On 7/21/06, Mark Stanton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> An associate (and heavy-duty consultant for Accenture) like to quote
> "There are 23 problems in computer science, and we keep solving them
> over, and over and over."
Got his email address? ;-)
Yeah, but he charges a whole lot of money for any of his 23 solutions <g>...
> I think there is a Fallacy of Generalization here:
Mebbe this is why we can't yet build robots like Asimov wrote about 8-)
Pretty much.
Seems to me there's general bits and specific bits.
The general part is really pretty easy, at least in concept;
take this list of stuff and put it into the corresponding places on this
other list. If something goes wrong do that.
Yep. Microsoft DTS does a fairly good generalized job. VFP programs,
too. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's written a semi-generic
solution: table, field in, table, field out, transformation. How hard
could it be ?
I just read a pretty positive review of the Open Source JitterBit in InfoWorld:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/07/13/29TCjitter_1.html
Sounds like it is worth looking at.
This seems almost too obvious to speak it, but presumably the difference
between what you said to start with ("there's lots of things doing this") &
what you said just there ("a generalised solution is difficult, complex, &
expensive) means there's nothing that works like this just now 8-)
ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) applications came about when they
invented the second computer. There are some good apps, but the older
mainframe types tend to sell pretty expensive solutions. There were a
few apps that came about in the datbase explosion portion of the PC
Revolution,... I wish I could come up with a product name or two, but
the hinges are just too rusty on this topic. "data transformation
software" yields 25 M Google hits.
> And how do you handle conflicts? Failures to update? Connectivity
> errors? At the high end, MQ Series and MSMQ queue changes from source
> to target, retry after failures, report conflicts, etc.
Details, details... 8-)
I bet you're right. It's too hard to do as a completely automatic thing...
yet 8-)
Well, the problem is hard. For many of my apps where we have to import
legacy data, we usually just hook on a logging facility and an error
log, and keep running it until all the data comes over.
--
Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com
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