A client-server software package published by Ab Initio Software Corp. Designed to facilitate data extraction, manipulation, and loading into relational database systems. Used mostly in data warehouse extract-transform-load (ETL) setups. Consists of the Ab Initio co->operating system, which is a UNIX-based server-side execution environment; and the Ab Initio Graphical Development Environment (GDE), a Windows-based client for designing, coding, maintaining and executing Ab Initio "graphs" (programs).