Jitterbit 3.0 effectively links
disparate apps, data sources
REVIEW: Open-source data integration suite links up applications and data
sources that might not be capable of communicating on their own
can collaborate around projects stored
on one or more servers.
The Enterprise MX edition of the
product, which is the flavor I tested,
adds facilities for managing multiple
servers and wrangling teams of users
with role-based access controls.
I tested Jitterbit 3.0 on a virtual
machine running CentOS 5. 4 and
playing host to both the client and
server components of the product.
The Jitterbit software was easy
enough to install. During the server
portion of the installation, I was
dumped out of the installer script a few
times for lack of specific dependencies,
but all the components I needed were
close at hand in the default CentOS
software repositories.
I set out to test Jitterbit 3.0 by creating an integration operation in which
the product would fetch a plain-text,
fixed-width delimited file containing
basketball statistics from a public Web
server and insert those stats into a
table in a PostgreSQL database.
I created a new project
in the Jitterbit client, and
then created a new operation within that project.
The client led me to
define a source, a transformation and a target
for the operation by rendering a simple diagram
with placeholders for each
of these elements in the
application’s workspace.
Double-clicking on the
source element in the diagram spawned a new tab
in the workspace with a
wizardlike form for defining my source. I named
my new source, chose
Next came the transformation step,
By Jason Brooks
Jitterbit 3.0 is a data integration suite that organizations can use to link up disparate applications and data sources that may not be
capable of communicating with each
other on their own. What’s more, Jitterbit is easy enough to use to allow
for a certain amount of
self-service among data-savvy users looking to
forge these links.
Jitterbit 3.0, which
began shipping last fall,
comes in three editions:
Community, Enterprise
and Enterprise MX. The
Community edition is
freely downloadable,
but lacks the project,
user and server management features of the
two subscription-priced
editions. Pricing for
Jitterbit’s Enterprise Edition starts at $6,400 per
year and varies based on
number of records managed, deployed servers and support
options.
In each of its three incarnations,
Jitterbit consists of separate client and
server elements. The client works in
the creation of data integration operations, which are then deployed to one
or more servers for execution. Multiple
team members can have the Jitterbit
client installed on their machines, and
The Jitterbit client made it easy for me to track the dependencies
among the elements of my integration project.
