m-Power Gains New ETL Capabilities

July 8, 2014 Alex Woodie

The m-Power development tool from mrc is gaining new extract, transform, and load (ETL) features with the goal of giving customers better business intelligence capabilities.

Despite the growth of “big data” and the accelerating pace of development of big data solutions, nothing so far has replaced good old ETL when it comes to moving data from transactional systems into data warehouses for analysis. In fact, if anything, the need for ETL has increased due to the ever-growing volumes of data organizations are tasked with managing.

The folks at mrc are looking to give their customers a leg up on ETL functionality with the July release of m-Power, its Java-based development tool for creating Web-based apps that run on IBM i and other platforms.

The new ETL functionality in m-Power allows customers to pull data from multiple databases, transforms it into the necessary format, and then loads it into a centralized data warehouse. Once the data has landed, users can leverage m-Power’s existing functionality to create BI applications, such as reports and dashboards, over that data.

The Chicago-based company says the new ETL enhancement will be particularly useful for companies that are struggling with moving data between on-premise and cloud-based applications. It will also help companies that adhere to regulations mandating the long-term storage of certain types of data.

“As businesses use an ever-increasing number of data sources, data integration and reporting becomes more complex,” Tyler Wassell, mrc’s manager of software development, says in a press release. “This new enhancement gives m-Power users a simple method for integrating data and creating reports over disparate sources.”