| We know that many organizations are fully convinced that an ETL tool such as RODIN is essential to a Data Warehouse or Data Mart implementation. The importance and value of these tools has been well documented and proven in thousands of installations worldwide. However, we also recognize that for smaller organizations, where budgets are tight and the project scope is often smaller, it is not always an easy decision. Can you forego ETL and just use your reporting tool against your operational data? Can you build some simple SQL or an RPG program or two to load a few summary tables? Will that work - and therefore save you money? Our belief is that in the vast majority of cases, the answer is NO. Up-front, your costs can be lower - but over time (often a surprisingly short period of time) this approach will expose you to serious issues and shortcomings which WILL cost more to correct later on. Here are just a few: - Data Quality is usually not addressed at all in this approach. If you don't think that can hurt you, you need to read this article .
- Your report authors will need to deal with the complexities of your transaction databases. Do they know how the data is stored and what it means? These transaction databases have no user manual or metadata to assist the reporting tool user: but they insist on you providing documentation to help them.
- Since you will be reporting from detail level data in all cases (unless you manually build and load summary tables), summary reports will take much longer to run. And while those long running queries are executing, response times will suffer for everyone else.
- How are you going to integrate that Oracle purchasing data?
- You replaced your ERP package last year and didn't convert all of the history. How do you join to that history in your reports?
- Your dates are all stored in numeric columns. Some are even in different formats. How can you easily create quarterly reports?
All of these issues (and more) will either cripple your BI reporting capabilities, or result in incorrect reports and bad decisions (probably both). In most cases, they will also cause delays and re-work as you discover each issue and need to find a way to solve it. We don't want you to be in this position, so we're making it easy for you to avoid it. Simply download and install RODIN from the links on this site. Use our techincal support resources to get started and then evaluate RODIN for up to 60 days before making a decision to license the software. At this stage you are quite confident that RODIN is the correct choice... but it's still your neck on the line, so we're going even further. If, at any time within the first 12 months (after acquiring a RODIN License) you are not completely satisfied with the software, we will refund your license fee. Guaranteed! Of course, there is some fine print, but it is quite straightforward: 1) Should you have a problem, we'd like the opportunity to resolve it: so prior to the 9th month, let us know something isn't right and that you're not happy. We'll do our best to fix the problem. 2) If we can't resolve it to your satisfaction, you simply uninstall the software and then we'll send you a check for the license fee that you paid. You can even retain the data warehouse and/data mart tables that you've created with RODIN. We think tha's just about as much as we can do to make it easy for you to choose RODIN. For more information, call +1 866-763-4639, or send us an inquiry. | 
