Gobán Saor » RSSBus

Clouds no longer pass by Windows.

Tom Gleeson — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 11:44:29 +0000

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 getting more amazing everyday) EC2 platform.

From my point of view, as with Oracle’s announcement last week, this releases yet more of my “legacy” skillset for deployment in the clouds. Although I’ve been involved with *nix servers for 20 years or so, as corporate servers became more locked-down (and removed to the control of 3rd party data centres) I lost day-to-day experience of using them; in latter years my main ‘hands-on’ platform was Windows, either my own PC or local departmental NT servers. Windows on EC2 will allow me to use a whole new set of Windows only software (e.g. RSSBus or XLsgen) and of course SQLServer.

The lack of SQLServer on EC2 has been a major problem for me as a datasmith; there’s an awful lot of data out there sitting in SQLServer databases, but currently if I need to “cloud burst” such datasets I would have to first extract the data to, say, csv files and then load the data on to a Linux compatible database. But with a SQLServer instance running in the cloud, I could simply use SQLServer’s native backup/replication tools. No more need to download data to my “ground-based” PCs resulting in quicker turnaround and fewer data security risks.

On the licensing front, I’m presuming that the OS licence will be on a pay-as-you-go basis, but what about SQLServer and other server products? Will MS do an Oracle on it, i.e. require a traditional upfront use-it-or-lose-it payment or will they the go the radical (but I thing inevitable) path of a licence-by-the-hour.

First RedHat, then Sun, then Oracle and now Microsoft; the mighty beasts of our industry have acknowledged there’s a new mighty beast on the prowl, dressed as a humble bookseller no less!

Amazon EC2: S, L and XL – now we’re sucking diesel..

Tom Gleeson — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 09:54:35 +0000

As of today, Amazon EC2 now supports two new Instance Types..

… a “Large” and an “Extra Large” instance type to complement the original instance type and provide more flexibility for EC2 users. The new instance types provide more memory, CPU, and instance storage, and are based on 64bit technology. EC2 users can now utilize these different instance sizes to support an even broader set of applications and use cases.

The Large Instance is equivalent to roughly four Small Instances (our original instance), and the Extra Large Instance is roughly equivalent to eight Small instances.

This increases the attractiveness of EC2 as a platform for micro ETL/BI activities, the extra memory accessible under the new 64bit instances makes the commissioning of pure in-memory on-demand open source PALO OLAP instances a real alternative. And it’s not just micro BI activities that could utilise this sort of service, many of the large BI implementations I’ve worked on in the past could easily be handled by this type of kit.

Also this week, /n Software announced the private beta of a Java version of their RSSBUS Server Engine; this could be a very useful on-demand micro ETL tool especially now that it will be capable of running under Linux (the current version requires a Windows IIS Server).

Proto – desktop BI tool.

Tom Gleeson — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 14:19:24 +0000

I see that Proto have repositioned their excellent VBA scripted mash-up product as a “desktop business intelligence system”. This is to be welcomed as the first time I used it I described it as a “mash-up tool for adults” and although it has the ability to play hard ball with the other Web2.0 mash-up kids, its DNA is firmly within the business world, more BI2.0 than Web2.0. It is in effect, a “reporting tool on steroids”.

The “free for non-commercial purposes” product is no more, but you can still download a 30-day free trial and the really good news is the new price of $300 for the Proto Individual product.

Also, another business-oriented mash-up tool, RSSBus, is partially out of beta, RSSBus Server RC1 is now available. Still no information on final pricing for the server product. A new Beta 5 release of the free desktop edition is also available for download. As I’ve said before, RSSBus Server front-ended by Proto would be a very powerful combination.

Google Spreadsheets – ETL tool

Tom Gleeson — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 12:49:37 +0000

Although I’m a total Excel fanboy, I most admit I rarely use it any longer for personal stuff such as home budgets, tax calculations, what-ifs, to-do lists etc.; I now tend to use Google Spreadsheets. Likewise, personal notes, drafts and useful bits of code are stored using Google Docs rather than MS Word. Three main reasons for this shift to the cloud:

Google Docs & Spreadsheets are ‘good enough’ for most of the trivial lists and calculations I require in my personal life and indeed for most business purposes as well, at least those that don’t require a pivot table.
These spreadsheets and documents are important but not necessarily in the ‘state secret/I-could-tell-but-then-I’d-have-to-kill-you’ scale of things, by building them in Google Apps they are securely backed-up and easily accessible.
A lot of the spreadsheets are collaborative in nature, and in the collaboration field, Google Spreadsheets just gets better and better.

