News and Events

Twister Data Integrator 3.6

The 3.6.0 release features improvements and new features focusing on usabilty and administration, performance, reliability, and security. The Twister Graph Designer received enhancements to ease project development, and the entire memory management backbone has been re-engineered enhancing performance. Common features such as adding support for third party libraries has been greatly simplified, and security has been enhanced using SSL certificates.

Usability & Administration

1. Immediate and visual feedback validating component configuration.
2. Graph "heat maps" allowing users to quickly identify bottlenecks or inefficiencies in the data flow (e.g., components that are either starved for data or producing too much).
3. Easier to install 3rd party (commercial or custom components) into the designer or controller.
4. Automated distribution of new code to production nodes.
5. Custom editor dialogs for improved user experience.

Functionality & Performance

1. Implemented XML streaming to provide ability to better handle very large documents.
2. New pivot components to better handle denormalized data.
3. Improved sorts & joins performance.
4. Improved multi-threading & multi-processing support.
5. Many-to-many Container Connections, increasing the volume of data that can be processed.

Improved Software Reliability

1. Re-engineered memory management architecture & instituted new memory monitor.
2. Better isolation of jobs.
3. Introduced project phases to more easily implement checkpoint restart.
4. Introduced sequences to allow users to build sequences of projects that execute in a defined order.

Improved Security

1. All web services require SSL certificates.
2. Only trusted clients can consume data.

Designer Screenshots


Graph Designer Runtime

The above image is of the Graph Designer's runtime, redesigned for version 3.6.0. The screenshot shows the Designer's ability to provide visual cues to the data flow developer utilizing a "heat map" representation of the data as it moves through the flow. In this instance, it appears as if the "Gatherer" and "Document Indexer" components are taking a long time to process records (indicated by the red connection lines coming in). Because of this, the "Sort Records" is starved for data, indicated by a yellow connection line.


Graph Designer Development

The above image is of a data flow being developed. The latest version provides users with useful dialogs that greatly expedite data flow development, and steer users clear of common mistakes. Additionally, users can select fields from drop down menus, instead of having to remember what they named a field.