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Product Snapshot: DT/Studio

Embarcadero enhances ETL tool with real-time capabilities

JavaWorld.com, 09/13/02

September 13, 2002 — Earlier this year, Embarcadero Technologies entered the ETL (extraction, transformation, and loading) tools market with its launch of DT/Studio. The developer of such cross-platform database tools as DBArtisan (for database administration) and ER/Studio (for entity relationship-modeling), Embarcadero Technologies moved into the ETL space after hearing its own customers' demands.

"We were being asked repeatedly for a tool that would do cross-platform data movement, cleansing, and scrubbing—your traditional ETL tool," says Stephen Aikins, DT/Studio's product manager. ETL tools let users quickly extract data from its source and move it to a specific location. Because traditional ETL tools don't have a foundation in Java, they lack platform independence. Seeing an opportunity, Embarcadero built DT/Studio with a Java-based engine, thus setting itself apart from competing products.

"Most ETL tools have self-standing server software," says Philip Russom, research director at Giga Information Group. "But then these predate reliable JVMs. DT/Studio has the ironic advantage of being late to market. JVMs have improved significantly in the last two years or so, and it now makes sense for a processing-intense server like an ETL tool to rely on a JVM for execution."

In addition to its unusual foundation in Java, Russom also praises DT/Studio's well-developed feature set, which Embarcadero borrows from its other products, like ER/Studio. Through a visual development environment, DT/Studio lets users move data from multiple sources to any location or application in three steps:

  1. Using ER/Studio, the tool reverse-engineers the existing operational data
  2. DT/Studio transforms the data from the original source into the user-established data format
  3. It populates the target or application at the optimum speed required


Last month, Embarcadero enhanced DT/Studio's features with the Delta Agent module, which examines the source system, identifies changes, and sends only those changes to the target system. The module adds real-time capabilities to DT/Studio, which, as Russom explains, is nothing new in the ETL space. However, most ETL competitors integrate these capabilities directly into an EAI (enterprise application integration) tool.

"Informatica PowerCenter, Ascential DataStage, and Acta's [recently purchased by Business Objects] ActaWorks currently support such [real-time] integration," says Russom. "But bolting on an EAI tool is expensive and the integration is fragile."

By offering Delta Agent as a separate plug-in, Embarcadero lowers the barrier to achieving real-time capabilities. "They've developed a slightly cheaper way to get a similar near-time data movement capability that relies on replication technology," continues Russom.

Keeping DT/Studio at a moderate price point is key to Embarcadero's strategy. "Every company has a need for an ETL tool," says Aikins. "It's been a question of whether they could afford to do it."

Because most ETL tools come with a three-figure price tag, many companies, like Cerqa based in Austin, Texas, create their own version.

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