Syncsort
Analysis of Syncsort and its DMExpress data integration product. Related subjects include:
Syncsort extends Hadoop MapReduce
My client Syncsort:
- Is an ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) vendor, whose flagship product DMExpress was evidently renamed to DMX.
- Has a strong history in and fondness for sort.
- Has announced a new ETL product, DMX-h ETL Edition, which uses Hadoop MapReduce to parallelize DMX by controlling a copy of DMX that resides on every data node of the Hadoop cluster.*
- Has also announced the closely-related DMX-h Sort Edition, offering acceleration for the sorts inherent in Map and Reduce steps.
- Contributed a patch to Apache Hadoop to open up Hadoop MapReduce to make all this possible.
*Perhaps we should question Syncsort’s previous claims of having strong multi-node parallelism already. 🙂
The essence of the Syncsort DMX-h ETL Edition story is:
- DMX-h inherits the various ETL-suite trappings of DMX.
- Syncsort claims DMX-h has major performance advantages vs., for example, Hive- or Pig-based alternatives.
- With a copy of DMX on every node, DMX-h can do parallel load/export.
More details can be found in a slide deck Syncsort graciously allowed me to post. Read more
| Categories: Cloudera, Clustering, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Hadoop, MapReduce, Syncsort | 8 Comments |
Our clients, and where they are located
From time to time, I disclose our vendor client lists. Another iteration is below, the first since a little over a year ago. To be clear:
- This is a list of Monash Advantage members.
- All our vendor clients are Monash Advantage members, unless …
- … we work with them primarily in their capacity as technology users. (A large fraction of our user clients happen to be SaaS vendors.)
- We do not usually disclose our user clients.
- We do not usually disclose our venture capital clients, nor those who invest in publicly-traded securities.
- Excluded from this round of disclosure is one vendor I have never written about.
- Included in this round of disclosure is one client paying for services partly in stock. All our other clients are cash-only.
For reasons explained below, I’ll group the clients geographically. Obviously, companies often have multiple locations, but this is approximately how it works from the standpoint of their interactions with me. Read more
Data integration vendors and Hadoop
There have been many recent announcements about how data integration/ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) vendors are going to work with MapReduce. Most of what they say boils down to one or more of a few things:
- Hadoop generally stores data in HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System). ETL vendors want to be able to extract data from or load it into HDFS.
- ETL vendors have development environments that let you specify/script/whatever ETL jobs. ETL vendors want their development tools to develop ETL processes executed via MapReduce/Hadoop.
- In particular, this allows ETL vendors to exploit the parallel-processing capabilities of MapReduce.
Some additional twists include:
- Pentaho announced business intelligence and ETL for Hadoop last year.
- Syncsort thinks different sort algorithms should be usable with Hadoop. Consequently, it plans to contribute technology to the community to make sort pluggable into Hadoop. (However, Syncsort is keeping its own sort technology proprietary.)
- Syncsort is considering replicating some Hive functionality, starting with joins, hopefully running much faster. (However, Syncsort’s basic Hadoop support is a quarter or three away, so any more advanced functionality would probably come out in 2012 or beyond.)
- SnapLogic fondly thinks that its generation of MapReduce jobs is particularly intelligent.
Finally, my former clients at Pervasive, who haven’t briefed me for a while, seem to have told Doug Henschen that they have pointed DataRush at MapReduce.* However, I couldn’t find evidence of same on the Pervasive DataRush website beyond some help in using all the cores on any one Hadoop node.
*Also see that article because it names a bunch of ETL vendors doing Hadoop-related things.
| Categories: Data integration and middleware, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Hadoop, MapReduce, Parallelization, Pentaho, Pervasive Software, SnapLogic, Syncsort | 1 Comment |
Introduction to Syncsort and DMExpress
Let’s start with some Syncsort basics.
- Syncsort was founded in 1968.
- As you might guess from its name and age, Syncsort started out selling software for IBM mainframes, used for sorting data. However, for the past 30 or so years, Syncsort’s products have gone beyond sort to also do join, aggregation, and merge. This was the basis for Syncsort’s expansion into the more general ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) business.
- As you might further guess, along the way there was a port to UNIX, development of a GUI (Graphical User Interface), and a change of ownership as Syncsort’s founder more or less cashed out.
- At this point, Syncsort sees itself primarily as a data integration/ETL company, whose main claim to fame is performance, with further claims of linear scaling and no manual tuning.*
One of Syncsort’s favorite value propositions is to contrast the cost of doing ETL in Syncsort, on commodity hardware, to the cost of doing ELT (Extract/Load/Transform) on high-end Teradata gear.