Various Talend Products and their Features

Talend Introduction

What has created the need for platforms like Talend? How does it fit into the business models?

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If we pay attention, it can be seen that the world today is centered around Big Data and cloud platforms. So, the organizations need to harness the enterprise information. This is where Talend, an open-source software integration platform, finds its use. It helps in the smooth transformation of data into business insights. Before it is possible to learn about Talend, it would be crucial to see what Talend is and how it helps the users.

In this article, you will learn below topics

What is Talend? What are the intriguing features of the products from Talend? Talend Products Talend Enterprise Products Key Features of Talend Enterprise Talend Big Data What are the benefits that Talend for Big data Hadoop offers? Data Integration What are the benefits of using Talend Data Integration? Integration Cloud How is Talend Integration Cloud better than the other tools? Talend Open Studio What are the most common use cases of the Talend Open Studio? How does the Talend Open Studio benefit users? Talend Platforms Talend Open Studio Architecture Talend Functional Architecture

What is Talend?

Talend is a popular open-source data integration platform. The essential services and software required for enterprise application integration, data integration or management, Big Data, cloud storage, and improving data quality are offered by Talend. In 2005, Talend entered the markets for the first time and became a pioneer in the field of commercial open source software for data integration.

The first product from Talend was launched in October 2006 - Talend Open Studio. The product is now called Talend Open Studio for Data Integration. Quite a lot of different products have been released in the market since then and have garnered wide acceptance.

Today, Talend is considered to be a next-generation product and has become the leader in Big Data integration software and cloud systems. Talend is helping companies to become more data-driven and be able to make real-time decisions. Talend is helping to improve the quality of data and make it more accessible. It can also be moved quickly to the target systems.

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What are the intriguing features of the products from Talend?

Businesses today want products that are powerful and would offer precise insights into the products. Since the availability of data is much simpler now, data analysis needs to be much simpler. This is how the Talend products have been created.

• Faster development and Deployment - Automation is one of the great boons Talend offers. It even maintains the tasks for the users.
• Less Expense - Talend offers open-source tools. These tools can be downloaded for free. The development costs reduce significantly as the processes gradually speed up.
• Future Proof - Talend offers everything that would get you through your marketing needs. Be it today or the future, Talend will have you covered. This makes Talend a very dependable product, and it will not be quitting the market anytime soon.
• Unified Platform - Talend is a firm that meets all of the needs of the businesses under a common roof. Everything along the lines of Big data, cloud storage, data integration, and management or enterprise application integration is managed by the products from the company.
• Huge Community - Since Talend is open-source software, it is backed up by a vast community. All the Talend users and members of the community use the community platform as the preferred location for sharing information and experiences. This is where people can go if they have doubts or queries.

 

Talend Products

The Research and Development team of Talend was first formed in 2002. This was when the company started to venture into data solutions and develop products that can be used by businesses to gain data insights. After the creation of the company in 2005, the first product - the Open Studio v1.0 was launched in 2006. The Integration Suite RTx / MPx / MDM acquisition came about in 2009 after the integration suite had been developed some two years before that.

The IDM Community Edition and the MDM Enterprise Edition first appeared in 2010, and so did the Open Studio V.

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Talend Enterprise Products

There are 3 significant products under the Talend Product Suites. The enterprise version works independently or along with the other products in Talend's portfolio. The Open Studio can be used on its own and even imported into the Enterprise Data Integration. Data profiling, data integration, data quality, and master data management (MDM) are managed by the products.

The Talend Enterprise Data Integration is based on the extract, load, and transform architecture. During the data integration process, this architecture leverages the capabilities of both the target and the source. It also enables the product to leverage the scalability, functionality, and performance capabilities of the relational database management systems.

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Key Features of Talend Enterprise

The key features of the Talend Enterprise products include:

• The ability to connect to more than 900 different databases, applications, and files as sources or targets for the integration tasks
• Offers support to the complex process workflows and the extensive data integration transformations
• Offers integration project support with release management, team-based collaboration, and a tool-based generation system
• Development tools based on repositories that are used for the management of design, creation, testing, deployment, and operation of the integration processes

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Talend Big Data

The automation of Big data integration with wizards and graphical tools is quite comfortable with the use of Talend. With the help of Talend, the organization can quickly develop an environment that works smoothly with Spark, Apache Hadoop, and the NoSQL databases for the on-premise or cloud tasks. Most of the companies choose Hadoop for improving performance and saving costs. The companies who face expensive computation time with the enterprise solutions go for this option. Data can be cleansed, enriched, transformed, and integrated for a higher analytical workload.

Four uses cases are included in the Talend Sandbox, and they are as follows.

• Apache weblog analytics - Apache analytics helps to easily filter and analyze the log files.
• Data Warehouse Optimization - Data warehouse can offer a fair share of challenges and Talend offers the leading data quality.
• Social Media Sentiment Analysis - It is one of the leading ways of monitoring social media discussions and analyzing them.
• Clickstream Analytics - It helps to collect, analyze, and report the aggregate data generated by visitors.

