I'm really looking forward to an X88/expressor/emunio webinar next week.  X88 is a new entrant into the data profiling market, but it does much, much more than just profiling. 

For a start the product will profile and automatically cross reference all data loaded into their database and it can handle very high volumes.  That's great as it stands, however what it allows you to do with that data is even better!

Using the loaded data X88 provides a business friendly interface to prototype transformation rules in real time so that the effect of transformations can be viewed in real time.  This provides a visual, real time and iterative method of understanding the effects of your business transformation and cleansing rules.

And it keeps on getting better......

Once you have completed your prototyping you can then a) produce a specification for your ETL tool detailing the transformations and b) create a file of the transformed data.  This file can then be used to test your ETL code (if it doesn't match the ETL output then the code is wrong!) and to test your target systems to check the correctness of the prototype.

All of this is done without the need for any traditional coding, which means that timescales for business rules and timescales for testing can be aggressively reduced.

Add to this expressor's semantic DI capability for the ETL, which incidentally has the effect of compressing development timescales, and this solution has a significant impact along the whole development lifecycle.

If you want to find out more then register for the webinar here