I was happy to see a new article in this month's Teradata Magazine titled "EII, ETL or EAI: Making sense of the alphabet soup." Written by well-regarded BI expert Claudia Imhoff, the article does a nice job describing when to use each.
I also like the subhead: "Here is your common-sense guide to modern-day integration." What's not-so-subtly suggested by the subhead is that integration technologies continue to progress, so anyone with the words 'data' or 'architect' who does not know about EII (the newest of the three) is, to put it gently, out of date.
Perhaps the best thing is that the article was published in Teradata Magazine. As I've written in the past, EII is not the enemy of the EDW. Lots of companies are using the two in conjunction. Even more are considering using the two together. Anyone who works with Teradata needs to know the advantages EII can bring to their deployments.
I've been following Claudia's writing on this topic for a while now, and I can say there are few who know it better. Plus she's well known to the BI and EDW crowd, so she's got street cred. Which is good, because Teradata users need to hear this kind of stuff from people whose opinion they trust.
One last thing. While I agree with her statement that no one should consider building a data warehouse using EII, one thing not specifically mentioned in the article that may be of interest is the idea of using EII as a prototyping tool for new EDW deployments. It can be very cost effective. Once the utility is proven, move up to something more scalable. It's something we've had success with in our work as a Teradata partner.
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