Ab Initio

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If you are looking for the Latin term, see ab initio.

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Ab Initio Software Corporation was founded in the mid 1990's by the former CEO, Sheryl Handler, and several other former employees of Thinking Machines Corporation, after the bankruptcy of that company.

The Ab Initio software is a fourth generation data analysis, batch processing, data manipulation graphical user interface (GUI)-based parallel processing tool that is commonly used to extract, transform and load data.

The Ab Initio software is a suite of products that together provides a platform for data processing applications. The Core Ab Initio Products are:

Co>Operating System
The Component Library
Graphical Development Environment
Enterprise Meta>Environment
Data Profiler

1 The Co>Operating System
2 The Component Library
3 The Graphical Development Environment
4 Enterprise Meta>Environment
5 Data Profiler
6 External links

[edit] The Co>Operating System

Runs across a variety of Operating Systems and Hardware Platforms including OS/390 on Mainframe, Unix, Linux, and Windows. Supports distributed and parallel execution. Can provide scalability proportional to the hardware resources provided. Supports platform independent data transport using the Ab Initio data manipulation language. The Co>Operating System is the underlying system of all parts of the product suite allowing communication and integration of all parts into the platform.

[edit] The Component Library

Reusable software Modules for Sorting, Joining, Data Transformation, database Loading Etc. The components adapt at runtime to the record formats and business rules controlling their behavior. Components also include various system "connectors" giving access to various storage engines.

[edit] The Graphical Development Environment

Provides graphical interface for editing and executing Ab Initio computer programs. This development environment utilizes the available components from the library to enable various ETL activities to occur. The Co>Operating System can execute these programs directly. Allows for monitoring of running applications to quantify data volumes and execution times for performance estimation.

xcan be run by the Co>Operating System. It is also possible to write Ab Initio programs without the GDE using a common text editor.

[edit] Enterprise Meta>Environment

Along with the Development environment and Co>Operating system is a datastore that tracks changes in development of graphs, as well as metadata pertaining to the development, how data is used, and potential of other means of data classification. The storage of graph related Metadata allows for data impact analysis to occur, giving the user a visual sense of how the data is changing in a graph, and the impacts that those changes have on another graph. Additionally the EME doubles up for config/change management allowing the latest version of a graph to reside post subsequent code changes thereby ensuring the latest code.

[edit] Data Profiler

The Data Profiler is a graphical data analysis tool that runs on top of the Co>Operating system. It can be used to characterize data range, scope, distribution, variance, and quality.