The courses use videos, questions, ... building Ab Initio applications. The first course starts with the basics; subsequent courses build on previous ones, covering increasingly advanced concepts and skills. You complete each course at your own pace. Start training n... More on abinitio.com

I started my career as an A>I (Ab Initio) developer. Worked on it for 3.5 years before moving to Apache Spark with Scala. A>I as a tool is not as common as Apache Spark, but that is mostly because the licensing cost of A>I is very high. So small or medium sized companies cannot afford it. It's the big traditional multinational companies (Banks, Telecom etc) that uses A>I. And in these companies A>I is used more than Spark. The reason A>I is preferred by these companies is because it is very reliable and performative. You don't need to fine tune jobs based on your cluster configuration (like you do in Apache Spark) to make it work. You just need to write optimised code, but that you need to do with Apache Spark as well. A>I just works and in most cases it will give as good a performance as Apache Spark. Yes, it's that good in performance. A>I support is also one of the best I have seen, which is very important for big companies. If you have any queries related to your A>I job performance or looking for support to some complex issues you are facing, the support team is very helpful. It's easy to learn if you have access to A>I tool. The connectors makes it very easy to visualise how the data will flow and transform. The A>I help file (documentation) is one of the best I have ever seen. That help file is the bible for learning anything you need to know about A>I. Having said all that, the reason I moved from A>I to Apache Spark was because I was interested more in writing code than using a GUI. My educational background is not in coding, and I was interested to get into it. It's not Also like the other comment said, A>I is only used by big companies. So I wanted to learn something new which can open doors to more companies as well. More on reddit.com

I genuinely laughed out loud reading this. I still remember the first time I visited their website, they didn't even have informational text on there back then. Just a white page with vague cryptic quasi-philosophical slogans. While I'm in no way shape or form an Ab Initio expert, I had to oversee the cloud migration of an Ab Initio setup for a large financial organization. I can give you *some* perspective here, although not as an end-user. 1- At the end of the day, it is an ETL tool so there is definitely overlap. They put a lot of emphasis on their GUI capabilities, if I recall correctly any sort of programmatic configuration/DataOps type approach is technically possible but quite painful to implement, notably due to how they manage licenses in a quite inflexible way. 2- Functionally, it does do whatever it says it does fairly well (reliably enough that a large financial would invest heavily into it), so I wouldn't say that there isn't a case to be made for a video game studio. As a business leader, however, I would personally steer clear of it quite simply for the reason you brought up -- it's not exactly one of the more mainstream platforms and hiring for it was daunting for that organization I'm referring to. Plus, there's nothing it can do that you couldn't do just as well with a less arcane platform. 3- It is absurdly closed off. Back then, you had to actually own a license to get access to the manual (not sure whether that's still the case) and even then, the documentation was drastically lacking. You had to actually setup the server before you could access documentation about setting up the server, as the documentation was hosted on the server. Your take on this being a cult rings very true to me, I have never in my career encountered an organization I had to wrestle with more to get any sort of helpful information. Plus, their support team was slow and ineffectual -- especially around licensing, which turned out to be a multi-month nightmare to get figured out. To actually answer your question, though, I'd say that trial licenses are a thing that does exist, but I'm not sure how you'd go about training for the platform without actually deploying the tool onto servers. If you're willing to do that, there *may* be a way if you reach out and ask nicely, but I'm not convinced. So yeah. Keep in mind, ours was a project of massive proportions, quite messy with tight deadlines, so I may be unduly traumatized and reporting a deformed version of the truth. Still, to this day I can't read the name of Ab Initio without my eyes glazing over "thousand-yard stare" style. More on reddit.com

Kinda late to the party, but here are my 0.02$. I was a field consultant at Ab Initio. As a field consultant you will predominantly work in a proprietary language (DML). It is sucky. The debugger and profilers are pretty flaky. Unit tests? Refactoring? Fuggedabout it. The IDE (or GDE as it is called) is 90s vintage. If you have used Visual C++ 6 - you will be right at home. Pretty much any modern IDE will put it to shame. I spent a few days teaching notepad++ about DML and the result was infinitely superior to the GDE. As a new employee - you will need to deal with a lot of crap. There are a bunch of old timers (some extremely smart, some not so much) who will give you a lot of crap along with a supercilous attitude. You will not be an employee of Ab Initio. Instead you will be employed by a front company - 'Coordinates Operations'. Sounds shady? You bet! They are shady as fick! Make sure you get everything in writing. Do not trust anything recruiters or headhunters say. Especially do not get seduced by vague oral promises of fabulous bonuses. They are cheap as fick. If its not in writing in your contract - it wont happen. Benefits are shite. 3 weeks PTO and 1 week 'feast day' ( last week in December). If you are a field consultant - you can kiss them good bye. I wound up working through my vacation. And there is no carryover, compensation etc. You will end up losing them. And there is no 401k match. And the insurance was total BS. You are better off shopping on your states health exchange. Travel - your headhunter will dance around this. They will say travel will be no more than 25%. Ask them to put it in writing; they wont. Expect anything up to 100% travel. And no - you wont be in Cabo for December and England in the summer. Instead - you'll probably be in Hotlanta for the summer and Minneapolis in December. As the junior most team member - you really cant expect to beat out the senior members Its a cult. Yup. The whole place is like a weird cult. Definitely not open or welcoming. Bottom line: if you are at the end of your career and they offer you say 600K to 800k a year: sure, take it. But if you are just starting: this will be the kiss of death. None of your skills will be transferrable. Just bite the bullet and leetcode for a month. You can land a job at google or twitter or fb or linkedin for more than those pikers at Ab Initio will ever pay you. And more importantly - 2 years at google or fb or twitter will be resume gold. You can always get better jobs after that. Ab initio? Tough sh1t! You'll have to keep explainibg to people about the company and the product. P.S. Their NDA, non compete, arbitration agreements etc are auper draconian. There is a reason no one posts negative reviews about them. However - I've recently gotten a terminal cancer diagnosis. So - they are welcome to try and sue me. 😃 More on reddit.com