cooper to logan - expressor software's semantic data integration blog

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October 29, 2009

expressor exhibits at PASS Summit 2009

expressor will be exhibiting as a gold sponsor at the upcoming Nov 2 -5 PASS Summit 2009, the premier Microsoft SQL Server conference. Stop by our booth in case you'll be attending the conference!

Posted by expressor software at 3:45 PM | Comments (0)

American Tower turbocharges complex data warehousing application with expressor

American Tower operates thousands of communications sites across the US for the wireless and broadcast industries. The company uses Microsoft Windows throughout the organization, is a heavy user of Microsoft SQL Server as well as Oracle and has adopted many of the Microsoft productivity tools -- including SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS).

American Tower is satisfied with SSIS overall, but recently recognized that it could not meet all of the data loading performance or complex data transformations required for their data warehouse application. For example, it took SSIS several hours to load 200 GB of data into the SQL Server data warehouse, in part because the target database was forced to execute lengthy stored procedures to transform the data before landing it.

As a result, American Tower began evaluating ETL / data integration tools from other vendors, but like many medium-sized businesses, the company had a limited budget for new IT solutions. This eliminated vendors with offerings whose price tags reached into the hundreds of thousands of dollars - such as Informatica - and quickly narrowed down the field to the affordable expressor semantic data integration system.

In a rigorous proof of concept test, expressor significantly reduced American Tower's data loading times. In addition, expressor's ultrafast parallel data processing engine and its flexible datascript scripting language enabled expressor to perform the required complex data transformations in a single process.

Other factors that convinced American Tower to migrate its data warehouse application to expressor included:

• the ability of expressor's smart semantics to create a common set of business definitions from disparate data sources and definitions


• the fact that expressor is built on an enterprise-wide metadata repository


• the fact that expressor's tool set is built around Microsoft Office and .Net, which made it easy for the company to get up to speed and fit expressor into their existing IT environment.

American Tower's experience shows that expressor is an excellent fit for any business seeking to upgrade to a true enterprise-class, Microsoft-friendly ETL / DI solution for their ever-growing data volumes and complex data integration requirements.

Michael Waclawiczek, VP Marketing

Posted by expressor software at 2:45 PM | Comments (0)

October 15, 2009

Applying parallel concepts to application development

I believe that the answer to the question posed on our LinkedIn group recently ('Should business users be involved in data integration development?') is that enabling business users to be involved in the data integration process is a fundamental requirement in enabling information management to respond to the building demands of the business.

Over the past several years we've all seen a dramatic increase in the volumes of data we've had to process. From a technology point of view, we've largely risen to the challenge by using parallel processing techniques such as pipeline and data partitioning parallelism along with advances in the hardware and algorithms used by these parallel processes. This has allowed us to perform more of the activities in parallel faster.

Unfortunately our businesses needs have also grown at compounding speeds, requiring information management to deliver solutions faster, cheaper, more reliably but at the same time make them nimble enough to respond to the accelerated rate of change in the business.

The ideas we've implemented on the technology side aren't completely radical since even early ETL tools recommended 'chunking' an application to make them more manageable - unfortunately with most of the early tools we needed land the data and then manage a ever growing array of small 'jobs' and interfaces that comprised an application - typically without providing any easy way to manage the menagerie.

We seem to be positioned to take a similar breakthrough step with respect to the business side of application development that we took for the technical side. It's not unusual for advances in the development side to follow advances in the technical side - in fact, it's more the rule than the exception. By allowing multiple contributors to work on the application in parallel and facilitating an efficient communication mechanism between them we are effectively introducing the parallel processing techniques we just discussed to the development environment.

This approach is not entirely new - after all we've had modelers managing the logical view of our information through modeling applications and business users creating Word documents and spreadsheets with specifications, but there was significant impedance between the operations and communication vehicles since they were forced to use different terminologies, constantly convert the definitions that were used between the physical world and the business world, and there was limited interoperability between these tools.

Role-based development, and in particular business users building and managing the 'business rules,' allows us to potentially separate the activities involved in managing these 'business rules' from the activities associated with moving the data (data flow programming). This allows users most familiar with specific aspects of the development cycle to manage and contribute the portions of the application that they are most equipped to work on - the business side can build, test, and manage certain business rules while the developer can build, test, and manage the data movement and handling aspects of the application.

