A2B Data™ FAQs
What is A2B Data™?
In simplest terms, A2B Data™ extracts data from A (source) and inserts data onto B (target)
Why was A2B Data™ developed?
Wyntec developed A2B Data™ to automate all the best-practice architecture and design patterns for you to achieve an active data staging platform in your environment. A2B Data™ establishes a solid data foundation, so you can build your analytics and data integration platforms quickly, cost-effectively and reliably.
What makes A2B Data™ unique?
A2B Data™ goes beyond just moving your data, it automates your end-to-end Active Data Staging environment. All the best-practice design patterns are already built into the product and ready for your use. Because of this, it requires minimal setup and minimal on-going administration. Compared to traditional ETL (extract-transform-load) products, A2B Data™ automates the EL (extract-load) part and frees your resources to focus on analyzing data.
What are some of the benefits of using A2B Data™?
Some of the immediate benefits:
- Mitigates project risk and saves you money – the extraction and load code is dynamically generated, so you don’t have to maintain expensive programs
- Bi-directional data integration – move your data from any source to any target
- Establishes a solid data staging foundation – this is the key to any data migration, integration, data ingestion or analytical architecture
- Processes only changed data – built-in change data capture mechanisms, simply pick from an extensive list
- Extended reporting – captures the history of changed data for non-volatile, historic and point-in-time reporting
- Enforces Load and Process Controls – built-in error logging, data quality monitoring and events driven alerts
- Insight into your data integration – automatically collects technical and operational metadata for your reporting.
Question – How does A2B Data™ support “Active” Data Staging
Active Data Staging is the disciplines supported by A2B Data™ to ensure the foundation of your data initiative is cohesive, architecturally complete, supports agile deployment and is extensible. Whether you manage an enterprise data warehouse, data mart, data lake, data integration, reporting database or operational data stores the disciplines of actively staging your data is enforced by A2B Data™. More importantly, A2B Data™ automate these principles without the need for you to write a single line of code:
- Ensure that data transparency is managed with technical metadata and lineage reporting
- Operational statistics are captured on every piece of data being staged
- Process controls are monitored, capturing transaction level log files, error log files, batch identification for every execution
- Processes changed data capture (CDC) with built-in flexible CDC strategies
- Offer both a Land and Stage for latent, real-time and streaming data
- Built-in error-handling and alert notifications.
How does A2B Data™ support Agile Development Lifecycle?
A2B Data™ is designed to support an agile development lifecycle. It is both iterative and proactive in establishing your robust data staging environment. A2B Data™ dynamically manages your development lifecycle giving your project team the tools to:
- Discover and Analyze your source data quickly
- Ensure your data staging environment is a best-in-class architecture
- Deploy the staging process without writing expensive code
- Grow your environment in quick iterations
- Enforced data quality with built-in edits
- Make informed decisions as A2B Data™ collects your technical and operational metadata.
What are some of my savings using A2B Data™ over traditional ETL tools?
ETL tools are great for performing complex Transformations but are an expensive overhead to perform the functions of Extract and Load. A2B Data™ is designed to automate the entire Extract and Load process for any of your data integration, data migration, and data acquisition needs.
Immediate savings are realized since A2B Data™:
- Support Agile lifecycles as your data is made available to you within minutes not hours or days
- Manages a solid data staging foundation as all the necessary design patterns to perform the data staging functions are already built in the tool
- Minimizes your cost, pricing is monthly subscription based on actual usage. Volume and Aging discounts are applied.
- Reduces errors as the code is generated for you
- Performance is improved as only changed data is processed and the code is optimized
- Improves your support and maintenance time as A2B Data™ dynamically detects changes in your data structures and captures all the necessary technical and operational metadata
- Mitigates project risks, as A2B Data™ is truly faster, better and cheaper over the traditional ETL methods.
How is A2B Data™ different from other data extract tools?
- A2B Data™ is a complete Active Data Staging tool; utilizes various change data capture mechanisms, is optimized and captures the history of changed data.
- A2B Data™ generates zero errors as it is 100% metadata driven; Efficient and Cost-effective as no code is required to maintain, Fast and Immediate as it processes only changed data.
