The other day I was looking for a open source, feature-rich, high performance ETL tool to use in an enterprise environment. I was disappointed nothing really seemed to match my requirements. Have I overlooked something or is this really a niche where there aren’t any viable projects? After looking in the usual places like sourceforge.net and doing a bunch of Google searches. I could not find any products that fit the bill. Here are (some of) my criteria:

• Fast. The candidate tool has to be able to move huge amounts of information between the source and target databases quickly.
• Flexible error handling. Data errors occur all the time, and when errors are encountered, we should be able to stop processing or log the error to a file or push the record into a violations table for subsequent processing. There are probably other popular strategies for handling errors, such as changing the offending data and trying to insert it …

Total cost of ownership (TCO) for relational databases is, in my opinion, comprised of 3 parts. License cost, support costs and the people costs of maintaining and managing the database.

The first component, database license cost, is a one-time fee paid to the vendor for the right to use the database on one processor. The license is generally perpetual, so youll need to work this out over the expected life time of the application or the time you’re going to continue to use database software. In some cases, if this money has already been spent, you might not include it in the TCO estimates.

Second, the ongoing support costs must be included. For Informix, DB2 and Oracle the support cost is usually a percentage (typically between 15% and 23%) of the initial license purchase price. In my experience it can range between $5k and $10K per CPU depending on which database you’re using and the initial purchase price for the licenses. …