After checking out WABIT, I decided to give a quick look at SQLPower.ca's other free offerings: Power*Architect and DQGuru. Note that SQLPower's Dashboard and Power Loader (ETL) tools do not appear to be free, open source software. I won't be offering any opinions on the non-free products. In any case, I don't really have any preference when it comes to Dashboard apps (right now at least), and when it comes to ETL tools, I'm still quite partial to Pentaho Data Integration.

Power*Architect

Power*Architect is a data modeling tool in the vein of ERStudio and ERWin. Many independent consultants (like me) will probably find it hard to justify spending scads of cash for a tool like ERStudio for their data modeling activities. Myself, I use MySQL Workbench, which is quite good. The only limitation is that... it only works with MySQL.

Here's where SQLPower's Power*Architect comes in. It's free (unless you need support), and it's multiplatform. If you haven't figured it out yet, I'm a Mac-centric user. While I do use virtual machines for Windows-based work, it's often nice to be able to run apps natively in the Mac desktop. Don't get me wrong, Power*Architect doesn't have the look and feel of a true Mac app. It feels more like a Windows app in a SWING container, but that works fine with me. This isn't an app designed for Joe Sixpack, so it doesn't need to have the eye candy, no matter how nice that would be.

My perspective on this app is coming from a ERStudio and MySQL Workbench user, and to be honest, I didn't read the manual. After about 10 minutes of use, I pretty much figured out how to use the interface. It's not that hard to figure out - a very good thing. I haven't delved into those detail level features, but on the surface, it appears that Power*Architect can easily satisfy that 80/20 proportion of must-have versus nice-to-have functionality.

Bottom line - am I going to use it? I'm definitely going to give it a whirl for a few months. I'll post a follow up summary at a later date, but in the meantime, I suggest that anyone on a tight budget who needs a data modeling tool check it out.

DQGuru

DQGuru is an interesting beast to me. SQLPower advertises as a data cleansing tool. Specifically, DQGuru de-duplicates, cleanses and performs address correction.

Most of my experience with data cleansing came at the ETL level, and I haven't really had the chance to play with a dedicated tool like DQGuru. Messing around with it (yeah, I should really read manuals), it is best described as a data cleanser for business users. You construct your projects in a wizard like fashion, and SQLPower keeps the user interface fairly simple to insulate them from what's going on in the back end. I would recommend this for database savvy analysts, but the hard core control freaks (like me) would probably prefer the control you get from the likes of a Pentaho Data Integration or IBM Information Server.

Like Power*Architect, I figured out how DQGuru works in a matter of minutes.

I don't see myself using DQGuru very often, but I can definitely see value when you have a quick and dirty cleansing job to process. DQGuru is a good tool for advanced end users who don't want or need to be messing around with complicated SQL (or regular expressions, for that matter) to perform common data cleansing tasks.

Good Times for BI

I really have to say, these are good times for the business intelligence market. The "free" offerings out there are getting better, especially since many open source projects are backed by real companies. Companies like SQLPower, Pentaho and Jedox are really going to give the big vendors a run for the money, especially in the small to medium enterprise space.