Hi,
First off, I’d like to say that I’m impressed with the Visual Importer Enterprise edition that I’ve been evaluating. For the most part, it does what it’s meant to do, and does it well. However, I think I’m trying to push it into directions it wasn’t meant to go, so if you’d be willing to give me some of your time, I’d like your thoughts:
Here’s our situation:
We have a number of systems out in the field that our connected to our main office via VPN devices. While not all the same type of device, they all use a database that we can connect to.
I’d like to use VImp to go to each of these systems and extract data from these remote databases.
We have a database at the local office that contains all of the connection information for the remote devices (IP address, Database username, password, and database name (SID), etc. plus scheduling information for when (and how often) data imports are to be made.
There are enough of these systems (and enough data on each system) such that importing the data from each one serially can’t be done within the timeframe allowed. We really must access multiple systems concurrently.
What I’d like to do would be to create one VImp package that knows how to import the data from device type ‘A’ and another that knows how to import the data from device type ‘B’ (for example), and then run as many instances as necessary to import all of the data from all of our remote systems.
I can’t seem to figure out a way to do this with VImp as it currently is implemented for the following reasons:
1) All connection information is ‘global’. Each ‘SQL Script’, ‘Lookup’, ‘Export’, and ‘Import’ objects has its own, static connection information that is set when the object is created. There does not seem to be any concept of ‘runtime’ data. Because of this, there doesn’t seem to be any way to run the same ‘package’ concurrently using different source targets. I know I can externally change the ODBC connection string in each object in the repository using some external script, but it affects all packages that use that particular object.
2) A single package can only be in the schedule table once. If I have three systems of device type ‘A’, imported via a package named ‘GetStuffFrom-A’, I can only schedule one of them.
I realize that this is a big ‘laundry list’ of issues, but I really would like to use VImp for our application. If you have any thoughts on how to solve our problem using VImp, I’d appreciate it. (And I’d understand if your answer is “That’s just the way it is, live with it.”)
Regardless of the outcome, I’d like to thank you very much for the help you have given me so far.
Sincerely,
Richard