Of course the interfaces that each of these contributor's uses will pose different requirements and some of the requirements will be common to multiple contributors - they must balance providing the appropriate amount of functionality while managing the complexity for each contributor, while allowing interaction in the event the scope of a particular activity extends beyond the contributor's capability. This is much like our technology advances in the hardware and algorithms employed by parallel data processing.

- Mike Ruland, field engineering

Posted by expressor software at 12:45 PM | Comments (0)

October 14, 2009

The CEO's perspective: why companies are choosing expressor

Quite a few people have asked me who's buying our product and why - so I thought I'd share my views with a larger audience.

expressor software was founded on the principle that data integration software should be easier to use and priced in a way that companies could use it for all of their data integration needs, not just the 20 to 30 percent of 'high-end' data integration projects. Anyone who's been to our website or read our blog knows that our software licensing and maintenance costs tend to be 60-80% less than what others charge and that our two primary product differentiators are 'smart semantics' and 'breakthrough performance.'

We use smart semantics to describe how expressor maps fields from multiple and diverse external data resources to common business definitions - in order to build a semantic metadata abstraction that enables efficient reuse of business rules and collaborative team development to empower organizations to significantly shorten development time and effort.

Our semantic metadata approach is a huge win for project users such as data analysts, who can create reusable business rules (based on these common business terms) that aren't tied to the physical metadata of various data sources and targets. Or ETL developers, who can now much more quickly develop and test data integration flows in expressor by relying on data analysts on the project to help them define and create the business and transformation rules governing the application, on data stewards to help them create and maintain the semantic data mappings in expressor, and on data architects to use expressor to specify the data connectivity and data parallelism requirements for the application.

Additionally, expressor has developed easy to use, role-specific GUI tools to facilitate efficient communication and collaboration of project managers, data analysts, data stewards, data architects, and developers participating in a ETL/DI project.

Our breakthrough performance is powered by the fastest parallel processing engine in the industry. expressor can move significantly more data from sources to targets than other ETL/DI systems and is quickly establishing itself as the price/performance market leader. Because of this unique capability, expressor has targeted its earliest sales efforts at Ab Initio customers, many of whom are largely satisfied with the flexibility and speed of their current system, but also very unhappy with the pricing and inflexibility of this eccentric vendor. Our price/performance leadership position now not only allows us to compete against the established players at the high-end of the market but extend our reach to mid-market companies, who have similar data volume and performance demands but can't afford to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for an ETL tool, and are forced to continue to hand-code their data integration applications.

It has been easy selling price/performance. The tech industry has loads of vendors that made a business this way. On the other hand, smart semantics has required more education and evangelism, and during our early sales and marketing efforts didn't give us the immediate gratification we were looking for - but a funny thing happened on our journey. Customers said, 'I believe you're fast and economical, but solve some of my problems that can't be solved by throwing hardware and money at the problem and then we'll discuss using expressor as an alternative.'

I'm happy to say we've successfully met that challenge - and that smart semantics were the key.

One of our recent wins was with a communications platform company that sells solutions to the healthcare industry. By pre-normalizing the relevant metadata into rationalized, semantic terms that were easily understood by customer service representatives, we could abstract and reuse complex business logic and dynamically change the way an application runs. Using expressor, customer service reps can now load patient record data from multiple sources into a repository for much more accurate and possibly even life-saving healthcare updates.

Another recent expressor win was with a clinical trials outsourcer, who needed to handle complex XML data combinations by normalizing data across nested arrays within the XML document. With smart semantics, we could take the metadata definitions from external specifications and match it to data arriving from internal and external sources - and create new functions for non-technical users - as opposed to coding the logic in transformation functions. The smart semantics rationalization process enabled, or should I say liberated, the company from its reliance on technical ETL developers.

Those are just two recent examples. We also keep a running survey on our web site, asking visitors to choose the single most compelling capability of expressor: smart semantics, breakthrough scalability, total lifecycle management or affordability. Smart semantics is the leading vote-getter by a two-to-one margin over the second choice, breakthrough scalability - 48% to 24%.

So what does this say? Maybe the world is ready for a new way of doing data integration. We don't intend on marginalizing the ETL developer. We simply think there a lot of business users and analysts that need to integrate data - and expressor can help.

- Bob Potter, president and CEO

Posted by expressor software at 2:45 PM | Comments (0)

October 6, 2009

expressor gains strong momentum

expressor software provided a business update today -- announcing that the company is gaining strong momentum in all areas of its operations, as shown by a number of new customers, partners, products and hires.

Read the full news release.

- Steve Casey, marketing

Posted by expressor software at 2:15 PM | Comments (0)