CoSORT's FAst extraCT (FACT) for Oracle

Today's Oracle DBAs and data warehouse architects face ever-increasing storage volumes and processing bottlenecks. Strict service-level agreement (SLA) commitments and shrinking production windows require world-class database reorg and data warehouse extract, transform, and load (ETL) solutions that deliver high performance and database availability.

The leaders in the field already leverage CoSORT's popular and powerful Sort Control Language (SortCL) program to transform these huge table volumes in a single pass, and pre-sort to load them quickly.

Such large volumes of data must be staged in flat files, as data warehouse experts like Dr. Ralph Kimball recommend. The fastest sort, join, convert, aggregation, report, and reload processing occurs in flat files. Data stored in proprietary formats and structured DBMS/ETL systems are optimized for queries, not for transformations or loads.

Because of these realities and the importance of speed, high-volume Oracle users can now turn to another high-performance CoSORT solution -- called FACT -- to unload huge, and specific table data into portable flat-file formats.

CoSORT's FAst extraCT (FACT) for Oracle is the quickest way to:

• perform bulk unloads
• produce differently-formatted data files from a table
• create the metadata for data warehouse transformations in CoSORT's SortCL and/or bulk re-loads through SQL*Loader.

FACT produces SortCL data definition files (.ddf) and SQL*Loader control files alongside the extraction.

With FACT, Oracle users rapidly unload their table data with the simple command: fact ini_file

where ini_file is a simple-to-use text file that specifies the details of the table, its extraction method, and its target format and destination (file or pipe). Each simple FACT statement can be issued from the command line, within a batch script, or from within an application program.

With FACT, data warehouse architects can optionally pipe together a complete and incredibly fast Oracle E-T-L process by combining the ini_file with a CoSORT SortCL job specification file (.scl) that references the .ddf created by FACT, and with a SQL*Loader process that uses the control file metadata. Consider this command template:

fact ini_file | sortcl /spec=transform.scl /spec=fact.ddf | sqlldr control=fact.ctl direct=true

This command-line statement initiates a rapid extraction and pipes it to CoSORT's sort control language (SortCL) program for simultaneous filtering, sorting, and reformatting (transform.scl). In turn, the CoSORT/SortCL output is piped in index order to SQL*Loader. No other ETL solution approaches this level of paralell processing performance, versatility, or ease of use.

FACT is currently available for Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX. CoSORT and its Sort Control Language (SortCL) program for data transformation is available on these platforms, as well as many others where you might choose to otherwise process the FACT-extracted data.

FACT license fees are assessed only once for perpetual use, and reflect the platform configuration or CoSORT combination that best suits licensee environments. FACT workstation or server copies can be licensed alone, or is discounted in conjunction with a CoSORT license bundle. Annual maintenance charges for FACT, which is an optional coverage for technical support and software upgrades, costs 20% of the base license fee, or 15% with a CoSORT license on the same platform.