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May 19, 2008
A Brief History of ETL, a good piece by Bill Inmon
Recommended reading: Bill Inmon, the Father of Data Warehousing, published last week A Brief History of ETL that takes a look at the history of ETL and provides a glimpse into ETL's future.
Bill opens his article with the IPO of Prism Solutions, which after a string of mergers and spin-offs finally became Ascential. I recall this dinner with Bill a few months ago in Palo Alto, where he told us that we were in the very same restaurant where Prism had been founded around a dinner table, some time ago...
However, this is the past! And in the future, Bill sees Talend as the best representative and leader of the new generation of ETL. With which I fully agree :-)
Posted by Yves de Montcheuil at 1:45 AM | Comments (0)
May 16, 2008
Wishing trains were late (and why I hate Aeroports de Paris)
An unusual thought... if only TGVs were late! I would have made my train connection at CDG this morning. Instead of sitting at the bar of the Sheraton and blogging, I would be on my way home.
Yes, 45 minutes for a plane-to-train connection at CDG is tight, and I knew it but I tried. It would have worked if:
- we had not had what the flight attendants called "the longest approach ever": we circled CDG to the East, probably going all the way to Strasbourg before turning back to CDG
- we had gotten a contact spot at the terminal, instead of being sent to a remote parking spot (many contact spots were empty)
- the TGV had been late! (but TGVs comply with Murphy's law: they are late only when you are in them and have an important meeting, never when you're running after them)
Of course, AA competes against Air France. And who is Air France's primary stockholder? Try to guess... the same government who owns Aeroports de Paris. No, I am not suggesting ADP is trying hard to annoy clients of foreign airlines... Unless they try to annoy all of their clients (ooups, sorry, the French word is "usagers") to make sure they use other (foreign) airports? Another (strong) possibility. Problem is, LHR is not any better these days. That leaves BRU, that I love.
Oh, whatever. The next TGV is only in 3 hours. And I have my 3G connection. I'll keep busy.
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Posted by Yves de Montcheuil at 3:30 AM | Comments (0)
Data integration and tradeshows
Spring is show season. We all know this in marketing. Even though shows seem to become more and more spread year-round.
Nevertheless, after the MySQL User Conference in Santa Clara last month (see my blog entry on Talend's corporate blog), we have been doing two shows back to back: JavaOne in San Francisco last week, and TDWI in Chicago this week.
Both were great shows for Talend:
- lots of Java folks at JavaOne (strange, no?) and lots of interest for data integration technologies. Open source is a big thing in the Java community. We had great discussions with many good contacts, and held also some very valuable meetings with press and analysts (expect some coverage soon).
- TDWI in the Windy City was good too. Relatively smaller than other TDWI conferences, but many representatives from high profile companies came by, intrigued by open source and what it had to offer. I also did a videocast with Claudia Imhoff for the B-Eye-Network - can't wait to view it. And of course, met with a lot of old friends, analysts, partners... this is really a terrific ecosystem. And open source is playing a key role in BI now. The evangelization work is starting to pay off.
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Posted by Yves de Montcheuil at 3:15 AM | Comments (0)
May 9, 2008
New players = signs of a mature market
Just before JavaOne, Sun announced their Mural project: "an open-source community with the purpose of developing an ecosystem of products that solve the problems in Data Management through a collaborative community-driven approach."
Unsurprisingly, Sun's definition of data management includes data integration, and one of the core components of Mural is called Data Integrator, an ETL project.
The Server Side echoed the launch of the project: Sun Microsystems Announces Mural: Open Master Data Management.
It is still too early to judge of the feature set and quality of this project - our flagship product, Talend Open Studio, has been released for over 18 months now and has over 3 years of R&D behind it. But it is clearly a sign that the open source data integration market is maturing and attracts new entrants. I know our technical folks will be monitoring closely the success of this project. And rather than seeing it as a competitor, I much prefer to see it as an ally in our fight against proprietary lock-in and the outrageous license costs our proprietary competitors are charging!
So... welcome to the open source data integration world, Mural!
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Posted by Yves de Montcheuil at 11:15 AM | Comments (0)
