ACL v12 is here and WOW!

ACL has released their webinar to demo ACL v12 (Click Here) and I have to admit it’s a slick upgrade. After moving on to larger and larger datasets, ACL kind of lost some relevance/power compared to tools like SQL Server. But boy does it look like they’ve started to turn the ship. Let’s recap some of the most significant enhancements:

• Direct Database connectors: Hive anyone? MongoDB? Cassandra? As a matter of fact, there are 16 new direct connectors to various databases that have gained in prominence over the years. No more uploading all those .CSV files - woohoo!
• Application Connectors - Connect directly into your Salesforce application. Very interesting. Even with v12 it doesn’t seem like they have a whole lot of application connectors but @DanZitting, ACLs Chief Product Officer, promised more to come in future releases.
• Joins on the database side - What??? This has been one of the biggest ‘missing’ features of ACL. As a matter of fact, in my mind, it’s one of the main reason users have migrated to other analysis tools. So, if your tired of importing 20GB tables into ACL only to filter out half the data farther down the line then you’re in luck!
• Analysis and Visualization upgrades:
  • Access ACL projects directly from Tableau
  • Run R and Python code directly from within your ACL expressions. Tableau integrated this into their recent version and i’m glad to see ACL jumping on the bandwagon.

Wow, what a release. As good as all of this is, it just might be that ACLs biggest home run has been pairing up Dan Zitting as Chief Product Officer and Keith Cerny as Chief Technology Officer. If they were the driving force behind some of these changes then they get a big round of applause from me!

So, if you use ACL then this is one upgrade cycle you won’t want to miss!