I made advanced BI queries with Scratch puzzle pieces

I&#x27;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&#x27;t even have to scroll down, and 60 seconds later, I had a much better idea of what this post was communicating.

I&#x27;m surprised there&#x27;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&#x27;t find any videos of the tool itself in use (<i>edit</i> here&#x27;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;3.bp.blogspot.com&#x2F;_FwFkbVFfnGQ&#x2F;S1qa8lgcw4I&#x2F;AAAAAAAAA68&#x2F;cLyS_3u00J0&#x2F;s1600-h&#x2F;1.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;3.bp.blogspot.com&#x2F;_FwFkbVFfnGQ&#x2F;S1qa8lgcw4I&#x2F;AAAAAAAAA...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Thinking_Machines_Corporation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Thinking_Machines_Corporation</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=tlZlpsa0jyA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=tlZlpsa0jyA</a>

Probably a bit of a tangent, but the BI world sure loves their no-code tools. It&#x27;s one of the few sub-industries where they really took hold.

Thanks for making a whole blog post out of the anecdote mentioned yesterday. Really excellent to see the whole story!

I hoped it was a follow up on yesterday&#x27;s comment on this. Thanks for sharing, Mr misterdata!

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

Old iron, 666 ~