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Message Posted: Tue, 08 Jan 2002 @ 16:11:38 GMT

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Rohit, as my site has just gone through an ETL evaluation process (and selected Hummingbird's Genio), perhaps you could use my experience. My choice was between Informatica and Genio and for both the expected plan was that the tool would perform the source extraction and transformation and then use the Teradata utilities for loading.

And with Informatica, this was the only option, all data had to pass through the ETL engine. But with Genio, we got another option, I guess best described as an ELT process. Genio would extract data, then use utility to load, and then send sql commands to Teradata to perform transformations. And this is a nice option if your transformations can be accomplished by sql (which is true for my site) because you take advantage of Teradata's parallel execution. Also Genio supports Fastload and Multiload, but Informatica only supports Mulitload (I guess because it expects you to load the target table directly as the transformations must already be done).

Another extension of this is if you ever want to do ETL on a Teradata box and just move data from one DB to another. Yes, you could just write the sql, but if you wanted to use the ETL tool for some reason, then Informatica would require you to extract the data to the ETL server, perform the transformations, and then reload it back (again because all data must pass through the engine). Genio though would allow you to just submit sql scripts to Teradata with no data export or load.

I can't really say if one or the other is better on the extract part or if they will support all of your source systems, but they were both sufficient here for us. The transformation options were really the deciding factors. If you plan on using a 3rd party data cleansing tool though, Informatica by far does have integration with more vendors if that is important to you.

Feel free to send me a direct email if you would like more info.

Jason Fortenberry
Argosy Gaming Company

P.S. In no way is this email intended to start an ETL tool debate, but simply to share my specific experience.

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