Jitterbit Expands Data Integration Tools

Open source data integration supplier Jitterbit has announced the availability of Jitterbit 3.0 Enterprise MX, with tools that make it easier to use by business analysts, as well as programmers.

Jitterbit started out giving online application users the means of integrating their on-demand application data with their internal systems. Salesforce.com and NetSuite customers could work with their data in the online environment. Jitterbit made it possible for them to move that data into databases and to data warehouses where other applications could get at it, said CEO Sharam Sasson.

Version 2.0 gave Jitterbit users a graphical user interface with which they could build connections between applications and between applications and databases. It could graphically represent a business process that required Jitterbit connectors. It also upped the ante by giving developers the ability to move "chunks" of data at a time, speeding up the extract and load process as data is removed from one source and added to another in a useful format, said CTO Ilan Sehayek.

The latest 3.0 Enterprise MX emphasizes extended management features and is a commercial product available through Jitterbit subscriptions. The core data integration system remains open source code under a variation of the Mozilla license -- the Jitterbit Public License. Seven management features separate the community edition from Enterprise MX.

Enterprise MX is meant to scale up to larger integration projects, allow more than one developer at a time to be working on an integration project without disrupting the work of others, and to give a systems administrator a management console on his or her PC to monitor and modify an integration process.

Large data "chunks" can now be broken down into smaller portions that stream to a database or data warehouse, at roughly 5,000 transactions at a time. If something goes wrong in the loading process, it affects just one bite-sized portion of the workload, rather than requiring the whole process to start over, said Sehayek.

"If you ask for data from something that doesn't work very fast, the whole system waits," he noted. If it's broken into streams, the system can tackle alternate tasks while it's waiting. The streams feature has led to "tremendous performance gains," he added.

Jitterbit concentrates on standardized data formats, including XML, Java Messaging System, text files, such as HL7 health record files, and WS web services standards. It does not connect to mainframe systems or data formats, Sehayek said.

A third version of Jitterbit, the Enterprise edition, has more features than the community edition but lacks some of the management features of MX.

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