There is another way to increase agility with traditional BI infrastructure. It is probably a more expensive and more difficult to do, but is also one of the low hanging fruit that we have seen our clients deploy is that even they have a very heavy investment in the entire environment right, both ETL data warehouse and BI.
Let’s say you have thousands and thousands of canned report that you really can’t give up. You can’t really think about re-writing them in a different tool using a different technology, then switching your data warehouse architecture would be a low hanging fruit. You could keep all of your SQL. You can keep all of your queries and not change them.
Just switch your row type relational database to a columnar type relational database. SQL will still work, and basically they are migrating from one database platform to another. All of a sudden your queries run faster, and you are tuning for query optimization.
Your requirements for tuning, for query optimization, and physical data modeling all of a sudden really becomes much, much less significant. So these are a couple of ways to think about it. Try to either get started with a different BI tool, or if your BI investment is really heavy potentially try to make your environment more agile by replacing your older less agile database architecture.
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Your requirements for tuning, for query optimization, and physical data modeling all of a sudden really becomes much, much less significant. So these are a couple of ways to think about it. Try to either get started with a different BI tool, or if your BI investment is really heavy potentially try to make your environment more agile by replacing your older less agile database architecture.
And this question is from Marina, is the InetSoft BI application very easily integrated with the .Net framework.
Yes. Marina, it is. For organizations who are heavily invested in a Microsoft environment: .Net, SQL server, SharePoint, what can InetSoft do? So some of our clients have been using our APIs to really do everything from gathering different pieces of content and making it a part of .Net applications to even doing different types of functionality operationally on the server.
Style Intelligence is easy in the way that integration really takes place in an easy manner through those APIs. In the past we had web service APIs using SOAP. Now we have for a JavaScript API to build that right into your front end and then also the rest APIs are available. And one question from Sasha is, is self service BI also using the in-memory concept?
Yes, absolutely. Self-service and in-memory are not synonymous, but rather what I would suggest to our listeners is to think about is this way: in-memory is one of the components of self-service agile BI. When a database is loaded in memory you have a lots more options to manipulate that data on a fly.
If you are working with a disk-based database your flexibility to perform what IF analysis is only as good as the data model, and I would say if the data model permits you to do this type of analysis, then you are good. If it doesn’t, then unfortunately you stuck until your call your database administrator or data modeler and have them change that data model according to your new requirements, and that obviously can take a day sometimes, sometimes weeks and sometimes even longer.
But with in-memory basically think of any kind of in-memory architecture as the same as spreadsheets. In spreadsheets all you really need is rows and columns and as long as you have your rows and columns and you understand what they mean you can build your pivot table on the fly.