Frequently Asked Questions

ELT Desktop is a tool that helps to do complex data transformations in your database. For more information about the concept of ELT Desktop, click here!

The most important difference to ETL is that we do in-database transformations. In the end we just send SQL to the database. Read here to get more information about the features of ELT Desktop.

What makes us different from other ELT tools is the possibility to control the generated SQL directly, without loosing any of the cool capabilities, like data lineage. The developer can tune his SQL to the max and is not dependent on the automatic code generation of any tool.

The major difference is that we do not just store the SQL code in simple text files. We parse and understand it, instead. The parsing makes it possible to implement cool features like dependency analysis. We know, which table or column is used and where.

ELT Desktop is a very lightweight tool, as it does not data transformation by itself but just sends SQL to the database. You don't need much system resources. All you need is an actual version of the java runtime environment (JRE) version 6 to run ELT Desktop.

Note: The beta version that you can download on this homepage is only runable on windows systems.

ELT Desktop is not a freeware, but as long as it is in beta stage you will be able to download it for free for evaluation purposes. If you're interested in using ELT Desktop in your production environment, please request an offering by sending an email at info@eltdesktop.com. We will respond as soon as possible.

ELT Desktop is developed using the Eclipse RCP Framework (RCP is an abbreviation for "Rich Client Platform"). Eclipse RCP is a development platform helping software developers to rapidly build new Java applications. It is well documented and widely used. The best known software built using this framework is the Eclipse IDE which is probably the most used IDE for Java developers.

Instead of having to write the application from scratch, we could benefit from proven and tested features provided by the platform. This way we could minimize the occurance of software bugs and focus on our core functionality, the data transformations.

Sure. There are several ways to expand ELT Desktop.

1. The easiest way is to create new reusable Job Diagrams. Using the existing EML functions makes it possible to build a wide varity of job chains for different szenarios (building the history of data, implement filters, do aggregations, etc). In the future, there will be a market place, where our customers can share their modules among each other to speed up the development process of new transformations.
2. However, there will be situations where the existing EML functions just don't offer enough functionality. In such cases it is possible to use our plugin capability to create new EML functions in Java programming language.

One great possibility provided by the RCP framework is the plugin handling. The core application is just a basic set of functionalities. All more specific features (database connectors, sql parser, EML functions, etc) are implemented as plugins. This way it is really easy to add new features as soon as you need them. The plugin capability makes it also easy to distribute new versions of ELT Desktop or patches.

It does also lead to a great expandability for the users, because it is really easy to create own plugins for special functions the product does not offer yet. These plugins can also be shared among the users without any limitation.