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Archive for the ‘ETL’ Category

LiteBI, Heavy ETL

Posted in BI, ETL, Talend, cloud, data, kettle, olap, tagged on April 24, 2009 | 2 Comments »

Although my major BI interest is in micro-BI (or is that  workgroup-BI?)  i.e. data, perhaps cleansed and packaged elsewhere, available locally on a datasmith’s PC,with most likely an in-memory OLAP as the analysis tool; the possibilities of the “cloud” as a BI platform have not escaped me.
From a micro-BI perspective, the ability to act as a [...]

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Project Gemini – XXL, Excel on Steroids

Posted in BI, ETL, SQLite, excel, tagged , on April 1, 2009 | 5 Comments »

In my last post about why I use SQLite in combination with Excel for datasmithing tasks, I listed the more traditional backends (Excel itself, MS Access, RDBMs & MOLAP cubes) that one would expect to “compete” with such an idea.   But I suspect that if that same post appeared  two years or so into [...]

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SQLite as the MP3 of data

Posted in BI, ETL, Palo, SQLite, VBA, excel, olap, tagged on March 14, 2009 | 14 Comments »

… and Excel as its “mixing desk”.
When I tell people that I use SQLite in combination with Excel as my datasmithing platform, many ask why SQLite? (Many others ask why Excel?  but “sin scéal eile”, that’s another discussion.) Those that question my use of SQLite tend to cluster into four camps:

Pure Excel jocks.
MS Access fans.
The [...]

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Talend ETL Excel report generator

Posted in ETL, Talend, excel on February 13, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Hugo, who you may remember from his OLAP Cube as a Mind Map project, has struck again. This time something really useful, a component for the Talend ETL platform that generates Excel reports using templates and a JSP style TAG language to control the output.
I’ve in the past used the excellent Xlsgen to [...]

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SQL – does exactly what it says on the tin

Posted in AmazonAWS, ETL, SQLite, data, excel, tagged , , on December 18, 2008 | 9 Comments »

SQL how unloved it must feel sometimes, constantly being maligned, accused of being on the wrong side of the object-relational impedance mismatch,  lacking the glamour of OO programming languages that claim the moral high ground. Yet at the same time hewing and hauling most of the world’s structured data on its old but well fashioned [...]

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Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle) V Talend Benchmark

Posted in ETL, Talend, kettle, tagged , , , on December 4, 2008 | 4 Comments »

Pentaho’s Matt Caster has just published a benchmarking exercise comparing Kettle and Talend.  In it he admits he’s not a Talend expert and he advises that people should perform their own benchmarks where possible as requirements differ.  Nevertheless, unlike most other benchmarks we’ve seen on the subject he publishes not just the results but the [...]

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Spending time on Excel-SQLite, C, VBA Callbacks & Twitter

Posted in BI, ETL, Palo, SQLite, VBA, Web2.0, excel, xLite, tagged , on November 20, 2008 | 3 Comments »

Haven’t posted here in a while as my spare time has been soaked up programing, well actually refactoring would be more exact.  My xLite “SQLite empowered Excel” codebase has grown over the years and required a serious makeover to get rid of stuff I no longer use and to generally make it more robust.  I [...]

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Open Source Metrics and Benchmarks

Posted in ETL, Talend, kettle, tagged , , on October 30, 2008 | 13 Comments »

Marc Russel’s blog links to a Manapps ELT benchmark report comparing the performance of several leading ETL tools both proprietary (DataStage and Informatica) and OS (Talend and PDI (aka Kettle)).  As would be expected each tool has their own strengths and weaknesses, but one thing stands out, the venerable Kettle ETL aka PDI 3.0 is now [...]

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Why Larry hates the cloud, and my data trinity.

Posted in AmazonAWS, ETL, Palo, SQLite, cloud, excel, olap, tagged , on October 4, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

Last week Oracle certified Amazon EC2 as a supported platform, that same week Larry Elison attacked the concept of cloud computing as pure hype. Obviously, Larry is not happy with this whole cloud thing, and I think it’s not just the threat it poses to the software industry’s traditional licensing model that worries him, rather, as Robert X. Cringely [...]

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Clouds no longer pass by Windows.

Posted in AmazonAWS, EC2, ETL, RSSBus, Web2.0, data, news, tagged , , , on October 1, 2008 | 4 Comments »

Amazon today announced that later this year, Windows Server woud be available on EC2. No details on cost and licensing etc. but this is major.  Up until now, that portion of the business world who are pure MS shops (a very large percentage especially amongst SMEs) were excluded from taking advantage of Amazon’s amazing (and [...]

