A new baby is joining Astera family of products!! I am happy to announce the launch of Astera DataMapper 2008 Standard Edition, a powerful and easy to use data transfer and mapping tool. After the successful launch of Astera Centerprise Integration Studio last December, we received a very high demand from our customers for a powerful mapping tool. Good news for those who have been waiting this launch; Astera DataMapper 2008 provides over 100 data transfer permutations, interactive data mapping capabilities, statistics, data preview, and data profiling.

If you're working with files, Astera DataMapper 2008 covers Excel, delimited, and fixed length file formats and supports hundreds of different encodings. If you are importing / exporting data then most of the well-known databases are supported: SQL Server, Oracle, IBM DB2, MS Access, MySQL, and Sybase. Complex SQL queries, stored procedures, and simple table selection all are in DataMapper. Best of all, there is no need to install any database drivers or client software; install the application in few minutes and you're ready to go.

My favorite features are visual mapping, automatic layout detection, and the powerful mapping expressions builder. With automatic layout building you can save a lot of typing time because DataMapper recognizes field types, length, and precisions from existing data with 99% accuracy. You can edit the name matching based default map by simple drag and drop between source and destination. Easy, right!?

What I really believe distinguishes DataMapper from other competitive products is that you get full control over your mapping tasks. You can create a database lookup, list lookup, or expression maps. If you‘re sick of writing DTS VB scripts, good news is that these days are gone. Thanks to DataMapper's powerful expression builder, a user friendly Excel like formula, you can type in complex mapping expression including mathematical operations and a use of the built in functions that covers a wide range of mapping categories like data and time, string, financial, Math, etc.

One feature that I became addict to is mapping preview. I love this feature and you sure will. You don't have to run the transfer to see the result of your mapping work; map preview feature gives you the ability to preview every single map while you're building it. If you want to get the feel of the overall mapping task just click on preview destination or click on show destination statistics to get aggregate data about your mapping task. Error log is another cool feature. In case you have some problems with your data, Astera DataMapper ‘s transfer log display detailed information about each error like record number, field or fields caused the error, description of the error, and data from the source and destination if available.