Why Use SQR Integrator for your Data Warehouse?

When contemplating a Data Warehouse, almost all companies go through a selection process. The selection process usually entails both a qualitative and quantitative analysis on subject such as cost, ease of use, speed, maintainability, and so on. When looking at the ETL Tool landscape, you may wish to consider using SQR Integrator, which has significant advantages for a large portion of the medium to large sized enterprise. If your enterprise already has PeopleSoft, ADP Payroll, or some other enterprise system that has SQR (Sequential Query Reportwriter) embedded in it, SQR Integrator can offer you real value for your IT budget.

SQR already in production

By virtue of the fact that SQR is a much more mature technology than most ETL tools, and due to the big Y2K “remediate or replace” that happened with ERP systems, the availability of SQR talent is much greater than other ETL tools. In some cases, implementation teams with dozens of SQR developers. The usual data warehouse implementation has only a few ETL developers at best.

Lower Training Costs

If you have resources that already know SQR, SQR Integrator training will be a breeze
for you current resource. SQR Integrator is repository based, with user generated
“commerce objects” that contain business logic. These commerce objects are visually
connected together in a mapping that allows the user to generate ETL scripts in SQR. A
resource who already knows the technical and functional aspects of SQR in a production
environment will generally be a quick study with this ETL tool. Once they create a
mapping, they will be able to see the results in SQR, which they readily understand.

Ease of use

The Graphical User Interface only requires mastery of 6 basic objects: Source, Target,
Filter, Join, Transform, and Database Strategy. Once your resources are familiar with the
basic objects, creating just about any SQR is a snap.

Ease of maintenance

Unlike using manually written SQR, SQR Integrator saves all business logic into a
repository. When changes have to be made to an ETL process, the user can easily
identify the commerce object that requires the change. Once the changes are made, the
user can save the mapping to the repository, and then generate the new ETL script that
reflects the changes. There is also a facility for impact analysis for proposed changes.

Use your existing platform

Your company may have an enterprise server that has an enterprise application and
database, such as PeopleSoft HR, Payroll, Financial, or maybe a standalone ADP payroll
application with SQR already installed. If that is the case, you already have all you need
to run SQR Integrator. Since the Application Interface is only accessing your database
for the purposes of building an ETL SQR, the only significant impact to your current
production system is the added burden of running more SQR programs.

Widely available resources

Since there are upwards of 25,000 ERP installations that use SQR, the SQR skill set is
widely available in most medium and large sized labor markets. Instead of using a brand
new tool set with the associated training and recruitment costs, use SQR Integrator, with
its large pool of trained SQR developers.

Platform Stability

SQR Integrator outputs ETL code in the SQR language. SQR is one of the fastest, most stable interface languages ever built. It is noted for its rock solid stability in the production arena.

SQR Integrator tunes the SQR to the database; other ETL tools require the database to be tuned for it.

In a perfect world, API based ETL tools would be able to tune their queries to the database. In practice for large processes, a developer needs to request that the DBA tune the indexes for the process. SQR Integrator will allow the developer to pick the already generated indexes from PeopleSoft and ADP systems.

This removes yet another step in the development cycle. There have been many complaints in the past that current mainstream ETL tool architectures have inherent weaknesses when using them against some enterprise applications, in particular, PeopleSoft, ADP, or other applications that have SQR embedded in them. This is due to the inability of some architecture to join more than twosources simultaneously, disallowing the use of some of the indexes already used with the source application.

SQR Integrator uses PowerJoin Technology tm to allow the simultaneous join of even a dozen tables. Some companies are even dropping back to hand coding SQR to get around using the ETL tools altogether. If this is a possible situation your company could get into, consider SQR Integrator. Implementation Science Resources have 50,000 + hours of implementation time that has gone into the planning and development of a tool that can make using SQR in an ETL environment much easier.

SQR Integrator is an object oriented, repository based ETL enterprise tool. Although SQR Integrator has a visual drag and drop development environment, it only uses the speed, stability and power of SQR to do the heavy lifting, instead of having to pump data through an API engine. There is no client or network based contention as in some of the current ETL offerings, especially when incorporating flat file sources into the mapping. SQR Integrator is fast, mpp capable, stable tool that was made specifically with the large data warehouse in need of speed in mind.