What is datawarehouse automation?

Hi Ajulius,

Can you expliain what is exactly datawarehouse automation?

Is the ETL script generated automatically?, what about complex business rules?

Thanks,

Data Warehouse Automation products accelerate the design, development and maintenance of ETL/ELT processes.

DWA tools differ from traditional ETL tools (ie, SSIS, Informatica, etc.) by offering features like:

o Best practice, methodology-specific, design and code
o Metadata driven design and development
o DDL and ETL code generation
o Data lineage and impact analytics
o Documentation generation
o Agile development support

The key difference is that, with ETL tools, you still have to write code. Whether you're dragging arrows between blocks on a diagram, filling the blanks in XML, or coding in a domain-specific language, you're still writing code. DWA products focus on your design, and write the code for you.

As you've seen from my response to an earlier question of yours, there are many DWA tools in the market, supporting a wide range of target platforms and DW methodologies. Browse some of those web sites for a better understanding of what's in the market

When you think about it, all data warehouse loading functions fall into specific code patterns.  Surrogate key resolution, key dependancies, what kind of dimension is it, what columns have history, are facts insert only or snapshots? So in an automation tool the loading part becomes more declarative than procedural. You map what goes where and the system does the rest.

Aginity Amp is such a tool as well.  It implements a store and publish architecture that manages the entire environment.  It also extends the publication side to include customized derived attributes (such as segmentations, complex calculations, etc).