There are several interesting things about Talend. To begin with, its product was in development for three years (a long time for an open source product) before it even reached beta testing, which was in August 2005. Moreover, its first official release was not until October last year, which explains why it wasn’t in my previous article. More recently, it released Talend Open Studio v2.0 in April this year and Talend on Demand (a software as a service offering) this month.
Secondly, Talend is French and only opened a US office earlier this year. This in itself isn’t particularly interesting but it reflects the fact that far more open source products are coming out of Europe nowadays: for example, three of the four open source ETL tools referenced in my previous article were European, as is Talend; while JasperSoft, the open source BI tool, is based on work that was originally (and continues to be) done in Italy and Romania. I don’t have space here to discuss the significance of this but it is certainly food for thought.
The third thing that is interesting about Talend is that it is not a black-box solution but is instead a code generating product that produces Java and/or Perl, plus (embedded) SQL as needed. Now, when ETL first started the early products (of which the most notable survivor is ETI) were all code generating offerings. However, back in the early and mid-nineties, which is when we are talking about, there was no such thing as portable code, so you had to re-generate your software to run it across heterogeneous systems, you had multiple versions of the same software and the whole thing was a mess. As a result, we saw the rise of black-box solutions like Informatica PowerCenter and Ardent DataStage (now part of the IBM Information Server). Portability was more important than the fact that a black box can be a bottleneck and that the compiled code derived from a code generating product will typically perform better than the interpreted code in a black box.
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