dropping them to the right of the top node or the top output node. The action is inserted after the specified node and all the outgoing maps are rerouted. This way, if you need to add a new transformation between two existing actions, you do not have to reroute maps manually. You can insert any set transformations such as filter, sort, join, union, route, etc.

Insert an action before another action

Add certain actions before another action by dragging from the toolbox and dropping them to the input port of the top node or the top input node. The action is inserted before the specified node and all the incoming maps are rerouted.

Insert an action before or after an element

Insert an action before and after an element by dragging it from the toolbox and dropping it on to the input or output port. This enables you to insert single transformations such as expressions, lookups, functions, etc. before and after elements. If the element is already mapped, Centerprise reroutes the maps where appropriate.

Delete an action and reroute maps

This feature can be used to remove an action and automatically reroute the incoming and outgoing maps. This action is allowed in certain conditions:

• Input and output layout is the same (such as filter, sort, etc.)
• Both input and output layouts contain a single element. Examples are list lookup, expression with one inbound element, and functions with single input and output element.

Cascade Element Delete

This feature enables you to remove an element from an action and any destination elements. Elements are deleted only if the action supports add/delete elements.

Reading Data

You can use a number of built-in features to optimize database reading. These include partitioning, change data capture, multi-table query, and others.

Read Only What is Necessary. When reading from a database, use where clause to filter out the records you do not need. Using filter transformation after reading the data reads unneeded records. If subsequent transformations expect data to be sorted, use ORDER BY clause to sort records in the database.

Do Not Map All Fields. For database table source, Centerprise reads only the fields that are used in maps. This can substantially improve database read performance. Therefore, avoid mapping the entire database table and map only the fields that you need.

Use Multi-Table Query. If you access data from multiple tables in the same database and then use Centerprise Join Transformation to join them, consider using Centerprise Multi-table Query source. This component features a sophisticated query engine to build queries that span across tables.

Use SQL Query Source. If you have an existing stored procedure or would like to write a query that is optimized for the specific scenario, use SQL query source.

Partition Data. You can use data partitioning feature of Database Table Source. This feature parallelizes database reading by creating multiple readers.

Use Change Data Capture. Centerprise includes multiple change data capture strategies to minimize data reads. These include Audit Field, Incremental Read as well as database writing strategies. If you transfer data at regular intervals and only a small fraction of data changes between transfers, CDC can help speed up your dataflows.

Writing Data

Centerprise supports native bulk insert for popular databases such as SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, Sybase, MySQL, Access, Netezza, Teradata, and more. This enables you to efficiently process high data volumes. Where applicable, use bulk insert option while writing to database. Centerprise also batches updates and deletes to optimize writes. Centerprise includes several write strategies that can be employed to speed up database writes. These include data-driven strategy, Slowly Changing dimensions, and Diff Processor.

Transformations

It is important to understand performance and memory characteristics of transformations. Transformations are blocking and non-blocking. Blocking transformations hold data until all the records have been received and processed. Non-blocking transformations continuously process and release records. Blocking transformations often impede parallel processing because succeeding transformations must wait for the entire dataset to be received and processed. Sort is an example of a blocking transformation. Join, distinct, aggregate, denormalize, and other transformations are non-blocking if data is sorted and blocking if data is not sorted. Avoid repeated sorting for large datasets. If applicable, use ORDER BY to sort data in the database. Remember, checking a ‘Sort Incoming Data’ has the same effect as inserting Sort Transformation.

Distinct and Aggregate Transformations: Distinct and Aggregate Transformations use little memory when the incoming data is sorted on key or group by. If, however, the incoming data is not sorted, these transformations store values in memory. This could consume enormous amount of memory for large data sets and will slow down the rest of the server.

Field Profile: Field Profile Transformation can consume significant memory if the number of distinct items is very large. Use this transformation with caution on large datasets.

Lookups: Lookups can slow down your dataflows considerably. If a lookup table is large, ensure that it is indexed on lookup fields. You can use appropriate caching options depending on the size of lookup table and the number of values you are looking up. Where appropriate, consider using Join Transformation instead of lookup.

Excel Files

Excel files are memory hogs. While reading, he entire file is loaded in memory. This slows down the dataflow and consumes substantial memory resources. Excel Destination keeps the entire file in memory and writes them to disk at the end of the dataflow. Avoid using Excel workbooks for large data volumes.

