Ab InitioFrom the Data Warehousing

Perspective

Data Warehousing

Why did it arise? Large Corporations gathered huge amounts of

data. Sooner, they were data rich but information

poor. Large body of disparate data, difficult to make

informed business decisions.

Solution!!!

Users wanted more control over their data Each department request data specific to their

department. Varying amounts of data from the same

source.One Solution to the PROBLEMS---Information/Data Warehouse.

What is Data Warehousing?

Data Warehousing is an architecture System for storing, retrieving and managing

large amounts of any type of data. Data warehousing concerned in moving data

from its current location to the data warehouse and transforming data into information.

E.T.L-----What is it??

E.T.L stands for Extraction, Transformation Loading.

This is the principle used in Data Warehousing

Characteristics of Data Warehousing

Application independent Collected at any moment in a business cycle. Metadata has been created for it. Easily understood by a non-technical

Characteristics of data in data warehouse

Subject Oriented

Integrated

Non-volatile

Time Variant

Subject-Oriented

Focus on entities rather than on process. A Subject-Oriented data warehouse is called a

Data Mart

ETL Tools

Many tools are being used in Data Warehousing for the purpose of ETL.

Ab Initio is one of the major ETL tool.

What is Ab Initio?

Latin word, meaning “From First Principles” ETL tool, developed by Ab Initio software

corporation (http://www.abinitio.com) Used in data warehousing, batch processing

and application integration.

Why Ab Initio?

Achieving Scalability Reduced Development Time Managing Metadata Integrating Other Applications

Features

Basic Components: Filter by Expression, Reformat, Sort, Join, Rollup, Dedup

Database Components: Input, Output and Update Table; db_config_utility

Built in Functions: Ab Initio built-in functions are those which can manipulate strings, dates, and numbers can access system properties

Vectors: An array of same type of elements that is repeated

Look Up Function

Built-in function within a transform function that allows a transform component to retrieve records from a look up file

Held in main memory Faster as searching and retrieval is key based Not connected to other components in a graph

Alternatives for Ab Initio

Informatica and Ascential are alternatives for Ab Initio but the main disadvantage is they are tougher to work with.

Highlights

Every plug-in facility available from industry leaders Informatica and Ascential incorporated into Ab Initio

Fastest ETL, possible to extract 41 million rows of data from an Oracle 8i database (Geneva billing system!) in about 5.2 minutes

Success Stories

Bank of Montreal-Moving 10 terabytes (TB) of data daily and analyzing it done using Ab Initio

Premier Inc. (www.premierinc.com health care services) successfully handled 14 TB of data using Ab Initio to achieve scalability and data quality

End

Thank You for your time!!