Top Features In FME 2020.1 Release
On July 9th, 2020, Safe Software Inc. released FME 2020.1. Here are the top features I’m excited about. I have to say this is a pretty significant .1 release comparted to some .1 releases in previous years.
Readers and Writers:
FME has always had unrivalled spatial support and they have continued to expand into this area. In this release, FME added readers and writers for writing spatial data to Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, and Oracle Autonomous, These databases recently just supported geospatial data so it’s nice to see that Safe Software Inc has already has added support to writing to these cloud data warehouses.
In addition to new geospatial support, this also includes support for additional applications with new writers and connectors: A new tableau hyper writer, google sheets V4 connector and an ESRI Argis Online connector.
Performance
FME has added data-aware transformer dialogues. Why is this important? Well, transformers like the “tester” are now aware of what the values of the incoming attributes are. So instead of having to inspect your data before seeing what is coming through, you can now simply see it directly in the transformer itself!
FME Server
They released FME Server Gallery Apps, which allows you to build web pages to share FME server apps and other resources with no HTML, javascript or CSS. Personally, I find this useful if you are trying to make a simple landing page that links all your cool FME apps or other apps that you might want other teams at your company may want to use.
Another enhancement was made in the area of enterprise integration. When building Automations on FME server, there is now a new “action” that can be selected called Dynamic templated workspaces. This new option allows you to design complex Automations with ease by consolidating multiple workspaces together.
“Dynamic Engines” were released as a new licensing option in FME 2020.0 and allowed for the increased processing power during high-demand times in FME Server with Dynamic Engines. In 2020.1, when you start a trial with FME Server, it now automatically comes with 100 free dynamic engine hours. This opens the doors to enterprises to leverage FME for their data integration workflows like they never could before. With Dynamic Engines, you can now spin up as many engines you want on your FME Server on the same host or additional hosts to process all your FME jobs. Dynamic engines are licensed by CPU time so you only pay for what you use. If your data integration workflows have unpredictable spikes in demand or infrequent large running workflows, you can benefit from Dynamic Engines.
Safe Software also made it easier to deploy your FME Server to the cloud. You can now use the BYOL (bring-your-own-license) offerings to deploy FME quickly and easily in Google Cloud Marketplace and Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
Conclusion
Above is the list of the top features that I am excited about. This list is not comprehensive of all the new features in FME 2020.1 To see a full list of new features released, check out Safe Software’s 2020.1 blog post. Their webinar on the release is also worth checking out for more information. If you want to learn more about how to use FME for common workflows, check out my FME training tutorials I created on my youtube channel.
