ETL and BI

Many people looking at Content Chimera will be tempted to compare against the de facto standard combination of Screaming Frog and Excel. There are a variety of issues with this approach (such as repeatability and efficiency), but perhaps the biggest is simply that Content Chimera isn’t really a crawler. Yes, Content Chimera crawls but that isn’t where the primary value lies (in fact, Content Chimera can import from tools such as Screaming Frog).

Also see Enterprise Content Inventories: Four Types of Tools You’ll Need.

If you were to try doing what Content Chimera does, you would need to add the following tools:

• ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) Tool. These tools are optimized to transform data, for instance to extract information out of URLs in your list of URLs. You can fake some of this in Excel with formulas or scripts, but it’s difficult to do consistent manipulation of data between one spreadsheet (for instance, for one site) and another. An example tool would be Easy Morph.

• BI (Business Intelligence) Tool. These tools are optimized for charting, but beyond what Excel provides. One notable difference is the ability to drill down into the data. An example tools would be Microsoft Power BI.

In many ways, Content Chimera acts as a data warehouse. It stores information in a variety of databases but optimizes the data for easy charting and analysis (see Optimize).