Talend's Open Source data integration solutions cover all data integration needs for organisations of all sizes. The most frequently used implementations for Talend’s toolset and consultancy are in the areas of :-  

It covers:

•  
  • Data migration
  • Data synchronisation and replication
  • ETL for Business Intelligence and Data warehousing
  • Data profiling

Data Migration

Simply put, data migration is the process of transferring data between storage types, formats, or computer systems. This typically occurs when upgrading to a newer version of an existing application or switching from one application to an alternate one or merging data as the result of disparate applications coming together either through mergers and acquisitions or rationalising historical purchases.

Data migrations can involve large volumes of data and characteristically take place in heterogeneous environments, with very different source and target data structures. Often complex mappings and transformations are required, with aggregations, calculations, etc. Without fail there will almost certainly be ongoing data cleansing issues throughout the process as well.

Talend’s data integration solutions are optimized for enterprise-scale data migrations and are designed to navigate you through the key areas of design, development and execution of data migration processes: 

•  
  • Business-oriented process modeling ensuring consistency in the migration of business data and processes
  • Fully graphical development environment that improves productivity, makes it easy to perform iterative runs
  • Scalable and fast execution platform with a grid approach that enables the processing of data close to its source and target for shorter downtimes
  • Broad depth of connectivity to support all source and target systems

Data Synchronisation and Replication

In many organisations, large or small, it is often the case that data is managed separately by multiple applications and/or databases, yet there is a need for that data to be kept consistent across all instances. This requirement for data synchronisation can be permanent involving day-to-day operational systems or temporary as in the phase of a migration. To ad complexity, this synchronisation may not be simply mono-directional but require bi-directional flows.

Typically data synchronisation is described as including all the processes that maintain data alignment between the applications and databases and there are many challenges to implementing an efficient and reliable solution.

Data synchronization often involves processes which tend towards operating in a real time environment and it is therefore critical to manage data effectively to reduce processing time. Additionally, the environments involved tend to be heterogeneous often combining legacy systems, packaged applications, RDBMS, mainframes, files, etc. across which data structures vary widely but still need to be maintained in sync. These differences can entail complex mappings between sources and targets, as well as aggregations, calculations, etc. Moreover, when conflicts of data occur, they must be managed and resolved taking into account record update precedence.

Talend’s data integration solutions are optimized for enterprise-scale data synchronisation and are designed to navigate you through the key areas of design, development, execution and maintenance of data synchronisation processes: 

•  
  • Business-oriented process modeling ensuring consistency in the migration of business data and processes
  • Fully graphical development environment that improves productivity, facilitates maintenance and reusability of data mappings and transformations
  • Scalable and fast execution platform with a grid approach that enables the processing of data close to its source and target for shorter downtimes
  • Broad depth of connectivity to support all source and target systems

ETL for Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing

In terms of populating Business Intelligence and Warehouse schemas, the ETL processes are critical components of the infrastructure. They are responsible for collating the data from all operational systems and pre-processing it for the analysis and reporting tools.

Typical steps include the extraction of the data from production applications and databases (ERP, CRM, HR etc.) and the subsequent transformation of this data to reconcile it across source systems, performing calculations or string parsing, or possibly enriching it with external lookup information. This data has to match the format required by the target system whether it is a Relational structure or Star or Snowflake Schema, whilst accommodating patterns such as Slowly Changing Dimensions.

The next stage is to load this newly formed data into whichever variety of BI application you need, which comprise an ever growing list of possibilities; Data Warehouses, Data Marts, Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) cubes etc.

The ETL window is becoming shorter and shorter as the latency of ETL processes moves from daily execution to near-real-time as the need for customer information escalates. This is exacerbated by the fact that we’re seeing data volumes growing and the disparity of sources always on the increases as the data becomes more granular as businesses strive for more information

Talend’s data integration solutions are optimized for enterprise-scale data synchronisation and are designed to navigate you through the key areas of design, development, execution and maintenance of ETL processes: 

•  
  • Business-oriented process modeling ensuring consistency in the migration of business data and processes
  • Fully graphical development environment that improves productivity, facilitates maintenance
  • Scalable and fast execution platform with a grid approach that supports both ETL and ELT approaches
  • Broad depth of connectivity to support all source and target systems combined with the ability to easily add new source systems
  • Built-in advanced components for ETL; string manipulations, Slowly Changing Dimensions, automatic lookup handling, bulk loads support, etc.

Data Profiling

Data profiling is the process of examining the data available in any existing data source and collecting statistics and information about that data. With this detailed analysis you’ll be able to:

Track data quality

•  
  • give metrics on data quality including whether the data conforms to company standards
  • find out whether existing data can easily be used for other purposes
  • assess the risk involved in integrating data for new applications, including the challenges of joins

Understand your data 

•  
  • assess whether metadata accurately describes the actual values in the source database
  • have an enterprise view of all data, for uses such as Master Data Management or Data Governance initiatrives.
  • understanding data challenges early in any data intensive project, so that late project surprises are avoided. Finding data problems late in the project can incur time delays and project cost overruns.

Talend Open Profiler is a sophisticated yet simple-to-use data profiler facilitating:

• • Connection to databases and files to introspect their structures with the resultant information stores descriptions of their metadata in its Metadata Repository
  • Business users or data management staff to define a set of indicators for each data element that needs to be analysed or monitored, ranging from simple or advanced statistics to text strings analysis, incorporating summary data and statistical distributions
  • The production of sophisticated reports and graphs that let users gauge at a glance the level of quality of the data, and the status of the indicators that were defined