Making data integration easier

Those of you with memory of an elephant may remember an article I wrote shortly after IBM acquired Netezza. I had been attending the Netezza user conference and was at a presentation from IBM about Information Server and data integration. This got interrupted after about 10 minutes by an attendee interjecting that he’d licensed Netezza because it was really easy to use but that this Information Server looked (expletive deleted) complicated. At which point the whole presentation became a general discussion around this very issue.

Well, it looks like IBM listened. The company has recently released InfoSphere Data Click as a part of Information Server. What Data Click is designed to do is to provide self-service data integration facilities for end users who know what data they want and don’t need IT to get it for them. It is not actually a single click process, IBM claims 2 clicks but that’s good enough for me.

Of course, the world being what it is right now, the announcement of Data Click is part of IBM’s big data governance story but you can use Data Click whatever sort of data you have – big or small, structured or unstructured – you could, for example, use Data Click to transfer data from your data warehouse to a data mart.

Under the covers Data Click uses ETL, data replication, Discovery, Metadata and Business Glossary and Blueprint Director – all part of Information Server – but if you are an end user you won’t care about any of that because you won’t see it. Moreover, this is not simply a data movement tool: you can transform the data and map it, and IT can apply governance rules so that, for example, if you are not allowed to see this data then you won’t be able to use Data Click to move it.

Of course this is a first release but IBM tells me that it has plans to add more sophistication into Data Click as a part of its roadmap.

All I can say (despite not coming from the Deep South) is yeehaw! About time.