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Cloudy skies, cloudy apps…

Posted in BI, ETL, Ireland, Palo, Web2.0, cloud, data, excel, news, olap, tagged , , , on August 28, 2008 | 4 Comments »

Just back from a break in Clifden, Connemara, summer is nearly over, the kids return to school today, back to work.
Counties Galway and Mayo were like the rest of the country last week, a tad wet, but unlike the developed east of the island, flooding was not a problem; a problematic drainage area is called [...]

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Talend + SQLite + Groovy the new Oracle …

Posted in BI, EC2, ETL, Groovy, Palo, SQLite, Talend, data, excel, olap, tagged , on August 2, 2008 | 5 Comments »

… well, at least for me.  Let me explain.
For most of my datasmithing career, I’ve had access to corporate Oracle databases and now with the availability of  Oracle10g  Express I can even run my own Oracle instances at home or on EC2.  The combination of a powerful SQL engine, expressive scripting language (PL/SQL) ,OS independence, [...]

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New universal SQLite JDBC library.

Posted in ETL, Java, SQLite, Talend, kettle, news, tagged , , on July 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

Both Talend (Java) and Kettle distribute the Zentus.com pure-Java SQLite JDBC driver and for most purposes this run-anywhere version is fine. But, if you really need to take advantage of SQLite’s speed then connecting using the native JNI version is a must.  Doing this was easy enough, just change over to using a generic JDBC [...]

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Groovy as Talend’s scripting language

Posted in ETL, Groovy, Java, Palo, SQLite, Talend, data, tagged , on July 20, 2008 | 5 Comments »

Although I had decided to use Talend (Java version) as my primary ETL tool I still had one major problem with it, its lack of a scripting tool.  Kettle (Pentaho PDI) has Javascript, Excel has VBA, Picalo has (well OK, is) Python and Talend in its Perl version has Perl.  I could have gone (and [...]

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Regular Expressions as an end-user programming tool?

Posted in ETL, Talend, excel, kettle, tagged , on July 1, 2008 | 2 Comments »

“What? Have you completely lost the plot, Gleeson?”, I hear you scream.  Jamie Zawinski’s famous quote is intoned once more ..
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think
“I know, I’ll use regular expressions.”   Now they have two problems.
Of course the above quote could be (and probably has been) changed to…
Most business people, when confronted with [...]

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What to do when Talend gets its knickers in a twist?

Posted in ETL, Talend, tagged , , on June 30, 2008 | 2 Comments »

If you’ve done any significant amount of work with Talend you’ll undoubtedly have experienced situations where either the generated code/JETemitters or the GUI representation of a job become unstable like so…

The usual advice is to backup your projects (workspace/projectName) , delete the workspace/.Java (or .Perl) and workspace/.JETEmitters folders and restart Talend to force a [...]

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Palo OLAP and sparse dimensions.

Posted in BI, ETL, Palo, excel, tagged , , , , , , , on May 26, 2008 | 9 Comments »

Last week I tried out both the latest Palo 2.5 release and its sister product, ETL-Server.  Although I’ve not done any proper benchmarks, 2.5 does appear to be faster than the previous release and the Excel add-in also behaves better when co-habiting with other add-ins and macros (the previous release’s use of, and response to, [...]

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Python to replace VB6 …

Posted in ETL, Python, VBA, excel, tagged , , on May 5, 2008 | 2 Comments »

… well at least for me. As I discussed previously I’ve been seriously investigating using Python as my primary datasmithing scripting language, in effect a new VBA. I also currently use VBA’s compiled cousin, VB6, for certain tasks such as building Excel RTD servers. The problem with VB6 is it depends on [...]

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Palo ETL Server – Not for me …

Posted in BI, ETL, Palo, SQLite, excel, tagged , on May 1, 2008 | 2 Comments »

Jedox have just released V1.0 of their Palo-centric ETL Server. I had been looking forward to this, not so much for its ETL ability (which is somewhat limited when compared to the likes of Pentaho PDI or Talend) but for the drill-through capability it would add to Palo. Alas, there’s a catch, you [...]

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SQLite – the ultimate data-smithing tool!

Posted in AmazonAWS, ETL, SQLite, Talend, data, excel, kettle, tagged , on April 26, 2008 | 4 Comments »

Image via Wikipedia
Although my data-smithing tool box is full to the brim with powerful tools such as Talend, Kettle PDI, Picalo and Excel, all backed by the cloud infrastructure of Amazon’s S3, SImpleDB and EC2, there’s one simple yet powerful tool that I always seem to gravitate back to, that tool is SQLite.
Now obviously being [...]

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