Hummingbird Ltd.’s Genio Suite data integration platform will soon offer native support for XML to provide near real-time data exchange for companies faced with the challenge of sharing and analyzing data that reside in disparate systems.
Genio Suite 5.0, to be released this month, will natively support XML, meaning XML won’t have to be altered into flat files (files that aren’t linked or related) and can be immediately shared between systems using messaging protocols.
Now, Genio Suite reads XML as any text file, without processing the XML tags. In version 5.0, Genio can read the XML structure and easily pull data from within the different XML tags. So, data from XML files will be quickly and easily moved into the integration platform to be shared with other systems.
“We want to extend the capability of the product to be able to use the e-business environment,” said Mathias Evin, product manager at Hummingbird. “More and more people today are realizing that loading data during the night is no longer possible because of the amount of data. What people want to do is refresh data warehousing during the day and use a near-to-real-time mode to directly push the information inside the warehouse.”
Other updates in version 5.0 include tighter integration with SAP, Evin said.
“We know that the messaging system is great when you want to process data, but as long as you want to transform the data that is inside the file you can do that with an EAI [Enterprise Application Integration] solution,” Evin said.
“Our approach is basically a combination of an ETL [extraction, transformation and loading] tool and an EAI tool,” he added. ETL refers to the functions needed to pull data out of one database and put them into another.
That puts Hummingbird in competition with other EAI vendors such as IBM Corp. and its MQSeries software, which uses message-oriented middleware to integrate platforms. Genio Suite 5.0 will include this messaging technology and its standard database extraction tools.
Len Mori, project manager of infrastructure for Trimac Corp., a trucking company in Calgary, said he’s looking forward to the XML support because it will simplify sharing data between systems.
Trimac has used the Genio Suite for about 18 months to store data from its PeopleSoft Inc. financial and human resource applications and an operational trucking system it runs on Sybase in an Oracle Corp. data warehouse. Now, users can easily access information from all those systems to analyze things such as loaded miles travelled and gross vehicle weight.
With the XML support, the data sharing will be more efficient, Mori said.
Pricing for version 5.0 was not available at press time. For more information, visit the company on the Web at www.hummingbird.com.