SAS Takes Data Integration to New Heights with Improved ETL Capabilities
With sophisticated change analysis capabilities and automatic grid computing support, SAS® Enterprise ETL Server increases speed and flexibility of ETL design, management, and execution.
CARY, N.C. (Oct. 4, 2005) SAS, a leader in business intelligence, today announced new features of SAS® Enterprise ETL Server that increase the productivity and add flexibility to extraction, transformation, and load (ETL) processes. As the first vendor to offer advanced change analysis capabilities, SAS has significantly streamlined the process of understanding and managing complex metadata changes, saving hours of manpower on complex manual work. In addition, automatic support for distributed and grid computing environments makes it even easier for businesses to take advantage of the massive speed and productivity gains offered by grid technologies.
"With ETL design and development consuming internal resources at an ever-increasing rate, there is an acute need to bring greater efficiency and effectiveness to this process," said Joe Augustine, worldwide product marketing manager for data integration at SAS. "The enhancements to SAS Enterprise ETL Server show SAS' commitment to providing our customers with the most innovative technology available to help companies achieve data integration, business intelligence, and analytical success, starting at the earliest phase of the process. By further optimizing ETL within the data integration process, our customers can spend less time worrying about the accuracy, availability and reliability of their data, and can instead turn their attention toward using that data to create cohesive enterprise intelligence."
The newest features of SAS Enterprise ETL Server include:
Unprecedented change analysis capabilities. ETL designers now have the power to proactively identify and discover how even the smallest change in design could impact an entire project. With the ability to precisely control which metadata changes are applied throughout their projects, designers can significantly improve efficiency throughout the ETL process from creation to execution saving hours of tedious manual effort.
Automatic support for grid and distributed computing environments. SAS also announced today that it is the first vendor to integrate grid-computing management capabilities within its enterprise intelligence platform, specifically for its data integration and data mining applications. By grid-enabling SAS' data integration offering, businesses can better use their existing computing resources to handle larger amounts of data in less time and without the need for additional hardware.
Major productivity enhancements. An improved user interface, enhanced debugging tools, wizard-driven table designers, and improved collaboration support all help to shorten development time and reduce maintenance costs.
Broad platform support, including 64-bit architectures. SAS has always supported the widest array of hardware and operating systems of any data integration vendor, and now SAS extends that support to include 64-bit platforms. This support gives users significant flexibility to adapt as their needs grow, accessing and running data regardless of the source.
SAS Enterprise ETL Server continues to deliver additional features and functionality that improve the data integration process. These enhancements include integrated data quality to ensure data is clean and accurate; data lineage and impact analysis capabilities to track and monitor the evolution of data elements; and the ability to easily access data from a wide variety of external data files, including legacy formats, without the need to write custom code -- something that is typically required by other vendors.
"SAS Enterprise ETL Server is uniquely capable in its ability to reduce the time required to handle complex data transformations," continued Augustine. "From metadata management to data migration, synchronization, and profiling, SAS handles it all with one product that can help companies achieve true data integration and BI success."
"In our fast-moving business, we need to deal with changed data and data structures quickly and efficiently," said Christophe Ponsart, marketing information system manager at Sofinco, a leading consumer credit firms in France. "It is imperative to understand how changes of source systems will impact our BI operations. SAS helps us to understand and deal with change effectively."
"We strive to minimize changes to our data model, but sometimes changes do occur" said Bjørn Lange, warehouse manager from SDC. "SAS allows us to compare our data models and BI metadata definitions side-by-side in a powerful user interface, helping us to identify what is out-of-sync and to specify where synchronization needs to happen. This saves us lots of manual, arduous, person-intensive work."
SAS Enterprise ETL Server http://www.sas.com/technologies/dw/entetlserver/index.html is an integral part of the SAS®9 Enterprise Intelligence Platform, which is an integrated, open, and extensible foundation for creating and delivering accurate, in-depth intelligence. From data integration and storage capabilities to business intelligence and analytic tools, the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform helps decrease existing intelligence gaps and provides a solid business analytics architecture that supports business processes at any level of an organization. More information about the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform is available here: http://www.sas.com/technologies/architecture/
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