hale studio 2.8.0

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9 years ago

HALE 2.8.0 brings PostGreSQL access

Posted on November 14, 2013 by

Just about a month after the release of HALE 2.7.0, the next intermediate version is ready for you. Despite the short cycle, it brings a lot of improvements, since it includes a few features that were almost but not entirely ready for release with the prior version. So these are the updates you can expect with the 2.8.0 (downloads, documentation):

Database access

Out of the “box”, you can now connect to PostgreSQL/PostGIS databases as a schema and data source for a transformation with the new JDBC based database support in HALE. Each table in the database is loaded as a type; to combine information from different database tables in a mapping, use the Join function, which has also been improved. To support additional database types, HALE’s plug-in mechanisms can be used. For more information, see the Database Import documentation.

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Sample Source Data

Source data is used in the live transformation to directly see the impact of changes to the mapping in the transformed data. Live transformation performance will become sluggish is the source dataset is very big, however. So, you can now configure that only a sub-set of the data is loaded into HALE, which in most cases also speeds up the import.

Groovy Transformation Scripts

While the transformations functions delivered with HALE cover a lot of ground, an occasional request by advanced users was to provide their own functions or customize existing ones. You can now can combine the regular HALE transformation functions with powerful Groovy scripts. HALE provides easy-to-use APIs for accessing and creating complex instances. To author the scripts, a new script editor is included that supports syntax highlighting and script validation. Detailed help and example code is available as well.

Improved classification mapping function

The classification mapping function now uses a tabular representation and has some new features:

  • Fill the lookup table with values encountered in the source data (Occurring values) or enumeration values defined in the schema
  • Load the lookup table from a CSV or Excel file
  • Save the lookup table as a CSV or Excel file

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Other new functions

As usual, there has been a set of other improvements (about 15). You can go here to learn more about these.

My colleague Simon will post separate workflow descriptions at the dhpanel blog for the usage of PostGreSQL databases and on the Groovy Scripting in the next days. Enjoy your work with HALE 2.8.0!