Tech Scene

James Standen presented Datamartist (web, twitter) at DemoCamp Toronto 24 (03-Dec-2009; Velma Rogers Theatre; 333 Bloor Street East, Toronto, ON), followed by a question and answer segment:

James Standen described Datamartist as a data scratchpad — essentially a tool that can read data (from databases and lots of other sources), do manipulations on it, and export it again.  A little like ETL, but more of an exploratory “get some work done” tool than one intended for long-term automated repetitive data extracts/transforms & loads.  He implied there are other tools in this category, although I haven’t used another tool that strikes me as having been quite like this.

This was probably the demo from #dct24 that seemed the most like a product ready to sell, to use; it seemed like something that might be of interest to corporate environments already, with a simple profit model. (Datamartist costs money to purchase!  How retro!)  I have no trouble imagining that this could easily be a successful product (although I don’t personally need something like this, and not having used it I have only a vague sense of its features and quality, but it left a good impression).