An EII/ETL Détente – Can’t We All Just Get Along?

There seems to be quite a bit of angst out there among the data integration crowd. So much wrangling over the new kid on the block, EII.

Wars of words often start with differences of ideology. When EII arrived, some vendors (wrongly) suggested that EII was the new data warehouse, replacing the old data warehouse and ETL process with a new, virtual data warehouse. This affront was met with a torrent of criticisms against EII. Articles with very angry-sounding titles appeared. Most were, predictably, written by ETL vendors looking to excoriate EII.

Recently, the ice in this cold war has started to thaw. In the past nine months, a new wave of more enlightened articles has emerged. First Neil Raden surveyed the integration landscape in December’s Intelligent Enterprise. Greg Mancuso and Al Moreno from Sinecon wrote an excellent overview of available integration strategies in April’s DM Review. Curt Hall from the Cutter Consortium wrote an excellent piece on the fit between EII and Data Warehousing in May. And hopefully that’s just the beginning.

Speaking for my fellow EII vendors, I can say that we hold certain truths to be self-evident: that there is no better way to load a data warehouse than ETL; that ETL performance and transformation capabilities are better suited for large volume data transfers; that we have no designs on replacing data warehouses.

Rather, we see an exciting future for EII. It will be a piece of the integration landscape, working together alongside ETL. We see innovative ways of delivering real-time information. We see innovative ways of delivering data from data warehouses. There are kinks to be worked out, to be sure, but this is true of every new technology.

Based on customer reaction, EII has found its place and will continue to grow. Over the past few years, significant improvements in the areas of performance and metadata integration have been made. Advances in transformation and caching capabilities continue to be made.

 To borrow and repurpose a quote idea from Neil’s article, as Victor Hugo once said "There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come." We think the time is now for EII. Rather than fighting a war of words, cooperation is in order. Only a détente will ultimately bring the right balance of technologies to customers. So can’t we all just get along?

Comments

[Dan Linstedt]

Hi Tim,

This is a great entry, and I hope to learn a lot more about EII, where it fits and how it's going to grow up. If you have a chance next week - drop me an email, and maybe we can chat on the phone?

EII has a strong suit for solving some of the trickiest brittle pipe integration problems, I wonder what would happen if it got a customer facing UI and a data mining engine behind it? Of course, that would be an SOA in process, with an enterprise portal and the data mining would be in the database (as it should be).

Just some thoughts,
Dan L
http://www.B-Eye-Network.com