We all know the line from the star wars trilogy. I would find it hard to believe that there are many people who work in the highly technical area of data analysis who has not heard the line:

“Luke: I am your father.”

And that is an entertaining way to introduce this interesting possibility. It is quite possible that back in the mists of time that Meta5 was “the father of DataStage”. This possibility was recently brought to my attention by an old friend who was a Meta5 user in the early 90s and was also a DataStage user many years later.

He related to me the story about how he had been invited to see a demonstration of DataStage around 1998. The demonstrator opened up the application and this friend of mine said “Hey, this is the metaphor (now Meta5) desktop!” The demonstrator, having never been a user of the Meta5 product inquired as to what my friend might mean.

My friend then took control of the mouse and said “Let me show you how to use this product.” He then proceeded to get an ODBC query icon copied to the pallet, copy a transformer icon to the pallet, copy a target icon to the pallet and join them together in a small job. He proudly pronounced “There, I am pretty sure this is how this is supposed to work!”

The DataStage demonstrator was amazed and asked my friend how he could possibly know how to use the product when he had never seen it before and Unidata (the makers of DataStage) thought there were no other similar products on the marketplace.

My friend pointed out that the interface was very similar to the Meta5 product, so similar in fact that it behaved in many of the same ways. Since the Meta5 product was released to the marketplace in 1984 and DataStage first came on to the market in about 1996 there can be no doubt which egg came before the chicken in this case.

So in this newsletter I thought I would include some images of public jobs of DataStage and then include some pictures of Meta5 capsules. You make up your own mind. Do you think DataStage looks suspiciously like Meta5?!

Source: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/api/content/SSZJPZ_8.5.0/com.ibm.swg.im.iis.productization.iisinfsv.overview.doc/images/ds_complexjob.gif

Source: http://i83.photobucket.com/albums/j309/vmcburney/DataStage/slowlychangingdimensionsjob.jpg

And here are some images of Meta5 capsules.

Sure, the icons are different, we use square icons with colored backgrounds to make all the icons the same size. DataStage, of course, needs icons that do different things. But the idea of getting some data out of a database connected tool, running it through a series of steps, and then writing it out to a file or another database has been implemented with remarkable consistency to the Meta5 interface.

We will probably never know if the people who developed the DataStage interface actually saw or used Meta5 or some similar product like Sagent. But it is an interesting theory and an interesting question!

Of course, there is a reason I have made this connection in the blog entry. There are a LOT of DataStage programmers out there who enjoy the benefits of the visual development environment with icons being joined by arrows. These programmers know the value of this sort of interface.

I am confident that DataStage programmers, who already know the value of the iconic interface for DataStage, would very interested to let their colleagues in the business know that there is a “DataStage for Business Users” with all the benefits of DataStage and more.

So if you are a happy DataStage user and you would like to share the benefits of a “DataStage like” product with your Power Data Analysts? Feel free to forward this blog entry to your colleagues. Feel free to let your business colleagues know about:

Meta5: “DataStage for business users”!

Meta5. So good that the leading ETL tool uses a remarkably similar interface!

Meta5: The Better Way

Thank you for your time and attention.