When Logi ETL Can Help You Integrate Your Data

If you are a data integrator, a data architect, a database administrator or a developer, you understand the different types of requirements your organization has for keeping your data integrated, organized and ready for analysis. In particular, you need to ask yourself these questions:

• Do you need an easy way to integrate your data across multiple applications including your BI reporting and dashboards?
• Is the volume of your data growing significantly?
• Is your organization working with increasingly diverse data sources?
• Do you want to ensure that your data is more accurate and better understood?
• Do you want to give your users the flexibility to work with their favorite tools (e.g. Excel, Google Spreadsheets) without forcing these into one centralized application?
• Are you a current Logi Info or Logi Ad Hoc user who needs extra scalability and a powerful way to integrate your data?
• In summary, are you looking for a better way to manage or create a process around your data?

If the answer to one or more of these questions is “yes,” Logi ETL is for you.

Finding answers to these questions is important for the data integration success of your enterprise. You need to be aware of the following situations:

1 – When Real-time Data Integration is Essential – The demand for current information is becoming increasingly important for users to make critical decisions. Next generation ETL tools are allowing this to happen. If analysis on yesterdays’ data just isn’t cutting it within your organization, Web-based ETL provides all of the crucial integration points; these allow your business applications to work with highly available, real-time, and diverse data.

2 – When Data Becomes More Diverse – As you grow your data and applications and need to introduce the latest technology, you can turn to models that facilitate this growth. The Software as a Service (SaaS) model is one example. Allowing SaaS applications to manage your data allows your company to focus on your core competencies without having to also manage hardware and databases. Salesforce.com and Amazon SimpleDB are among these newer, less traditional data sources.

Also, different and better application tools are becoming available to the end user. Examples are Excel, Open Office and Google SpreadSheets; users will turn to these tools to store data rather than keeping it all in one big centralized database. So now you have an organization with a large amount of data, plus diverse data sources that you need to consolidate and manage. With this diversity, you lose on data quality and process significantly, so ETL becomes a requirement to bring all of this together.

3 – When Your Data Volumes are Growing Significantly – This can be due to your having more databases to work with and finding it harder to get intelligent information efficiently from your data. When this situation leads to queries taking longer and a diminished confidence in the accuracy of your reports, organizing your data through an ETL process is the solution.

In this case, Logi ETL gives you a means to organize the data and a managed process to ensure data quality. You can also gain better knowledge of the data through techniques for data profiling. This other essential part of ETL will help you understand a) what your data represents and b) how you can continue improving the process and quality of information so you can make better business decisions.