Background

Production of premium quality wines is the economic engine that drives the Lodi-Woodbridge region. Supported by over 90,000 acres of vineyards that surround the Lodi community, Lodi-Woodbridge grape growers annually produce a crop worth more than $350 million. Nearly 40 percent of California’s premium wine grapes are grown in this region, making Lodi the “Winegrape Capital of the World.”

“While this is our first experience with an ETL tool, we were very thorough with our evaluations. Astera Data Pipeline Builder suits our needs perfectly. It has all the functionality we need, it is easy to use, it keeps the data together so it can be centrally managed, and it is the most cost effective. It is very important to get the functionality we need, and not pay for what we don’t need.”

– Steve Mann, Information Systems Manager

Use Case

The City of Lodi stores its financial and planning systems’ data in disparate databases that are shared among internal departments. Additionally, the City of Lodi needs to share information and services securely with its businesses and taxpayers. Maintenance and integration had always been done using an intermediate access database that was hand coded. As the city’s systems multiplied, this method of sharing data quickly became too cumbersome to maintain.

Steve Mann, Information Systems Manager, was charged with investigating data integration tools to handle the city’s growing number of projects as well as take some of the data maintenance burden off of his team.

The city’s data  integration requirements were fairly straightforward: transfer data from one location to another securely, efficiently, and quickly.

As the city was using a variety of database servers, including Oracle, MySQL, DB2, and SQL Server, the solution had to be versatile. The core financial and billing systems were housed in IBM DB2 databases and the integration platform had to be able to move the data into MySQL, draw information maps with Access and the SQL server, and create files in a number of formats. Additionally, manually executing this solution was becoming a burden, so the new solution also had to be automated. Finally, the solution needed to be centralized, as multiple team members would be working on projects at different times.

Enter Astera Data Pipeline Builder

After evaluating a range of available ETL tools, Mann and his team selected Astera Data Pipeline Builder because it delivered enterprise-level functionality, an intuitive user interface, and was the most cost-effective solution for the city’s needs.

Astera Data Pipeline Builder is a high-performance, scalable data management platform that allows businesses to meet today’s advanced business needs. Powered by an enterprise-grade parallel-processing engine, Astera Data Pipeline Builder offers data extraction, transformation, integration, and data warehousing all through a single platform.

The team now takes advantage of Astera Data Pipeline Builder’s built-in scheduler to automate transfer jobs, eliminating the need for manual processing. The city has been able to share information and connect with its citizens more rapidly and securely. Because Astera Data Pipeline Builder is able to create web page source files from information within the database, the public can now look up business license information. Because the data is housed internally for security purposes, sharing this data electronically previously would have been too risky. With Astera Data Pipeline Builder, the data is easily exported automatically into another database platform which gives the public the information they need without exposing the core systems to security threats.

“Astera Data Pipeline Builder meets our needs for rapid deployment. Now, we can have transfers done in a matter of minutes that would have previously taken us a day, or days. We saw the additional features and functionality and definitely envision using them as we progress. And because we use it so extensively, we want to ensure we stay current with the software,” said Mann.