What are the benefits that Talend for Big data Hadoop offers?

The cost-saving performance of Talend for Big Data Hadoop is attracting the attention of a lot of big enterprises. The easy cleaning and enrichment of data are one of the biggest reasons for aligning with this tool. The benefits that Talend for Big data Hadoop offers are as follows.

• The efficiency of the big data job can be improved by arranging and configuring in a graphical interface
• Faster parallel data processing can be achieved through MapReduce
• Data quality, scalability, and management functions can be added
• Remote deployment and shared repository
• Profiling with data cleansing
• Hortonworks Data Platform is embedded inside
• Offers native support for Hive, HDFS, Mahout, HBase, Sqoop, and Pig

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Data Integration

The Talend Data Integration software or tool has an open and scalable architecture. Faster response to the business requests is allowed through the platform. The tool even offers easy development and deployment of the data integration jobs, much quicker than what is possible by coding through the hand. It also allows you to integrate all the data with the other data warehouses and synchronize data between systems.

Data integration also involves combining the data stored in the various sources and offering users a unified view of the data. The various ETL (extract - load - transform) jobs can be managed, and users are empowered with a straightforward and self-service data preparation.

What are the benefits of using Talend Data Integration?

The scalable architecture of Talend Data Integration is among the best in the market. The jobs become much easier than what could be achieved through hand-coding. The benefits of using Talend data integration are as follows.

• Team Productivity - Talend Data Integration helps the users to collaborate using impact analysis, powerful visioning, testing the code, debugging, and metadata management.
• Agile Integration - The tool responds very fast to business requests without the necessity of writing code. There are more than 1000 connectors, graphical tools based on Eclipse, and a code generator that has been optimized for performance.
• Lowest prices for ownership - The pricing model from Talend is based on subscriptions. The users would need to pay for the number of developers using Talend Studio which helps you save money compared to flat licensing.
• Easy management - The tool provides monitoring features coupled with advanced scheduling. Real-time data integration with dashboards is one of the most common features. The tool even features a centralized control to allow fast deployment across multiple nodes.
• Staying ahead in the competition - This tool saves you from waiting hours with the latest data integration features.

Integration Cloud

If you need to accelerate the on-premises and cloud data integration projects, you can use the highly secure and scalable integration platform as a service. The Talend Integration Cloud software allows built-in data quality, connectivity, and native code generation. Talend is a stable cloud integration platform that allows business users and IT professionals to share both the on-premise and cloud data.

Talend tools help to unlock the power of the cloud design jobs by proper monitoring, management, and controlling the cloud platforms.

How is Talend Integration Cloud better than the other tools?

Talend Cloud is improving the performance figures for both the cloud and on-premise applications. The solutions are secure and scalable. The reason why Talend integration cloud is better than others is explained below in a few points.

• While the handwritten code is mostly necessary elsewhere which is wholly unproductive, there are more than 900 drag-and-drop components that can be found here.
• The tool generates optimized code, and there is no need for specialized skills.
• The tool is very simple and paves the way for better collaboration and management.
• While there is limited support for most tools, this is not the case with Talend.

Talend Open Studio

Talend Open Studio is an open architecture that allows for cloud integration, big data, data profiling, and data integration among other things. Offering more than a thousand pre-built connectors, it is a GUI environment. So, performing operations like loading data, transforming files, or even renaming them is very easy. The components can define complex processes very quickly.

The components allow the creation of integration jobs that do not need to be coded but configured. Another benefit of the Talend Open Studio is that the tasks can be run from within the development environment. They can also be executed in the form of standalone scripts.

What are the most common use cases of the Talend Open Studio?

Hand coding would definitely not be as cool as the GUI environment provided by the Talend Open Studio. The pre-built connectors and configured components help the users. The most common use cases of Talend Open Studio are as follows.

• Data transfer between databases - The data has to be migrated to a new database each time new systems are designed, or the existing ones are upgraded. They could have the same schema or a different one altogether. The Talend Open Studio offers the necessary connectors and actions that are required for this purpose.
• File Transfer - Large quantities of data might need to be transferred during the integration tasks. Files often help in performing these tasks. CSV (comma-separated values) is an example of such a file. It might so happen that the system that would receive the file needs a different format. The Studio can handle this case as well. It offers the possibility to define processes that perform the transformations on the data. File management capabilities are also provided through operations like FTP transfers or archiving.
• Synchronization - The collaborating systems might not be connected to the same repository. There might be a duplication of certain information in an ecosystem. This requires that the information should be periodically synchronized as a consequence. The Talend Open Studio allows performing synchronization of the systems with the help of some tasks that automate the process.
• ETL - ETL is just an acronym for Extract - Transform - Load. The term describes an essential process for data warehouse systems.

How does the Talend Open Studio benefit users?

Talend Open Studio is one of the finest solutions when companies are trying to work with their data. It is a boon for the developers working with data cleansing and analysis. The Talend open studio benefits the users in the following ways.

