What Does Ab Initio Mean?

▪ Ab Initio is a Latin phrase that means:

▪ Of, relating to, or occurring at the beginning;
first
▪ From first principles, in scientific circles
▪ From the beginning, in legal circles
 About Ab Initio

▪ Ab Initio is a general purpose data processing platform for enterprise

class, mission critical applications such as data warehousing,
clickstream processing, data movement, data transformation and
analytics.
▪ Supports integration of arbitrary data sources and programs, and
provides complete metadata management across the enterprise.
▪ Proven best of breed ETL solution.
▪ Applications of Ab Initio:
– ETL for data warehouses, data marts and operational data sources.
– Parallel data cleansing and validation.
– Parallel data transformation and filtering.
– High performance analytics
– Real time, parallel data capture.
 Ab initio Platforms
▪ No problem is too big or too small for Ab Initio.
Ab Initio runs on a few processors or few
hundred processors. Ab Initio runs on virtually
every kind of hardware
▪ SMP (Symmetric Multiprocessor) systems
▪ MPP (Massively Parallel Processor) systems
▪ Clusters
▪ PCs
 Ab Initio runs on many operating
systems
▪ Compaq Tru64 UNIX
▪ Digital unix
▪ Hewlett-Packard HP-UX
▪ Ibm aix
▪ NCR MP-RAS
▪ Red Hat Linux
▪ IBM/Sequent DYNIX/ptx
▪ Siemens Pyramid Reliant UNIX
▪ Slicon Graphics IRIX
▪ Sun Solaris
▪ Windows NT and Windows 2000
 Ab Initio base software
consists of three main pieces:

▪ Ab Initio Co>Operating System and

core components
▪ Graphical Development
environment(GDE)
▪ Enterprise Metadata
Environment(EME)
 Ab Initio Architecture

Applications
Ab Initio
Application Development Environments Metadata
Graphical C ++ Shell Repository
Component User-defined Third Party
Library Components Components

Ab Initio Co>Operating System

Native Operating System

UNIX Windows NT
 Ab Initio Overview

Store all variables

in a repository / is
Run all your
also used for
Create all graphs
control / also
your
User graphs EME collects all
metadata about
graph developed
Co>Operating in GDE
User GDE
system

DTM
Graph when
User deployed
generate .ksh Used to schedule graphs developed in
GDE. It also has capability to maintain
dependencies between graphs
 Anatomy of a Running Job
▪ Host Process Creation
➢ Pushing “Run” button generates script.
➢ Script is transmitted to Host node.

➢ Script is invoked, creating Host process .

Host
GDE

Client Host Processing nodes

 Anatomy of a Running Job
▪ Agent Process Creation
➢ Host process spawns Agent processes.

Host
GDE Agent Agent

Client Host Processing nodes

 Anatomy of a Running Job
▪ Component Process Creation
➢ Agent processes create Component processes on each processing
node.

Host
GDE Agent Agent

Client Host Processing nodes

 Anatomy of a Running Job
▪ Component Execution
➢ Component processes do their jobs.
➢ Component processes communicate directly with datasets and each
other to move data around.

Host
GDE Agent Agent

Client Host Processing nodes

 Anatomy of a Running Job
▪ Successful Component Termination
➢ As each Component process finishes with its data, it exits with
success status.

Host
GDE Agent Agent

Client Host Processing nodes

 Anatomy of a Running Job
▪ Agent Termination
➢ When all of an Agent’s Component processes exit, the Agent informs
the Host process that those components are finished.
➢ The Agent process then exits.

Host
GDE

Client Host Processing nodes

 Anatomy of a Running Job
▪ Host Termination
➢ When all Agents have exited, the Host process
informs the GDE that the job is complete.
➢ The Host process then exits.

Host
GDE

Client Host Processing nodes

Connecting to Co>op Server from GDE
 Host Profile Setting

1. Choose settings from the run menu

2. Check the use host profile setting checkbox.
3. Click Edit button to open the Host profile dialog.
4. If running Ab Initio on your local NT system, check Local
Execution (NT) checkbox and go to step 6.
5. If running Ab Initio on a Remote UNIX system, fill in the
path to the Host and Host Login and Password.
6. Type the full path of Host directory.
7. Select the Shell Type from pull down menu.
8. Test Login and if necessary make changes.