Attunity’s place at the intersection of structured data and_MySQL

Organizations are tapping into new sources of information for competitive advantage, but the journey from concept to reality is proving to be a bumpy one, with management complexity emerging as a major bottleneck to turning raw data into business insights. Attunity vice president of marketing Lawrence Schwartzreturned to theCUBEat this week’s Percona Live 2014 MySQL show to discuss how his firm is helping customers overcome to this challenge.

Attunity develops replication and file transfer solutions that make it easier for companies to move their data where it needs to be, a task that may seem relatively straightforward but can significantly hinder the analytics process in enterprise environments with a large number of disparate information silos. Each of these systems has to be monitored, maintained and secured, as well as connected to every relevant source and hooked up to the main data warehouse.

Historically, ETL used to be IT’s weapon of choice for data integration, but Schwartz says that the rapid growth in information volumes is rendering the technology obsolete. Traditional batch-based loading processes that depend heavily on scripting simply don’t cut it anymore, he explains. Attunity offers an alternative solution that pulls everything under a common management interface which saves admins the trouble of learning the ins and outs of any specific platform.

“Instead of having a command line-driven interface, it’s all GUI-driven, so it’s very easy to pick your target and source, pick your tables and get started,” Schwartz details. “And if you’re managing a best-in-breed enterprise environment where you have all these sources and targets, that becomes essential.”

Managing data in the global enterprise

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The complexity of data integration goes up a notch in geographically distributed environments that span multiple sites and utilize information from remote sources. Attunity is addressing the associated challenges with a newly introduced information flow automation tool called Maestro that Schwartz says provides a single point of control for the entire migration life cycle.The offering made its debut two days after the company announced that it has added support for MySQL, the world’s most widely used open-source database.

MySQL soared into the spotlight last week following the launch of WebScaleSQL, a collaborative effort led by Facebook, Twitter, Google, and LinkedIn that aims to repurpose the database for web-scale workloads measuring in the petabytes. Schwartz sees the initiative as a testament to the platform’s robustness and more importantly, the fact that relational systems still have an important role in the Big Data era.

“It doesn’t surprise me because at the end of the day, when you start scaling and looking at performance there’s a lot of NoSQL options, whether it’s Hadoop or MongoDB, but if you’re gonna repeatedly go after the data you want an index,” he explains. “So you can go ahead and bolt that on Hadoop or something else, or you can look at the existing tools and scale that out,” he explains.

The emergence of new use cases for MySQL has not gone unnoticed by Attunity. The company’s newly updated solution enables DBAs to quickly pull data from even the largest instances into a data warehouse for deep analysis, even if the target happens to be in the cloud. Many companies are using the firm’s software to move data into Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Redshift, a process that Schwartz claims usually takes a couple of months to complete manually