• One of the first points is that it reduces the time taken to develop the integration. The process which could take weeks or even months is done within days or even in a matter of some hours.
• The data present from various sources is converted and updated.
• It allows businesses to monitor and manage problematic deployments with much ease.
• It allows the developers to have the lowest cost of ownership for any solution.
• The Talend Open Studio can be easily used to convert, combine, and update the data collected.
• It also inherits the potential power of the programming platform.
• The Talend Open Studio is the best choice across the industry with a wide selection of source and target connectors that are offered.
• The multi schema log file or the reconciliation report created post data flow, or migration has very strong compatibility.

Talend Platforms

The data integration platform from Talend helps to import raw data from the different sources to the data warehouse. The desired format is then used for exporting it to the various systems. Talend can be used to link to different sources like e-mail marketing, CRM, and even the OLTP systems. The data is then moved to the data warehouse as swiftly as possible. The aggregated data is then made available to the sales team for strategic decisions.

Talend Integration Suite

A subscription license is required to use the Talend Integration Suite as an additional service. Multi-user access and teamwork are allowed by this data integration solution. It also supports large volumes of data. It even enables data consolidation in one central repository via the Shared Repository tool. Thus, all the members of a collaborating team can access the data. Management of user privileges and permissions is also allowed

Talend Integration Suite MPx

The MPx tag refers to the massively parallel platform that is specially designed for the companies so that large volumes of data can be processed in a short time. The FileScale technology supports the platform, which allows the transformation and sorting of very large files by breaking down the data operation into smaller and independent processes.

Talend Integration Suite RTx

The Talend Integration Suite RTx is a real-time data integration platform. This tool works in a web-based environment and enables the triggering and integration of the processes. Depending on the requirements of the users, the data integration processes are performed, and the tool also facilitates easy access to critical data. The platform also includes the SOA Manager and is used to manage the incoming requests and a queue system.

Talend on Demand

The platform is an online service and enables the consolidation of project information from Talend Open Studio. The data is stored in a shared repository that is hosted, controlled, and backed up by Talend. So, there isn't any need for configuration or administration of the platform. The platform facilitates the storage of code and objects and reusing them for the local and distributed working team.

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Talend Open Studio Architecture

The Talend Open Source Architecture has three significant components - the clients, the Talend servers, and the databases.

• Clients - One or more Talend Studios and Web browsers are present in the Clients block and use the same or different machines. The Talend Studio allows the users to perform the data integration processes, without considering the level of the data volumes and the complexity of this process.
• Talend Server - Another essential structure is the Talend server which is a web-based application server. The administration and maintenance of all the projects are enabled by it. It includes access rights, user accounts, and even project authorization. All these are available in the Administration database.
• Database - The Administration, Monitoring, and Audit of the databases comprise the Databases component. This is the part that helps in the management of the user accounts, the project authorization, and even the access rights. The Audit database helps in the evaluation of the different aspects of the jobs so that an ideal process-oriented decision support system can be developed.

Other than these three fundamental structures, two components are present that must be mentioned:

• Workspace - Workspace is a directory in Talend where all the project folders must be stored. At least, one workspace directory is required per connection. Talend allows for the connection with various workspace directories if the users would not like to work with the default directories.
• Repository - The repository is a storage area. The TOS tools use the repositories to gather data for the explanation of business models or designing jobs.

Talend Functional Architecture

Talend can quickly identify the various functions because of the functional architecture. It can then respond to the multiple needs of the IT market and interact suitably. The three functional blocks primarily include - Administration and Monitoring, Administration and Management, and Execution & Development.

Administration and Monitoring

The studios here carry out the various data integration processes, and they do not depend on the process complexity and the data volumes. However, proper authorization is a must if a user wants to work on the projects in Talend Studio.

Administration and Management

The web-based Administration Center and repositories are contained in this block. The repositories can be based on the SVN servers or the shared repositories. The Administration Center is responsible for the administration as well as management of all the projects. The administration metadata is stored in the database server like the project authorization, user accounts, and access rights. The SVN server stores the metadata that includes Business Models, Jobs, Routes, Routines, Services, and others. Thus, sharing of data becomes easier between the end-users.

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Execution and Development

One or more job servers can be deployed inside the information system. The servers run the jobs or the technical processes according to the scheduled date, time, and events that have been defined in the Talend Administration Center Web application. The end users also have the power to easily transfer the jobs from a Studio to a remote execution server. This process is known as the 'distant run' in Talend.

Thus, Talend is the leading open-source software platform today that offers data management and data integration solutions. It helps businesses in the automation of Big data integration with wizards and graphical tools. This graphical interface helps to improve the efficiency of the job design. 

The software has an open and scalable architecture and allows faster response to business requests. Talend Enterprise Data Integration is meant for small to medium-sized businesses the midmarket organizations. The larger organizations can use the products like Big data Integration, Integration Cloud, MDM, Data Services platforms, and the Enterprise Service Bus.