Ascend.io Unveils Flex-Code Data Connectors for Rapid Data Ingestion

Unifying Fragmented Data Ecosystems, ascend.IO Offers New Flexible Coding Options to Build Custom Data Connectors and Support for 40+ Connector Types

Ascend.io, the data engineering company, announced significant advancements to the Ascend Unified Data Engineering Platform with the addition of flex-code data connectors, a first-of-its-kind connector framework for data ingestion in the Apache Spark ecosystem that bridges the data connectivity worlds of databases, lakes, warehouses, APIs, and more. Ascend.io has added support for over 40 new connector types to support the most popular and widely used data systems. Ascend.io’s flex-code data connectors provide the power, speed, and flexibility to connect not just from, but to, any data system in the world.

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“Analytics, machine learning pipelines, and business intelligence dashboards generate the most excitement and attention in today’s data world, but the basic work of data ingestion and unification still adds major delays and complexity to the majority of projects. While many data replication tools do a good job of copying data out of the most common platforms out there, increasingly the most valuable data for businesses doesn’t come in standard formats or from standard platforms,” said Sean Knapp, CEO and founder of Ascend.io. “Our flex-code data connectors framework changes the game by eliminating the burden of data ingestion and unification across a much larger data landscape, removing bottlenecks across the data lifecycle, and allowing data teams to spend more time on analytics and insights that drive the business forward.”

Flex-code Data Ingestion Provides Ease of Use With Full Customizability

Low-code and no-code technologies have risen to prominence in recent years, as demonstrated by research that shows 80% of data teams are already using or considering these tools. Generally, these lower-code technologies use visual interfaces that abstract away the majority of coding required to build business logic, greatly limiting the flexibility to meet more complex needs with custom code when needed. The Ascend.io flex-code approach addresses both needs, where analysts benefit from low-code features while engineers can add raw code to handle special situations, under one unified framework.

As part of its new flex-code data connector foundation, Ascend.io has also added support for reusable connections, custom no-code user interfaces, and a built-in connection browser to easily navigate all data available to users. Augmenting the scalability and power of Apache Spark, Ascend.io offers an extensible framework for connecting to hundreds more data sources than Spark supports natively. Teams can also choose to build their own custom connector types, which can be used for specific use cases or made more widely available and reused across the entire organization.

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“Data ingestion is a major hurdle for many organizations, requiring significant time and resource investment from already strapped data teams. As a small team working to ship lots of huge features, it is critical to maximize engineering productivity,” said Zach Gray, founder and CEO at Flare Build Systems, a Bazel-focused SaaS, training, and consulting company and Ascend.io partner. “Ascend’s new flex-code data connectors will have a profound impact for us, providing an elegant, no-code interface to easily connect our various backend systems, remove the burden of data ingestion, and greatly improve the productivity of our data teams.”

Flex-code data connectors will be available to Ascend.io customers this month via Ascend Ingest, a suite of capabilities that allows data teams to easily ingest any data, from any source, in any format – simply by describing the inputs. Ascend autonomously monitors for new data, format conversions, data profiling, and incremental processing, with the ability to detect and ingest new, updated, and deleted data automatically and efficiently.

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