You can also find the new expressor technical blog here: http://community.expressor-software.com/blogs/categories/expressor-technical-blog/

Everyone we talk to says that Talend takes a very developer centric approach to ETL. Their tool really caters to programmers, who are highly technical people – but (without insulting them) most of them really don’t understand data all that well.

Many of our expressor Studio download users – almost 8,500 in counting and rapidly growing with each day – approach ETL more from a “I need to get my job done without having to become a programmer” perspective. “I need easy to use ways for building data flows, write business rules, and the tool needs to be flexible to adopt to my ever changing data processing needs where possible.” That is what the bulk of our users would say, many of whom do not have a “programmer” background and consider themselves to be “data professionals”.

Given our user base, expressor believes that each Studio product release must meet our high product quality standards and new functionality must be “fully baked” rather than leaving it up to the community (as Talend does) to deal with unresolved product complexities and bugs.  What we also hear is that the Talend Open Studio product is ridiculously poor in performance and has poor documentation, something our users wouldn’t attribute to expressor Studio.

So here are your choices:

• If you want to be shielded from the ETL complexities as much as possible and expressor Studio provides the functionality you need, its a no brainer to select expressor.
• If you want to reduce your data mapping complexity, time and cost, you’ll love expressor Studio.
• If an Office 2010 look and feel makes you feel more comfortable than using a more Java centric IDE, expressor is your choice.
• If you need fast data processing, expressor is it!
• And lastly, since both products are “free”, you have the choice to evaluate either one.  While doing so, you should also take a look at the commercial versions of each vendor’s products – you’ll find that expressor is less expensive.

Michael Waclawiczek, VP Marketing

Some may say yes, while others will say no.  It all depends on how the criteria for identifying duplicate records are defined.
If the requirement is that every field value must match, then there are no duplicate records in the table.  However, if the requirements are that the fields item, size, and color must match, and we want to keep the most recent entry, then the resulting table would look like this:

In this example, we removed 3 records because they contained duplicate entries for item, size, and color:

Of course this is a very simple exercise with only 11 records.  What happens when you are dealing with 11,000 or even 11 million records?  Naturally not something you would want to do in Excel or by hand!  This is where expressor shines and makes data de-duplication an easy task.

For a close-up look at how you can leverage expressor to quickly and easily de-duplicate your data, check out the corresponding solution in the technical blog section.

“I would like to commend the entire expressor software team for developing the expressor Studio application.  The powerful software engine allows for quick, streamlined ETL solutions, as well as the ability to apply data constraints and validations surrounding business intelligence needs.  What used to take several software applications to accomplish tasks, such as, data flow developments, mappings, transformation, and queries, is now available in an affordable and seamless data integration package. Data planning and development time is drastically decreased, while data quality is substantially increased.   This is truly a company who understands the interdependencies between the technical and business functions in an organization.  I recommend to all – give it a try………….”

For additional testimonials, visit our Corporate Website or our Community Center home page.

4 Tips for ETL Software IDE Developers

I introduced the notion of Semantic Types. To an end-user, a seamlessly integrated semantic typing engine significantly increases the ease of use of an ETL IDE (integrated development environment, or developer studio). This led me to think about other ease-of-use issues I have encountered while building ETL applications.

When I get stumped while programming, I find myself asking the variations on these questions:

• “How do I…?”
• “Now what?”
• “Why isn’t this working?”
• “Why do I have to redo the work I just did?”

More …

Introduction to Adaptive ETL Tool – How adaptive is your ETL?

I am often reminded by the fact that BI/data warehousing infrastructure is very brittle and not very adaptive to change. There are lots of basic use cases where data needs to be frequently loaded into SQL Server or another database. What I have found is that as long as the sources and targets stay the same, SSIS or any other ETL tool for that matter does a pretty good job handling these types of scenarios.

But what happens when you are faced with more challenging scenarios, where the data formats and possibly the data types of the source data are changing from customer to customer?

More …

Sharing your ETL Resources Across Applications with Ease

Frequently an organization will find that the same resources are used in multiple ETL applications, for example, the same database, general purpose processing logic, or file system locations.  Creating an easy way to reuse these resources across multiple applications would increase efficiency and reduce errors.  Moreover, not every ETL developer has the same skill set, and it is likely that one developer will be more adept at writing code while another is more comfortable configuring database connections.  Real productivity gains will come when these developers are able to work independently while still making their work available to others assigned to the same project.  These are the benefits of a centralized version control system.

