“Helical Scrunch" - Product to overcome ETL shortcomings by Helical

Regaining the faith of the clients in the company for bringing innovative products to make business more profitable and easy process working, Helical IT Solutions has launched its ambitious product HELICAL SCRUNCH into the market to solve the existing ETL issues faced by the companies.

• One of its own kind, Helical Scrunch will reduce the time, effort & resource requirement by approx 30-70%

• High end visualization & control of ETL jobs, status, errors, data flow, configurations etc

Nitin Sahu, Co-founder, Helical IT Solutions said, “We are really excited to launch Helical Scrunch which will further lessen the complications which exists in ETL Solutions, thus resulting in saving time and resource requirement and creation of much better high quality enterprise ETLs. We have been working on this product for the past 3 months. This will be a new revolution in the way ETLs are created and used”.

He further explained, “ETL jobs are generally created for data migration, creation of data marts and data warehouse, data integration, data replication, data cleansing etc. Though this work can be handled by database SQL, yet ETL tools are used because of its ease of usage, built in objects like aggregators, easy debugging, good auditing capabilities etc. Even ETLs have many restrictions like very low visibility & control for an ETL admin, no reusability of ETL scripts, no standardization, error and logging etc, keeping all these restrictions of ETL tools in mind, Helical IT Solution has came up with a custom framework (known as Helical Scrunch), to work on top of an ETL tool, thus removing all the restrictions of the same.”

What is ETL?

ETL is shortened form of EXTRACT, TRANSFORM, LOAD.  In ETL, using any method data gets extracted from some source , then this data gets changed (transformed ) as per specific need, further changed ( transformed ) data gets loaded to another system mostly known as target system.

Problem Definition: Though there are many ETL tools available in the market, but using them also come with their own inherent problems, some of which are highlighted below:

Best Practices: Each and every developer does the ETL development according to his logic and his method of development; hence more often than not the best practices are not followed. These best practices are related to error handling, naming conventions, QA, QC etc.

Lack of standardization: Often not following the best practices on logging, error handling, naming conventions, documentation etc leads to lack of standardization between the different ETL jobs which have been developed amongst the different ETL developers.

Lack of control for end user: Generally in any ETL, an end user or IT administrator is often not able to see and monitor what exactly is happening. He has absolutely no control of the jobs, flags, status etc.

Lack of reusability: Generally, any ETL job is designed to tackle any specific problem, and not with reusability or long time picture in mind. So whenever there is any change, ETL job creation starts from the scratch.

Lack of monitoring: An end IT user or business user is having no option to monitor the progress of the job execution, what is the real time progress, logs and errors encountered if any etc.

Lack of visualization: Lack of visualization in ETL tools result thus result in an end user having no control and visibility on the history of the jobs execution, what jobs were executed, what jobs are executing, what error is being thrown etc.

Helical Scrunch

Pluggable: The Helical Scrunch has been designed in such a way that the different features are pluggable (like logging module, visualization module, status and notification module etc). This gives the developer freedom to select which all modules are to be present

Reusability: Helical Scrunch has been designed in such a way to make sure that the jobs created are usable. Having a standardized naming convention, features, documents etc further goes a long way in making sure that the jobs are reusable.

Control: Helical Scrunch provides an extensive control to an end user/IT admin via web interface. The control is very exhaustive which includes controlling and changing ETL configurations without opening ETL job, monitor data flows, controlling what to execute what not to execute etc.

Visualization: Helical Scrunch also provides, via web interface, extensive reports and dashboard capabilities. The reporting capabilities thus empower user to have real time view of the project status, error encountered, data transfer, data flow monitoring, which all jobs are executed, which all jobs are executing etc. There will also be ability to select date range for seeing the different parameters. Visualization helps in Monitoring and Analysis.

Alerting and Notification: The alerting and notification feature of Helical Scrunch helps in creating different kind of alerts. These alerts and notifications are configurable. These alerts can be set on certain events or thresholds. Notifications could include email alerts etc.

Reusability: Helical Scrunch has been designed in such a way that the jobs created are following standard conventions, best practices, naming conventions etc and thus they can be easily edited and highly reusable.

Extensibility: The architecture has been designed in such a way that easily any new module or feature can be added, which makes the entire framework highly extensible. Thus it can accommodate any new requirement or business logic or feature.

Logging: Helical Scrunch is designed in such a way to make sure that absolutely all the ETL work is properly logged. The extensive logging mechanism helps in visualization, identifying, alerting and taking corrective action.

Advantages:

Time Saving: Generally, whenever any ETL job is designed, a lot of work is involved in designing reusable components like error logging, custom logging, defining naming conventions, designing proper architecture etc. By usage of Helical Scrunch, a company can reduce ETL development time by 30-70%, and with a much better quality.

Resource Saving: Usage of this can lead to reduction of a number of resources required to execute the same project. ETL architects are not at all required and ETL developers to create generic ETL jobs and implement ETL architects are not required. The only work involved is in terms of business logic implementation. 30-70% of lesser ETL resources might be required for the implementation of the same work.

Quality of output: The ETL jobs created using this will be of a much higher quality.

Interactivity: A user interface for controlling of jobs, putting configurations, having a view of what is happening, reports, analysis etc gives a lot of interactivity and information to the end users.

Team Productive: Usage of Helical crunch can lead to the ETL team becoming effective and start working right from the day one. Helical Scrunch takes care of all the other things like nomenalcature, standardization, creation of jobs etc. Hence, ETL team can only need to focus on the problem in hand, which is actual implementation of the business logic.

About Helical IT Solutions

Helical IT Solutions is an open source DWBI company and has expertise in providing simple, practical & affordable solutions which are suitable for business users, right from CEO, CXO, line managers & to every end user of the enterprise. With a quick turnaround time, the company can provide mobile BI solutions, on premises or hosted SaaS solution, hence catering to every type of need. Helical offers services on entire BI stack, ranging from ETL, DW, Data mining, Analytics, BI solution. They also provide integration of disparate data sources and offers powerful interactive tools like balanced scorecards, personalized dashboards, key performance indicators, automated alerts, graphical mining, cross tab reporting and more! At present Helical impressive clients list include Unified Social Media, Vortecy Energy Consulting, Sage Human Capital – HR Business Intelligence, Predikto, hCentive- HealthCare insurance and many more.  Check www.helicaltech.com for more details