Loading Data From A Variety Of Sources
The other side of this, there are a bunch of software technologies out there today which are pretty flexible at loading data from a variety of sources. The data mashup approach is a really flexible way where you can go out and load different data sources on demand or on a schedule. You might schedule the refresh of a cache during the morning. It might be 10 in the morning, and the mashup tool might grab 30 tables out of an Oracle database, five more tables from a SQL Server database, and a couple of Excel sheets that somebody just put together because we did some survey yesterday.
Then the visual reporting application loads it all into a memory pool on the server where it’s accessible from clients PCs and mobile devices via a web interface. The group has access and can start working. There are number of software products that can do that, obviously. There are Gartner reports, TDWI reports, Aberdeen reports, most industry analyst have reports listing visual reporting vendors.
And similarly for agile BI technologies, if you did search on data discovery and analysis or visual reporting analysis or agile BI, you’re going to find, most of the current writing on the technologies. We have some of these reports on our Web site in the Evaluate section.
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“Flexible product with great training and support. The product has been very useful for quickly creating dashboards and data views. Support and training has always been available to us and quick to respond.
- George R, Information Technology Specialist at Sonepar USA
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How can you control the impact of these visualization tools on the data sources?
Okay great. Well, it seems like we’re just about out of time. I think maybe we have time for one more question. This one just came, how can you control the impact of these visualization tools on the data sources?
That’s a good question. So there are a set of visualizations tools that don’t write to the source system. And ours is unique because it offers that option. Traditionally visualization vendors have not written anything to the data sources. They just pulled from the source systems, and all of the analysis slicing and dicing is done offline from the source systems. We can run in mode, too, to protect the source’s performance and intergrity.
You can export lists out. You can create metrics, and you can prevent changes to anything in the source system. But with our solution, you also have the ability to write back into the source system. You may want to update sales or add new data to the source system and not depend on ETL tools to interface with the source system database.
So I think the question is, what is that you’re looking to do? Most of the data discovery and analysis applications are not like us with since they do not write into the source system. The older solutions revere the database as the word of truth, God’s word and integrity. They are philosophically never going to allow somebody to change something in there whether it’s an Excel spreadsheet or an Oracle table or a SQL Server table. They will only let you read and let you analyze it and slice and dice it and export results and merge them with other data, but not change the data.
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Read why choosing InetSoft's cloud-flexible BI provides advantages over other BI options. |
It seems like we’re out of time. I hope everyone appreciated this synopsis of the topic of agile BI, and hopefully our attendees gained some level of greater clarification on the topic. And from the questions that have come in, it looks like we provided a great platform for discussion. So as we mention before, we hope that this discussion will continue on our blog. Thanks again for attending.