More …

expressor Studio Includes Powerful Scripting Capabilities

One of the major problems in developing a data integration application is writing transformation code.  Many tools try to meet this need by providing a large number of operators that minimize coding through configuration.

Specialized operators are fine for basic transformations, but most ETL transformations require logic specific to the particular application.  For that, tools resort to full featured coding tools such as Microsoft Visual Studio.  expressor software has taken a different approach.  The expressor Studio tool provides a light-weight scripting language called expressor Datascript and integrates an editing environment into each programmable operator.

More …

expressor 3.2 Release Review

I have been following expressor software for some time now and they have recently released a new version of their expressor Studio desktop ETL application.  I am pleased to find out that the download and installation experience of this application has been greatly simplified.  expressor Studio no longer requires users to install a license key after they download and install  the product.  They have also eliminated a Microsoft Visio dependency from their product.  Removing the license requirement and Visio dependency has made download and installation much easier.

More …

5 Tips for Improving Your Data with expressor Studio

It’s no secret that bad data leads to bad decisions and poor results.  However, how do you prevent dirty data from taking up residency in your data store?  Some might argue that it’s the responsibility of the person sending you the data.  While that may be true, in practice that will rarely hold up.  It doesn’t matter how many times you ask, you will get the data however they decide to provide it.

So now you have bad data.  What constitutes bad data?  There are quite a few valid answers, for example:

• Invalid date values
• Inappropriate characters
• Wrong data
• Values that exceed a pre-set threshold

More …

Each institution submits its own customer file to ClickRSVP, each in a different format. ClickRSVP must validate, normalize, and import the data in each customer file into its SQL Server 2005 database before campaigns can be run. The company operates on tight timeframes, executing multiple campaigns for a range of clients across multiple time zones.

Initially, this data import process was done with the company’s proprietary email marketing system. According to Kevin De Gray, VP of IT for ClickRSVP, “our original system had a manual mapping system that made it very cumbersome to import the data.” As a result, ClickRSVP next implemented a custom coded solution written in Microsoft’s C# programming language to speed and automate the import process.

But the custom coded solution was very rigid. Since new mappings and transformations were required for each new customer and campaign, “development was very slow, and maintenance was a nightmare,” according to Kevin. Moreover, the company has several employees that can function as analysts, but only one developer. So the C# solution did not scale as each new customer and campaign required development effort that could not be performed by the analysts. “We just would not have been able to meet the customer demand with our existing systems. The process was not sustainable. We needed a better way to do it,” remarked Kevin.

What the company needed was a flexible environment that allowed the analysts to quickly customize the application for new customers and campaigns. The company evaluated four different products as part of its evaluation process. expressor software was selected because of its functional capabilities, its simplicity, and its total cost and superior return on investment.

To learn more about how ClickRSVP is using expressor and what benefits they have achieved thus far, click here.

The expressor Team

Enhanced connectivity via new expressor DataScript Operator
expressor Studio 3.3 introduces the Read Custom and Write Custom operators that enable expressor Datascript developers to build data adapters for reading and writing data from/to custom data sources. The expressor 3.3 release includes a sample set of shared libraries and a project that demonstrate use of the Read Custom operator to transfer Google contact data to Saleforce.com contacts.

Database Table Creation
expressor Studio 3.3 can generate Table Schemas from Semantic Types and Write Table operators can use those Schemas to create new tables in databases. Prior to expressor Studio 3.3, Table Schemas had to be derived from existing database tables. The key benefit of this new feature is that your data integration application can create the database repository it needs and saves developers the work of anticipating and creating separately the database tables required for ETL.

Datascript Modules
expressor Studio 3.3 increases the manageability of user-written functions by adding a new high-level artifact called Datascript Modules for storing and calling those functions. Previously, users had to take much greater care in storing, calling, and deploying custom functions they created for their data integration applications. Calling functions is now simpler and more reliable, and Datascript Modules can easily include references to other Datascript Modules without concern about preserving paths.

Other enhancements
expressor Studio 3.3 has also increased reuse with the addition of Operator Templates and a facility for exporting and importing Projects or Libraries between workspaces. Once you’ve configured an operator’s parameters, you can save it as an Operator Template and reuse it in another situation requiring the same or similar configuration.

The Write Table operator will now capture records that violate database constraints, either skipping the record or emitting it on a reject port.

Register at http://go.expressor-software.com/sneak_peek_3.3.html

You can download expressor Studio 3.2 for free at http://www.expressorStudio.com.