B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

58 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
transition of data through the engine, making this process the fastest
of all the three approaches. Here, the ETL engine simply brokers the
Structured Query Language (SQL) instructions between the source
and the target.
Designer tool
The designer tool provides a graphical user interface to specify data
mappings, transformations, process rules and flow movement processes.
The data is transformed, based on the transformation rules defined by
the user. The process rules define the dependencies to control the flow
of data. For instance, if the values in one of the target tables (let's say
A) is dependent on the values of the other target table (let's say B), A
cannot be loaded until B has finished loading. The transfer of the data
can be in real-time or batch mode, as defined by users.
Metadata repository
Metadata is information about data such as length, description and the
data source it belongs to. For instance, metadata for a data element
"customer_id" will be its length (8 characters), location (CRM database)
and its description (id for each customer in the CRM database).
A metadata repository stores and manages metadata about data along
with the transformation rules.
Scheduler
The scheduler is used in an ETL solution for programming, deploying
and controlling processes that can be scheduled to execute on an event
or calendar basis.
Benefits of ETL solution
ETL solution is best suited for creation and maintenance of data
warehouses and data marts. ETL data integration software works in
conjunction with products from enterprise application integration vendors
and process integrators, not in lieu of them. For instance, a data