Today, Google announced further additions to their spreadsheet product. The AutoFill feature adds functionality I’ve come to expect from Excel, but with a twist, integration with Google Sets. But the additions that really caught my eye were the new data import functions. Now again, Excel has had web queries since Excel97, and it always amazed me why online pretenders to the throne tended to ignore the most common source of tabular data on the web, the HTML table; something to do with the great XML/Tables divide I guess!

Google now not only fixes this omission,providing access to HTML tables and comma/tab separated file, but also provides access to RSS/ATOM and generic XML sources. All that’s missing now are functions that can read other common online data files formats such as Excel, MSAccess, XBase and of course SQLite.

This addition of HTML import support and the AutoFill feature will further reduce the number of times I’ll need to fire up Excel for personal tasks, but the RSS/ATOM/XML import feature also has potential as a tool in my micro-ETL toolbox. Using Excel as my only micro-ETL tool is possible when the data is either already in Excel/CSV or accessible via a COM API or via ODBC drivers, otherwise I can call-in either Ruby, Talend, Kettle or even RSSBus. But now I’ve another option, if the data is public and published as RSS/ATOM or some other variation on XML, I can use Google Spreadsheets to fetch the data and import the resulting tabular dataset into Excel via a Web Query or via the GData API.

One other thing. While researching this post, looking up links etc. I used another new feature Google added today, Google Reader’s new Search facility. As most of my references are discovered via the blogs I subscribe to, the ability to restrict searches to that subset of the web is fantastic; I even used it to search through my own blog posts! If del.icio.us offered the same option it would make re-finding stuff even easier. I did try to use Google Co-Op to build a search engine restricted to my del.icio.us links but it didn’t seem to like the volume of links (4000 odd) I sent it.

Apatar – a few extracts short of a load

Tom Gleeson — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 18:22:19 +0000

I’ve been meaning to try out the Apatar ETL/Mashup tool for sometime and today being yet another rainy day in this the worst Irish summer that I can remember (and Irish summers are not renowned for the lack of rainfall) I decided to give it a try out. Not impressed I’m afraid; comes up short when compared to either Kettle (Pentaho PDI), Proto, RSSBus or Talend. Very few database connectors (e.g. no SQLite,DB2 or Firebird support) this wouldn’t be a problem if the product offered a generic JDBC or ODBC connector. It does have one nice feature the others (other than RSSBus) haven’t, an Amazon S3 connector. But the thing that I find amazing is that a product that’s positioning itself as an Enterprise 2.0. mashup tool doesn’t have the ability to read and write Excel files! And no, CSV files don’t count.

I hope their intentions are honorable…..

Tom Gleeson — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 02:20:07 +0000

I’ve said before that these two would make an ideal couple, I see the ~~courting~~ flirting has begun …..

RSSBus

Proto

Mashup Match Making

Tom Gleeson — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 17:26:57 +0000

I’ve been watching and trialing RSSBus since its initial public beta last May but had of late began to wonder had /N Software lost interest in the project. But there appears to be light at the end of this particular beta tunnel with the announcement of the integration of the RSSBus engine into News Gataor’s NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES), still no pricing info on either NGES or RSSBus server.

Another potential partnership that the folks at RSSBus should investigate is a link up withProto. Both products are firmly positioned behind the corporate firewall with their emphasis on commercial data sources i.e. – dare I say it – mashup tools for adults.

Proto is visually appealing (like Yahoo Pipes) and is Excel centric in both its table-based design philosphy and its choice of macro language, VBA; both sound design decisions in the market the product is aiming at – the power user. It is however, lacking in some of the ‘heaving lifting’ tools that power-users depend on but are usually supplied to them by IT; this is where RSSBus comes in. With its XML scripting language and its extensibility capability provided by C#/VB.NET its natural user base is the corporate IT developer. RSSBus’s impressive list of pre-built connectors and the ease with which developers can add new ones, makes it an ideal partner to Proto’s more approachable user-focused front-end.