<p>Coglin Mill is close to shipping a new release of its RODIN extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool for building data warehouses on the IBM i server. With the upcoming release of RODIN version 7.2, the company will include a connector for loading customers' Salesforce.com data into their IBM i analytics engines. Coglin Mill has also improved the product in the areas of slowly changing dimensions, user defined functions, and real-time ETL.</p><p>Coglin Mill already supports the most widely used databases with its RPG-based RODIN tool, including DB2/400, DB2 for LUW, Sybase, SQL Server, and Oracle's 11g and MySQL. These databases are popular enough in Coglin Mill's base of IBM i customers that it developed standard connectors for them.</p><p>"Lately we've started to get requests for some of the more--I wouldn't necessarily call them exotic--but different data sources," says Alan Jordan, vice president of Coglin Mill. "And one of them is Salesforce.com. More and more customers are using Salesforce for CRM, and it's nice to pull some of that information into your data warehouse."</p><p>Jordan doesn't see a huge shift to cloud-based apps among his customer base, particularly when it comes to core transactional systems, which businesses still prefer to run on their own servers and in their own data centers. "You have customer information in your applications on the AS/400, but Salesforce might have information about new opportunities with customers or contact information," he says. "So you just try to build a universe of 'What do I know about this customer.'"</p><p><a href="http://www.itjungle.com/fhs/fhs100212-story01.html">Keep reading...</a></p>