- A2B Data™ Requires minimal setup, no development of code is necessary and on-going maintenance is streamlined – a substantial savings compared to traditional ETL (extract-transform-load) products.
- A2B Data™ provides you the necessary data privacy and security, it is a collaborative architecture involving a Cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
- A2B Data™ Agents reside on your servers and within your firewall so your data never leaves your control.
- A2B Data™ automatically collects metadata about any/all databases and tables you wish A2B Data™ to process and automatically generates the code.
Is A2B Data™ just a data movement tool?
No, there are many internet-based products that will simply mirror your data from one system to another. A2B Data™ was specifically designed to manage your enterprise Active Data Staging environment. With built-in design patterns to extract, sort, organize and stage data from “any source to any target”.
What does it mean “any source to any target”?
- There is no limit on the number of source/target databases that A2B Data™ can extract and load data.
- Any flat-file formats
- Any Commercially viable database
- Cloud-based storage
- Cluster-Based Architectures
- Massive Parallel Processes and Appliances
- Messaging and streaming.
What is the pricing model for A2B Data™?
A2B Data™ is monthly subscription pricing, that calculates based on actual usage. Utilizing a tiered usage model that offers huge volume discounts and additional reductions based on annual usage.
Can we (the customer) control when each A2B Data™ profile (data extract process) executes?
Yes. A2B Data™ works collaboratively with any scheduling systems that you choose to use. You may choose to batch the processes or dynamically call A2B Data™ to start executions. A2B Data™ supports running the processes on customer chosen intervals (e.g. every 10 minutes, hourly, daily, etc).
Can the customer have any number of A2B Data™ profiles (data extract processes)?
Yes. There is no limit to the number of A2B Data™ profiles or profile objects.
Does A2B Data™ automatically identify the source tables and the associated column names and data types?
Yes. The customer chooses which source databases and tables A2B Data™ is to process. A2B Data™ will collect metadata about the databases and tables including column names and data types. From that metadata, all A2B Data™ is dynamically generated and monitored. A huge saving for you, as you don’t have to write a single line of code.
Will A2B Data™ automatically handle data type conversions from source to target systems?
Yes. We have automatically developed the data type mappings for you. For instance, if the source system table has a column defined in Oracle as Number (5,2), A2B Data™ will automatically define an appropriate data type and format for the target system (e.g., in Netezza it would be Numeric (5,2)).
Will A2B Data™ extract all data from source tables each time the data extract processes are executed?
This depends. The way A2B Data™ handles source data is configured for each source object (table) as either:
Extract all source data each time and copy all the data to the target.
Extract only data that has changed; we have several different methods you can choose from for your Change Data Capture (CDC) processing.
What does preserving changed history mean?
After a source table has been extracted in-full the first time, all subsequent executions of the extract process will extract and insert only the new and changed rows (records) into the target table. This results in a persistent Stage with a history of all data changes.
Where do the A2B Data™ profiles (data movement/update processes) execute?
A2B Data™ services will define/create the data extract processes but the processes will execute on the customer’s server with no data rows being sent to the Cloud.
Does any A2B Data™ code need to be installed on the customer’s server(s)?
The customer will need to install an A2B Data™ agent. The agent will create and execute the extract and load data processes. This process of installing the code is automated for you.
Since A2B Data™ is Cloud-based, how much network traffic will occur?
The A2B Data™ agent only occasionally communicates with the A2B Data™ Cloud server. The majority of network traffic will occur between the source and target data servers as one would expect from any data movement software product.
Can A2B Data™ be used for a one-time data conversion?
Absolutely. A2B Data™ can process any number of files/tables from more than one server, read all the data in the source files and tables, and copy all the data to one or more target servers. This can be executed once or multiple times. The initial execution will move all the data within the filter parameters and subsequent executions will move only the changed data since the last process time.
Is there an audit trail and error log?
Yes, A2B Data™ creates an audit trail and error log for each execution of a data extract process. A2B Data™ includes a facility to view or print the audit trail and error log.
Can we use A2B Data™ for an evaluation period in our environment?
Yes. The product can be downloaded and installed in your environment. The first 50 tables are for free for the first 24 months.
Can we see a live product demo?
Yes. Please visit Wyntec.com/a2bdata