Centerprise provides built-in ability to move binary data between applications, databases, and files via simple drag and drop that involves no programming or scripting. With Centerprise, you can:

• Move picture and video files to database tables
• Move BLOB, CLOB, and other large data between databases
• Exchange files with web applications using SOAP, or HTTP/REST
• Move binary data between local database and cloud applications such as Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Additionally, Centerprise’s high-performance parallel processing engine, combined with native bulk load support for popular databases, delivers the throughput to handle the most demanding integration tasks.

• Support for all REST methods
• For GET, common paging patterns are built-in. These include next page and item range.
• Common authentication mechanisms including basic and OAuth are supported
• Serialization and deserialization support for XML, JSON, and HTTP name-value formats
• Use sample XML, JSON, or name-value text to automatically build input or output layout
• Auto-determination of output layout for GET requests

Quickly Integrate with Popular Web Services

With Centerprise REST connector, you can quickly integrate your internal applications with any REST web service. These services include:

• Google, Yahoo, and Bing REST services
• Amazon Web Services
• Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media sites
• Salesforce.com, QuickBase, Zoho, and other online databases
• ZenDesk, Bugzilla, and many others

Integrate your In-house systems with cloud web services

Centerprise connects to an array of databases, file formats, and applications. With Centerprise REST connector, you can connect your in-house applications with web based platforms using a point-and-click interface requiring zero programming.

Centerprise now includes the capability to connect to any OLE DB data source. This feature expands Centerprise connectivity to include any OLE DB drivers. With this capability, you can query Microsoft Active Directory, Microsoft FoxPro and Jet Data Sources, and numerous third parties data sources that provide OLE DB connectivity.

A partial list of Microsoft OLE DB providers can be found in http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187072.aspx.

Here is another useful link: http://www.carlprothman.net/Default.aspx?tabid=87

Many require a series of workarounds or multi-step processes requiring staging tables and custom programming. As a result, companies frequently rely on custom, ad-hoc programs to manage their complex data conversions. These ad hoc programs are difficult to create, expensive to maintain, often create performance issues and do not scale well.

If you are responsible for validating, normalizing, and boarding data from multiple sources, perform complex data mappings and conversions, and routinely deal with format inconsistencies and data quality issues, you know how challenging it is to find a solutions that provides the functionality required to manage those processes. Astera developed Centerprise specifically to enable the processing of complex data conversion tasks by business analysts.

The Centerprise user interface was developed and refined in collaboration with Astera’s customers to provide enable a high level of productivity and support enormously complex data conversions. As a result of these efforts, Centerprise delivers a superior solution for complex data conversion tasks.

Key Features which make complex data mapping easy:

• Drag and drop visual flow designer enables creation and visualization of even the most complex dataflows
• A single-click WYSIWYG data preview provides an instant view of data at any step in a dataflow
• Workflow designer enables orchestration of jobs and dependencies
• Integrated environment featuring database browser, and query editor; provides detailed visibility into your data sources and targets
• Full featured scheduler, event-driven job triggering, and other capabilities assist with visually design and automate your data conversion workflow

Customers with complex data conversion needs select Centerprise because it makes these data conversions easy, boosts their productivity, provides constructs to handle layout discrepancies and data quality issues, and delivers the performance and scalability to efficiently process high data volumes.

Learn more about complex data mappings and conversions.

Getting Started Videos
The first are Getting Started Videos. These are designed to help users get a running start You’ll go through a tutorial while being accompanied by a corresponding video of the tutorial project. These videos are hosted on our Youtube Channel , as well as embedded in web pages that are installed alongside the product.

Help Videos
The second set of videos are Help videos. These are direct, one to one, video representations of our help files. For example, if there is a help topic on sorting, then there is also a video discussing just that topic in complete detail. Once our Help has been re-vamped, these videos will be embedded directly in the help topic web page.

In addition to being embedded in these installed web pages / chm file, these videos will also be placed embedded in pages in a section of our website dedicated just to these videos. Most likely, this will be a grid with a brief description and a thumbnail of the video.
We’re sure you’ll find these useful. Feel free to let us know what else you’d like to see!

learn more about Centerprise for Microsoft Dynamics CRM