The Business Intelligence Blog

How else can you title the post, when the father of Data Warehouse himself, Bill Inmon, writes a nostalgic note on ETL.

When data warehousing and ETL first appeared on the scene, the coders of the world felt threatened. In case after case, the coders of the world went and found their most complicated, most arcane, most convoluted program that was needed for transformation and threw that program at the ETL vendor. When the ETL technology threw up, the programmers said – “See, we can’t use ETL here – it can’t handle the XYZ program.”

Fast forward to today, and there is ETL everywhere. It is found in almost every shop that has a data warehouse. No one thinks twice about bringing in ETL technology. The drudgery of writing and maintaining transformation code has mercifully been shifted to automation.

What happened when programmers were protecting their own turf? The programmers were selecting the most impossible example of code and transformation to use as a basis for selecting or not selecting ETL processing. Behind the one difficult program are oodles of easy and much more normal transformations. Selecting the most difficult program in the company as a basis for transformations is like selecting Yao Ming as a representative of Chinese people. Yao Ming plays in the NBA and is 7’5″ tall. To draw the conclusion that most Chinese are 7’5″ tall is to make a serious error in judgment because even though Yao Ming is Chinese and is tall, not all Chinese are nearly that tall. For that matter, neither are the Americans, the Russians, the English or anyone else. But that is exactly what the early programmers did in order to keep ETL out of the shop.

David Stodder at intelligent enterprise takes a closer look at Teradata 12.0, the latest release. Must Read.

Teradata’s 12.0 release is intended to satisfy the need for enterprise data warehouses to support today’s rapid pace of operational decision-making. One major challenge is to enable systems to load data continuously at the same time that they handle a large number of queries. Traditional data warehouses, which were not designed to address timeliness issues, separate these tasks by loading data in batch during off hours; in contrast, “active” operational data warehouses have to load data in the same time frame as they provide updates to users.

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Teradata is elevating the profile of master data management as well. The company is developing its MDM software on technology it gained and controls through a 2005 partnership with i2 Technologies. Teradata 12.0 manages MDM centrally from the enterprise data warehouse and employs the technology much like an extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) process to ensure data quality and consistency of definitions. The company is expanding its implementation of MDM to include version management so organizations can see what their master data looked like at specific points in time. Teradata also is integrating MDM with data modeling tools and publishing services so that new and existing definitions can be consolidated, managed and communicated more effectively.

“Teradata is focused on enabling financial services executives to transform compliance issues from a management migraine into a strategic opportunity,” said Jim Donovan, Teradata’s vice president of global industry solutions for financial services. “The Teradata Enterprise Risk Management solution creates a single, authoritative data environment to ensure accuracy, consistency and auditability across business lines. With this approach, the management of risk becomes one of the most compelling opportunities organizations have today for achieving innovations that will accelerate growth and drive operational efficiency.”

The components of Teradata Enterprise Risk Management solution include the Teradata(R) Warehouse 8.1, a suite of hardware, software and professional consulting services. In addition, the solution is supported by Teradata Financial Services Logical Data Model and partnerships.

More on Teradata Enterprise Risk Management solution.