Data Sources in Centerprise

Centerprise is extremely flexible when it comes to  connecting to data sources, offering up an almost "anything to anything" data transformation solution.  Not only does it support a wide variety of data sources including most major SQL databases, it also supports several popular file formats such as comma delimited, fixed length, Microsoft Excel, and XML files.  Combine this with the ability to use ODBC data sources and Centerprise becomes a tool that can be used in almost any data transformation scenario.  In addition to just connecting to these data sources, Centerprise offers up several advanced options for handling different data sources.

Click here for the full list of supported data sources.

Flat File Options

A driving force in the ETL market today, is the abundance of legacy data hanging around in the form of flat files.  These files come in wildly varying formats.  Centerprise handles these differing formats by  allowing you to control field delimiters, record delimiters, header positions, file encoding, and more.  You can even filter out lines of text that should not be read in as records by using wild cards or regular expressions. 

Predefined Layout Specifications

For fixed length flat files (files with no field delimiters), Centerprise offers a tool to visually specify where one field ends and the other begins.  Often times, however, these specifications are already well-known and trying to pinpoint these field markings to match up with your specification is just extra work.  For this reason, Astera has introduced predefined layout specification reading into Centerprise. With this feature, you simply point Centerprise to where your specification file is,  and it will construct a file structure layout based on your spreadsheet input.  This can save much valuable time, saving you from manually typing in each and every field for a file structure layout.  This is especially true for fixed length files, but is also available for all flat source structures.

Xml

Besides flat files, Centerprise can also handle XML files as a source in data transformations.  With Astera's unique way of processing XML files, you can easily write complex rule functions just as you would any other type of flat file.  You also have the ability to aggregate data found in child nodes.  So extracting XML to flat file or XML to database table becomes a snap.