Big Data and Big Migration equals Big Money. Is there a better solution?
Up until now, the data acquisition and data migration industry has been big money. Most of the tools currently used on the market not only take up a lot of resources, but require a lot of time-which translates into a lot of money. On average, a mid size company can spend from $100K to $200K per month on capital expenditure. Over the course of a year, a company will end up spending millions for just managing the data acquisition and data migration efforts. Not to mention there are tons of risks involved, and a reported 83% rate of issues in traditional data migration. Such problems as data loss, downtime, technical compatibility issues, data quality, data corruption and application performance issues are the main risks.
So what’s the solution?
Finding a tool that can automate the data acquisition process to not only streamline the project delivery, but to minimize the cost and risk.
Sounds simple, doesn’t it?
Does something like this even exist on the market yet? The answer is YES.
A2B Data™ was developed just for this purpose; in the hands of expert resources A2B Data™ performs all the necessary data acquisition function and is the “EL” in the Extraction, Transformation and Load (ETL) framework. Most organizations are shying away from expensive and clumsy ETL tools to perform the data acquisition processes, as these tools require manual coding and develop the mappings one object at a time. In most cases, ETL tools are misused as wrapper to hand coded SQL based transformations. The emerging trend is to automate the mundane and repetitive efforts and dedicate the resources to complex transformations. Simply put, the customer’s appetite for data is larger than what a fully manual coded environment can satisfy.
Since A2B Data™ does all the data acquisition functions, your expert resources are freed up to perform the complex transformations to support your reporting, EDW and data mart environments. This synergy between expert resource and automation gives customers the most ideal utilization of resources, time and cost.
A2B Data™ is metadata driven and all code is dynamically generated, thus no code is necessary to maintain. With this approach all change and release management is performed by A2B Data™, faster turnaround time for project deliveries are observed, more data quality and consistency in data management is guaranteed. This is a benefit when compared to using traditional ETL tools as resource time and cost is extremely high.
Why reinvent the wheel when it is already captured in A2B Data™?
The necessary best-practice design methods to manage an enterprise data acquisition environment are already built into A2B Data™. Over two decades of expert knowledge has gone into the R&D effort to ensure A2B Data™ passes all the best-practice design considerations and design patterns.
Let’s look at a brief overview:
- A2B Data™ is a metadata driven solution that automates the data acquisition process
- It’s a highly responsive OS independent solution
- Light footprint installation in enterprise network
- Automated data type mappings between heterogeneous source/target database systems
- Easy migrations across environments
- Identify and apply changes from your source system to land/stage
- Local network driven solution with cloud based interface
- Data and Credentials never leaves local network
- Complete history and audit of all jobs
- Aging reports and job statistics are captured in the meta-model
- Easy access to monitor loads and progress from any tablet/Smart Phone.
A data warehouse without an enterprise stage or data lake is risky at best and does not meet your long-term needs.
Whether it is a data warehouse, data mart, data migration or data integration layer all these frameworks require solid data acquisition architecture. The source data extracted from disparate heterogeneous systems is persisted into a common stage database. The design of stage object includes historic data and changed data captured with varying data latency. A2B Data™ manages this component of extracting, migrating and loading real-time, event triggered or scheduled data. A2B Data™ is codeless and utilizes metadata driven design patterns to perform flexible change data capture (CDC) methods from any flat file or source database.
Landing your data is not the same as staging your data
With A2B Data™ you can choose either or both methods:
Convert your source data into a central landing database. The landing database mirrors the source database. This option lets you convert all your existing long running operational reports off of your source system by pointing them to landing database.
Transform your source data into a central staging database. Customizable and adaptable type-2 change to preserve column history and effective dating. This option prepares your stage database to be non volatile, historic and of quality – three key factors of an enterprise data warehouse and allows you to mine the data for a given point-in-time slice.
This is not possible with most Operational Transaction Processing Systems (OLTP) or Operational Data Store (ODS) as little history is preserved.
A2B Data™ with the metadata driven portal manages all the extract and load processes, design and control. Traditional change data capture methods impose a lot of overhead in maintenance on your source systems, whereas A2B Data™ has versatile extract methods to read source data from any RDBMS and flat files. And A2B Data™ can design & develop new custom extraction methods suitable for your business needs. A2B Data™ also supports different latency requirements from near real-time (messaging or HL7), triggered or time based data executions.
How do you manage remote data?
A2B Data™ can interface external data found in the Cloud, extranet or remote services. The flexible framework can perform the data acquisition process from remote location to a central server and ensures all the data is encrypted and protected during the submission process.
A2B Data™ is disruptive technology the changes the data acquisition paradigm by automating the process. Includes all the best practices designs for extracting and detecting change, leverages metadata driven rules engine, does not produce ETL code, optimized loads, extensible changed data capture, generates error free target tables and eliminates a lot of unnecessary time and cost.
Customers can now receive their data, when they want it, how they want it and where they want it without all the costly overhead.
