Re: ETI from Evolutionary Technologies, Inc.????

In article <1994Nov17.005114.29289_at_bMD.com>, kevins_at_bmd.com says:
>Does any of you have experience with ETI from Evolutionary Technologies, Inc.?
>
>Looking for info on how well it works with rather complex table schemes and
>non standard templates...

First a disclaimer: this is my opinion and not the official position of my employer, EDS.

I used ETI Extract on a project this past summer and came away with the following impressions:

1. The standard templates handle simple conversions nicely. I define a simple conversion as mostly one-to-one or one-to-many mappings of source fields to target fields with some minor conversions (if source field = x then target field = y). However, more complex conversions, such as converting a source value to a target value via a lookup table (either in memory or via file/database I/O) require creation of custom templates. The custom templates should be written generically so that they can be reused in future conversions. This requires a lot of time and programming talent to do correctly.
2. I was not impressed with the tool's ability to handle complex schemas. We had the situation where our source was denormalized with multiple occurrences of a field on one record. We wanted to convert to a more normalized schema with multiple rows containing one field per row. We could not accomplish this without creating a custom template (see #1).

We used Extract to generate 2 simple conversions and were pleased with the results. However, after a month of struggling to generate a more complex conversion, we gave up and hand-wrote a program in less than 2 weeks in order to meet a pressing deadline.

I feel the tool has a lot of potential if a company is willing to devote resources to creating the additional templates necessary to handle complicated conversions. The cost of the customization would have to be recovered over multiple conversions. Therefore, don't use it if you are planning on doing just one conversion or if you have extremely tight deadlines or staffing for the first conversion.

I would be interested in hearing a response from Evolutionary Technologies to see if any of these issues are being addressed.

Mark D. Garner, Sr. Systems Engineer
EDS Corporate Information Systems
EMAIL: msmwhq09.mgarne01_at_eds.com
PHONE: (214) 605-3183
Disclaimer: I am NOT the Mark Garner associated with MAKE.MONEY.FAST Received on Mon Nov 21 1994 - 19:06:05 CET