Tool performance isn t taking a backseat, either. Many vendors have recently added enhanced loading capabilities for the leading target databases. New loaders in Hummingbird Ltd. s Genio Suite, for instance, significantly reduce the time required to manage large volumes of transactions. Other products, like Formation from Informix Software Inc., integrate parallelism into their architectures to take advantage of all available CPUs. By automatically segmenting a job across multiple CPUs, such tools boost performance while making more efficient use of enterprise resources.
Users can even specify parallel settings on individual operators or groups of operators.
Meanwhile, companies have introduced new techniques to help reduce the data processing workload, a particularly crucial consideration as warehouses sag under mountains of data and an escalating number of transactions. Products such as ChangeDataMove from BMC Software Inc. lets designers almost instantly reflect in the data warehouse incremental updates and changes in the operational transaction processing environment. That not only keeps target databases more current and consistent with source databases than they have been in the past, but it also allows the tool set to transform and transport to the target database only the data that has changed, thereby reducing the workload. When purchasing an ETL tool, a number of issues are worth considering. Take a close look at the architecture of the tool as well.