Improve application performance and reduce project delivery times through automated optimization.
Ab Initio enables non-developers to do advanced data processing using a full graphical environment. But what happens when you are dealing with very large amounts of data? Can non-developers make it work in a reasonable amount of time? For Ab Initio, the answer is yes.
Ab Initio provides the graphical environment for non-developers and a sophisticated optimizer. Because Ab Initio software knows how the data is stored and the required processing logic, it can determine all sorts of things automatically, such as how to run in parallel, when to sort the data, how to join the data, and when to filter fields that the application doesn’t require.
When databases are involved, Ab Initio takes advantage of pushdown opportunities to perform certain joins or queries directly in the database before streaming the data out. Applications automatically run rapidly and efficiently, empowering the non-developer to focus on solving the business challenge.
Migrating decades of development from on premises to the cloud could involve years of work. Or it could be done with Ab Initio.
A major US credit card provider built one of the world’s most innovative Business Intelligence environments using Ab Initio software. After decades of on-premises software development and operations, they decided to take advantage of new technologies, eliminate local data centers, and move to the cloud.
Moving a system that had been developed over a span of 20 years is not an easy prospect. The data was stored in a very large, expensive data warehouse. There were over 100,000 lines of SQL, including vendor-specific SQL. There were thousands of Ab Initio graphs. They did not have detailed information on exactly which graphs were running, how often they ran, and which parameters they ran with. That information was buried in the job scheduling system and in the shell scripts that launched the jobs, and it needed to be unearthed before proceeding with the migration.
Because automation was the key to this migration effort, they worked with Ab Initio to build the automation machinery. In some cases, Ab Initio provided out-of-the-box automation tools and translators. In other cases, the two teams worked together to build custom automation tools. Automated translation of Ab Initio–based application logic is possible because of Ab Initio’s unique structure and metadata-driven processing model. Ab Initio’s analysis tools automatically documented the various job and data dependencies. Ab Initio–developed tools also analyzed hundreds of thousands of runtime log files.
This migration took 18 months, a remarkably short time for a project of this magnitude. Working with Ab Initio, the credit card provider ended up with a more resilient system capable of taking advantage of the latest technologies, and they saved millions of dollars.