PRO2 SQL For Data Warehouse Replication

[jennid]

Hello All-Our ERP system is SX.enterprise, version 6.0.060, running Progress version 10.2B04. We are in the process of designing a data warehouse and are investigating options for syncing the data in the Progress SX.enterprise database with the data warehouse SQL database. We came up with a high level design for creating this functionality in-house using database triggers to write the changes in the Progress database out to a queue that would be used to update the SQL database. We are now checking into out of the box applications that do this so we can determine if we can buy something cheaper than developing it ourselves (we have a bit of a resource shortage right now). We are looking at a solution offered by Bravepoint called PRO2SQL:

http://www.bravepoint.com/products-pro2-replication-suite.shtml

Have any of you used this product? I'd be interested in hearing your expereinces....good or bad. I would also like to know if there are similiar products you've used and how you liked them.

Thanks.

 

[Marian EDU]

Re: Pro 2 sql

Can't tell you anything about PRO2SQL solution but I'll venture to make a few comments on the subject...

In a typical data warehouse environment you don't need real-time replication, the usual suspects there are ETL tools (extract-transform-load). You probably worry about incremental load but most of the 'fact' tables - the ones that business users are interested in, and usually with the largest number of records (orders, sales, stock changes and so on...) does have a 'time information' attached so it's quite easy to come up with an incremental load strategy. As for the dimension tables (customers, products, ...) you should think if implementing 'slowly changing dimensions' are needed or you can get along with the 'current view'.

There are a number of good ETL tools in the open source world that you can check-out, not everyone can jump for Informatica Power Center, Ascential or Business Objects... most of those do offer good connectivity: RDBMS (JDBC), Excel, flat files, web-services and have a number of useful transformations that can be used for 'data cleansing'... you'll probably find that the same information is present in multiple applications and for each subject matter a leader should be appointed and cleansing will be required along the line.

Even better the 'data' can be exported from the 'business logic' layer instead of going directly to the database and then 'apply' the business logic on target database using views, stored procedures or end-up by putting it directly into the reports (you do target for unified reporting and probably some sort of business intelligence i guess)...