A Look into FME 2021.0

FME 2021.0 is packed with exciting new capabilities. Major developments have been in the works to help you connect with even more systems, transform with speed and agility, and automate with increased control. To see everything new in FME 2021.0, visit the New Features page.

A quick announcement before we dive in, the virtual FME World Fair is coming May 4-14, 2021. Make sure to save the dates to see some of the new features in action.

Now, let’s take a ride through all the greatest features in FME 2021.0!

Expanded System Support: Connecting More Data

To continue expanding your data reach, we’ve added support for 10+ new systems to ensure that no matter where your data is gathered, stored, or used, FME can help you make your data accessible and usable for people who need it. To highlight a few new systems here:

• Apache Parquet (Reader/Writer) – Read and write datasets from this high data volume, column-oriented data storage, the future of CSV. This is common in big data workflows.
• PROJ7 (Transformer) – Access grids remotely in this new version of PROJ.
• RabbitMQ (Connector) – Connect to the RabbitMQ message broker (AMQP 0-9-1) to send, receive, acknowledge, or count messages to support data streaming workflows.
• CKAN (Connector) – Upload and download data from this popular open-source open data portal.
• BIM360 Docs (Connector) – Upload, download, or list files hosted on BIM360 Docs directly to and from FME.

Enhanced User Experience: Easier and Faster Than Ever

In FME 2021.0 you’ll see significant performance enhancements that improve your experience with usabilly, flexibility and speed. With Data-Aware Transformer Dialogues now available in the AttributeManager and a new visual Parameter Dialog Builder, you can build increasingly streamlined and reusable workflows, saving even more time. This is a huge plus for anyone using FME Hub to share workspaces and custom transformers. As with each release, many transformers have now been fine-tuned to perform up to 10x faster.

Advanced Automations: Increased Control and Robustness

For FME Server users, it’s even easier to manage complex automations workflows. With Guaranteed Delivery, you can build more robust workflows to track and prevent failures when communicating with multiple internal and external systems. This is a critical requirement in Request for Proposal (RFP) processes for enterprise application integration.

If you work with Automations that chain together heavy job processing or need to troubleshoot complex triggers, a Manual Trigger is now available so you can run on-demand Automations with the click of a button or through a REST call.

Data Streaming: Real-Time and No Coding

With Streams, a brand new interface in FME Server, it’s easier than ever to integrate streaming and IoT data using event streams for continuous, real-time data processing without any coding. As an alternative to bulk or batch processing, stream processing enables you to connect and integrate streams, enrich and analyze data for real-time decision making, no matter the source and volume of your data.

Autoscaling: Laying the Groundwork

If you work with large deployments, you might have encountered questions like:

• How much CPU and memory resources do my workspaces require?
• Should I implement Dynamic Engines, and how should I assign jobs or queues to them?

To help you find the answers, FME now delivers Job Information so you can manage FME Server queues and deploy engines more efficiently. In this release, you will have access to Job Execution Metrics, Queue Control, and Queued Time for Jobs.

• Job Execution Metrics – With access to metrics including job processing time, memory usage, CPU time, and CPU percent, you can identify when engines are most or least busy and use the statistics to power dashboards in other enterprise applications to track FME Server engine performance over time.
• Queue Control – A reimagined way to manage the load on FME Server engines. This intelligent feature helps admins set up rule-based queue assignment to maximize the usage of engines and the efficiency of job submissions on FME Server.
• Queued Time for Jobs – Admins can access job queued time as API endpoints to better understand the processing capacity of FME engines and optimize their deployments accordingly.

With the groundwork set, we will be working towards a more intelligent FME Server that returns historical, current, and predicted load information to help you make better decisions about when to scale engines.

Of course, we cannot get off this ride without talking about Dynamic Engines as they play a fundamental role in supporting Automations, Streams, and autoscaling. With the same capability as standard engines, Dynamic Engines enable organizations to use FME to solve new challenges in innovative and cost-effective ways.

As always, we value our users and we’d love to hear your feedback. Let us know your thoughts through our Ideas Exchange.

Stay tuned for upcoming webinars on autoscaling, data streaming, new Automations features, and Esri CityEngine.

To view all the new features in FME 2021.0, visit the New Features page.

You can get FME 2021.0 on the Downloads page.