Yesterday evening, I received a copy of Expressor. This is a free ETL tool which made a very good impression to me.
I downloaded the copy from http://www.expressor-software.com . The download and subsequent installation is very simple. The file to be downloaded is about a 100MB and the installation is straightforward: some legal screens and a few hits on the ” next button” .
Once the tool was installed, I started my watch to see how much time was needed to create a dataflow. I wanted to extract the values from a table and write these to a file. It took me 18 minutes to create this flow and have it run.
The setup of the tool is straight forward. The first things to do is to set up the data connections (to Oracle, ODBC, SQL Server etc).
Once this is done, one could create the input- and output logic. Once could decribe what data are to be read and how the data are written to a target database. Finally one could describe the transformation in data betwee in- and output. Everything was positioned at logical / easily understandable locations within the programme.
I really liked this programme. It came across as an ETL programme without the issues that make difficult in an ETL environment. Like user access: difficult to understand, more difficult to implement and impossible to debug. Within expressor no user access module (thank God).