Informix Formation Speeds Data Transformation for Building Business Critical Data Warehouse
Informix Corporation, a technology leader in enterprise database-powered solutions, has unveiled Formation 1.4 at the DCI - Data Warehouse World Conference in Chicago. Originally designed to handle the volume and speed/performance required for clickstream data collection and processing, this powerful data extraction, transformation and load (ETL) tool now features complete native connectivity to all Informix databases -- along with 28 new usability enhancements and faster performance through the automatic parallelism of smart components which can utilize all available CPU resources during job execution. This enhanced performance and usability helps customers streamline the processing of their business critical data into enterprise-wide data warehouses.
"Customers who rely upon high capacity and high performance extraction, transformation and loading of source data into data warehouses will be pleased to know that our benchmark testing of Formation 1.4 has shown an average operator performance increase of 20 percent," said Bob Walters, vice president, business development, Informix Data Warehousing Division. "Now with complete native connectivity to all Informix databases and enhanced ease of use, Formation is the ETL tool of choice for unsurpassed performance for the manipulation of complex, business-critical data."
Expanded Power and Flexibility in ETL Processing
Formation eliminates the need to write complex custom code to collect, prepare and deliver data to the data warehouse environment by utilizing an innovative client/server architecture that allows the user to construct and deploy complex, multi-target transformation routines assisted by an intuitive, graphical user interface. In addition to providing complete native connectivity to Informix Dynamic Server and Informix Dynamic Server with Advanced Decision Support Option, Formation now offers native connectivity to Oracle8 Server, Informix Red Brick Warehouse and Microsoft SQL Server. These critical features -- along with surrogate key lookup and automatic parallelism -- ensure greater ease of use in importing, exporting and sharing jobs and functions among users in disparate computing environments. Other features new to Formation include comprehensive ISO 9000 compliance and multibyte character sets to support languages other than English, such as the Kanji characters of written Japanese.
Smart Design and Smart Components for Smart Execution
To provide sophisticated data extraction, transformation and load processing, Informix has enhanced Formation 1.4 with smarter design capabilities and smart components for more efficient execution. By enabling the generation of surrogate keys, Formation's 20 transformation-specific operators allow the seamless exchange of data from Windows NT to multi-processor UNIX boxes in production environments. Users with tight load windows and demanding transformation requirements will also appreciate the industry's most advanced join techniques, made possible by over 70 standard operator functions for manipulating numerous types of data critical to the enterprise.
Smart Data Processing for the Corporate Data Warehouse
The new features of Formation 1.4 will be critical to streamlining enterprise-wide operations along with enhancing the competitiveness of customers of previous versions of Formation as well as those new to the product. By providing an individual user with the ability to design, share and update custom features, customers will be able to exploit the capabilities of a single integrated application that extracts, cleanses, transforms and delivers data for integration into a single data store.
Availability
Formation 1.4 will be generally available in June of this year.
About Informix
Informix Corporation, based in Menlo Park, California, provides innovative database products that assist the world's major corporations to attain competitive advantage. Informix is widely recognized as the technology leader for corporate computing environments ranging from small workgroups to very large parallel processing applications. Informix's database server, application development tools, superior customer service, and strong partnerships enable the company to be at the forefront of major information technology solution areas including data warehousing, high performance OLTP, and Web/e-commerce. For more information, contact the sales office nearest you or visit our Web site at http://www.informix.com.