Hi, we're in the process of preparimg a study for
the akquisition of an ETL tool. We're fully convinced
that an ETL tool will increase productivity and will
pay .. But we would prefer to beef up our arguments
with some kind of quantitative study on programmer
productivity increases by using ETL tools

Any links, pointers, studies?

Thanks in advance

Wolfgang

"Wolfgang Keller" <wk (AT) objectarchitects (DOT) de> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:ae01a906.0312081042.6f24cb60 (AT) posting (DOT) google.com...

Hello Wolfgang,

I doubt that you will find more than success stories and generic hints on
how ETL tools can increase productivity. You will most probably find the
first on the Web pages of the ETL vendors. The reason for my assumption that
the increase of productivity cannot be expressed in plain numbers is that
there are so many factors, like the amount of data sources, data quality,
data transformation issues, data quality management and so on. Every
environments differs from the next.

For a functional overview I would like to point you to www.barc.de. We
tested pure ETL tools and the ETL functionality provided by data bases and
compiled a report out of it.

Kind regards,

Joerg Narr

"Joerg Narr" <n_o_spa_mjoerg_narr (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> wrote

Joerg,

thanks! Your answer is in line with what I heard from a metrics guru
He had never seen a piece on ETL productivity passing over his desk ..
Seems I can stop searching

Thanks anyway

Wolfgang

PS: HEY ACADEMICS - here's a potential Ph.D. theme .. it's free, it's
interesting and nobody has done it yet :-)

You must be kidding.



ETL is one of the most ridiculous pieces of software that adds absolutely no
value to your data; quantitatively ZERO. All an ETL tool does is converting
operational data so that it can be fed into else where. Why didn't some one
engineer in the first place that 'else where' to be good enough to take
operational data as it is? ETL is just a work around of poorly engineered
artifacts and in your opinion it 'increases productivity"?



Think of this example: you need to copy a piece of text from the browser and
past it into your email editor. What happens if you have to 'convert' the
copied text through a tool before you can paste it to your editor? Do you
still think that conversion tool increases your productivity or you think
that editor poorly engineered? This reflects the current state of ETL and
OLAP engine.



Only to throw you a different opinion that you don't see very often.



-ping



PS. A person is soo narrow minded that he can see the world through a
keyhole, with both of his eyes.




"Wolfgang Keller" <wk (AT) objectarchitects (DOT) de> wrote

Ping Luo <ping (AT) pivotlink (DOT) com> wrote:
It is even worse. It adds coupling and reduces cohesion, and thus adds
negative value. As a temporary measure, before the old systems can be
refactored sufficiently, it could make sense, though.

Stephan