Somehow when someone mentions BI there are suggestions for Reporting tools, and with notes about ETL come notes about BI and Reporting. In my mind (what there is of it) there is a vast difference between these concepts. I think the confusion comes in when a product like MITS, for example, incorporates its own ETL functionality to accomplish what it does. Some basic reporting tools do the same in the name of performance. But the ETL performed by these tools is generally proprietary and cannot be used in other contexts.
Now when you're talking about a real ETL platform like DataStage, you should be able to use data from platform X with any platform Y. A product like MITS or Cognos or Informer or any other could code their front-end processes to use DataStage as a data source. This would open them for use, even with non-MV platforms like Oracle or DB2 - and of course products like Cognos do exactly that - but our MV-centric colleagues generally don't think in those directions. Speaking of DataStage, I was discussing an association with a company a while back for providing mainstream BI tools for MV (that option is still considered from time to time and interested parties are welcome to contact me). As we can all relate, I had to spend a lot of time explaining the Pick/MV concepts which were completely unfamiliar to them. In our discussion we decided that the best way to use common BI tools with MV was not to link directly to MV at all as a data source, but to use a middle-tier ETL tool, I could provide the extraction from MV and they could extract from the generic middle-tier using common queries and tools. Ironically when we were discussing what tools they already used, they mentioned DataStage. Maybe they were unique but it seems to me that DataStage could be considered a poster-child as a successful MV application, but somehow that marketing value seems completely untapped. *sigh* Tony Gravagno Nebula Research and Development TG@ remove.pleaseNebula-RnD.com _______________________________________________ U2-Users mailing list [email protected] http://listserver.u2ug.org/mailman/listinfo/u2-users
