Etl

Every platform modernisation programme has the same first act, and it is never the interesting one. Before anyone gets to write a line of dbt, somebody has to work out what the current thing actually does. In the SAP BusinessObjects Data Services case — BODS, if you’ve had the pleasure — that means inheriting a few hundred dataflows whose authors left the organisation years ago. The logic lives in exported XML. The business rationale lived in the heads of people who are now at other companies. Nobody can tell you which flows are duplicates, which ones nothing reads any more, or what any given one is for. There is a spreadsheet somewhere claiming to be an inventory. It is wrong in ways nobody can enumerate. ...