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November 10, 2009
expressor uniquely positioned to address 'big data' challenges of SQL Server community
As Michael's observations indicate, PASS Summit 2009 was a very successful trip for expressor. Microsoft SQL Server continues to deliver on the needs of the mid-market. As a technologist, I have always been impressed with Microsoft's commitment to innovation and improvement of its own products. Other attendees and exhibitors at PASS Summit 2009 shared in this enthusiasm.
During the event, several members from the SSIS team 'wandered' over to the expressor booth to learn more. With several patents pending we were unafraid to assist them in this endeavor! As I demonstrated the product they became more intrigued and began using the word 'innovative." We thank them for their confidence in us!
Many of the attendees we met had similar challenges: growing data volumes, increasing data complexity, increasing metadata management requirements, complex transformations, shrinking processing windows. Despite the fact that many attendees were from the under-served SMB market, many were encountering these 'big data' challenges. These users have outgrown simpler integration tools and have either propagated messy and costly development practices or were even compelled to license Informatica or DataStage at significant cost. Many have been using SQL Server for transactional systems but are just beginning to develop data warehouses and analytical capabilities. Many are challenged with integrating non-Microsoft sources and targets and are forced to build sub-optimal solutions because native connectivity does not exist in their tools. Many need to write complex transformations but are burdened with the development and maintenance costs associated with business rules that are not reusable. They have a strong desire to manage their data and applications from a semantic layer but don't have the tools to do so. Many require the ability to build flexible and dynamic data integration or ETL applications because the source of data being processed is flexible and dynamic. And they prefer to process their data integration or ETL applications from non-Windows platforms such as Linux but have not been able to find an affordable yet powerful integration platform. While SQL Server is meeting their RDBMS needs, these users were faced with significant and costly challenges in integrating with SQL Server.
Most encouraging is that expressor is uniquely positioned to address the end-user needs of SQL Server (and other RDBMSs) as described above. Our core engine was built for high-performance and complex data handling. The types of data volumes described to us at PASS would not represent any challenge to expressor. Our pre-built transformation operators are very powerful and provide many 'record level' data transformation capabilities missing from homegrown solutions and many tools. Our fully-integrated transformation language, expressor datascript, is built for speed and powerful custom transformations at the field level. Our semantic integration model is core to the product and facilitates the re-use of data mappings by using a business dictionary for data integration development; it also allows business rules to be defined and managed independent of any data application but easily re-used wherever needed. And our our-of-the-box repository captures design-time and run-time metadata allowing for complete visibility into data integration applications and deployments including impact analysis and data lineage. Most of these inherent features simply do not exist in mid-market ETL tools and exist only as poorly-integrated bolt-ons to enterprise-priced ETL products. Most important to the SQL Server users and attendees at the PASS Summit 2009, these are all core features in the expressor solution, are designed to work together, and are affordable.
We are extremely excited about our ability to address ETL and data integration needs with SQL Server customers.
Steve Frechette, VP engineering
Posted by expressor software at November 10, 2009 7:30 AM
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