I'd like to take a moment to appreciate that the first thing I saw on this page was a GIF explaining <i>exactly</i> what the blog post was talking about, but visually. I didn't even have to scroll down, and 60 seconds later, I had a much better idea of what this post was communicating.
I'm surprised there's no mention of Ab Initio, which looks like [1], in these threads. AFAIK they were the pioneer in BI ETL while everyone else was copying.<p>Then again, they are pretty secretive, and that may be why I can't find any videos of the tool itself in use (<i>edit</i> here's one [3]), maybe due to copyright takedown requests.<p>That software was the successor of Thinking Machines [2], which was the hot AI company of the 80s AI boom. The software itself is quite good at parallelizing logic. And, the graphical front-end makes it easy for non-programmers to pick up the tool.<p>[1] <a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_FwFkbVFfnGQ/S1qa8lgcw4I/AAAAAAAAA68/cLyS_3u00J0/s1600-h/1.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_FwFkbVFfnGQ/S1qa8lgcw4I/AAAAAAAAA...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlZlpsa0jyA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlZlpsa0jyA</a>
Few years ago I essentially went the same way though only up to a demo (because someone else got the contract) , but the target was to modify the ETL pipeline that before was implemented in hard coded T-SQL stored procedures and a Java app whose source code was evidently lost and recreated with disassembler.<p>The constructs in Blockly would have been used to generate the transform queries that turned input data into all kinds of summaries in snowflake schema