Solving Complex Hierarchical Data Integration Issues Quickly and Easily

Business–to-business (B2B) data exchange is a complex undertaking involving a variety of platforms, formats, and data sources. Incoming data often has hierarchical structures that must be parsed into a common format, validated, and loaded into internal databases. And for outbound data the challenges are even greater because data from a number of disparate sources such as databases, files, and services must be combined in a structure that complies with established standards and partners’ requirements. Development of these integration points is both expensive and time consuming, often requiring scarce IT resources.

The good news is that complex data integration doesn’t have to be difficult and expensive. Astera’s Centerprise Data Integrator has been developed from the ground up specifically to solve integration issues such as hierarchical structures found in XML, electronic data interchange (EDI), web services, and more. Business users as well as developers can work with the intuitive, drag-and-drop environment to quickly and easily parse and construct hierarchical structures. This enables organizations to manage their complex integration jobs faster and more affordably, cuts the need for IT resources, and fosters more agile, mutually beneficial relationships with customers and vendors.

Working with Hierarchical Data

Single, integrated platform  — Centerprise provides an integrated and consistent approach for working with both flat and hierarchical files. Because everything is done in a single environment, users working with hierarchical data use the same familiar toolset they use when working with flat structures. All data parsing and structure building is done in the same map, with no need for coding or scripting.

Special components and modes  — New technologies have been created specifically to provide capabilities for joining disparate data sources to build complex trees, automatically building hierarchies from relational databases, and applying transformations to specific tree nodes. This last item—applying transformations to tree nodes—enables users to apply common Centerprise transformations such as Aggregate, Filter, Join, Distinct, Sort, Normalize, Denormalize, and others to specific nodes in a hierarchical structure. With this unique technology, users can rapidly create powerful transformations for hierarchical-to-flat, flat-to-hierarchical, and hierarchical-to-hierarchical situations.

Next week we’ll dive into detail about how to use these Centerprise technologies to parse, validate, and load your complex hierarchical data. You can also learn more by viewing our Astera.TV video library of Centerprise webinars, specifically Complex Data Integration in Centerprise and Business Partner Integration in Centerprise.