I'm looking at various make-like systems to implement simple extract-transform-load data-build plans. (Top candidates are ANT and SCons at the moment.)
Two initial questions that I can't answer after reading the documentation and the 'Ant book'. 1. Can you control the degree of parallelism, eg. I want to do something like 'ant --maxParallel=4 ...' or: <parallel numThreads="4"/> <... lots of tasks ... </parallel> and have Ant only kick off new tasks when old ones finish to avoid having too many running at once (they have big resource requirements). 2. Is there any good way to manipulate dates held in properties? The ETL plan is typically parameterized by a target date (say <property name="targetDate" value="2002-12-25"/> with an xsd:Date value), and the required outputs depend on characteristics of the date (is it a Friday, a month-end, etc), and possibly on related dates (extract records between now and 1 calendar month ago). I guess I could do this by shell scripts outside of ant and read results into properties, but it seems painful. Thanks, Patrick -- _________________________________________________________________________ Patrick Surry, PhD Tel 617 457 5200 Fax 617 457 5299 www.quadstone.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
