Yesterday I went to the
Talend Roadshow. 3 hours nicely spent and the it
worthed the time and traffic jam. No money involved as it was free.
I liked a lot that it was a "hands on work" seminar and not a marketing presentation. Benjamin, the guy who presented the product (
btw: the open source version), had a good IT background and this was handy.
So, they provided us with some laptops, a practice book (5 exercises) and the
Talend User Manual. The nice think was that Benjamin actually showed us how to use the most important
Talend component:
tMap. It took my one full day (at work, so just between meetings and other stuff) to understand
tMap and
Talend and I was
unsuccessful. why? too less time, too less tutorials on "how to start" using it. So, at that moment, I ended up using Kettle (from Spoon) just because another collegue has the knowledge already.
After the yesterday Talend Roadhow I must say that I like better Talend than Kettle because:
1. I can debug it (put a breakpoint on the java code)
2. with Traces enabled, I can see on real time the data being processed (really handy)
But, perhaps, if I went to a Kettle Readshow (nope, it doesn't exist) then Kettle would acquire more points also.
My conclusions about the Talend Roadshow:
1. it's free
2. the person presenting it (Benjamin) was one of the French founders (I think), so an IT person, no marketing boring presentation
3. all the IT questions got an answer
4. we actually had to work with the product
5. too bad there was not indepth intro about the facts/dimensions components; but I guess that's because the attendees should have already know DataMarts.
So, if you get the chance, GO CHECK IT OUT.
PS: I will try now to go my kettle jobs in Talend and see which is easier to implement/faster/better debugging.
