From Aventine Solutions

During the last two months of 2007, I am evaluting solutions for Extract/Transoform/Load (ETL) for a client and since they in turn 1) provide the technical resources for the end users of the system and 2) they are mostly a J2EE/Eclipse shop, it would make sense to find a good ETL solution that fits into this architecture. On of the ETL frameworks we are considering is Jasper ETL a cousin to the Jasper reports framework that a lot of J2EE developers are already familiar with. This is a commerical open source product, discussion about packaging and pricing to come later.

[edit] Installation

• Since Clover ETL was the first tool I looked out in this category for this project, I will be comparing the Jasper ETL to it using the same prototype ETL graph.
• The first thing to notice is that there is no direct support for MacOSX, only Linux and Windows. The Windows EXE installer is about 119MB.
• The ETL workbench seems to install a standalone version of Eclipse. The first time you run it, it searches automatically for updates, so this takes quite some time. I'm evaluating version 2.0.0; after the update I'm at build 3513. The workbench is based on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform and Talend Open Studio

[edit] Getting Started

• For documentation, I downloaded version 1 of the PDF Jasper ETL User Guide.

[edit] Comparing Clover and Jasper

• Clover ETL allows you to choose between installing a standalone Eclipse workbench or just installing the plug-in itself into a your pre-existing Eclipse set-up. Jasper ETL doesn't give you these choices. Using the Clover GUI plug-in only, Macintosh support was straight-forward because I had an Eclipse Europa instance already set-up.
• Clover ETL is divided clearly into the free Java only component and the pay-for GUI Eclipse plug-in, where ETL applications can be built only using the former without the latter. Jasper ETL also doesn't provide these choices.