ANALYTICS, BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE, & PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

Transcription

1 Entrinsik PAGE 2 THE INFORMER TM ADVANTAGE Real-time access to multiple data sources Talend PAGE 5 THE VALUE OF OPEN SOURCE TO ENTERPRISE DATA WAREHOUSING ANALYTICS, BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE, & PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT WhereScape PAGE 6 ehealth RAPIDLY BUILDS DATA WAREHOUSE WITH WHERESCAPE RED Composite Software PAGE 7 DATA VIRTUALIZATION BEST PRACTICES Best Practices Series

2 2 Sponsored Content THE CHALLENGE: Extending Consolidated Reporting and Analysis to the Front Line Traditionally, full-featured reporting & analysis solutions have focused on the needs of executives that have a strategic perspective. And because of this limited user population, traditional business intelligence has focused on historical data analysis, such as OLAP, where users typically evaluate large amounts of historical, trending data. As a result, traditional BI is usually associated with data warehouses, data marts and other centralized, large scale, aggregated data stores that can be costly to implement and difficult to manage. However, the rich functionality and interactivity provided by most BI applications often prove overwhelming. Most end users need little of this functionality. Instead, they need easy access to regularly distributed reports and other analysis capabilities. They need interfaces and navigation that are logical and intuitive. Rather than force casual users to struggle with multiple complex data structures and queries, reporting should use easy-to-understand language and present information clearly. For reporting and analysis to drive better performance, organizations must engage the majority of users casual business users, managers, and executives who need to securely interact with the data when and where they need it. In addition, front-line and business users need the flexibility to analyze rapidly changing data from multiple sources, in multiple ways, to change how they view data, to access data in real time to help drive business decisions, and to manage reports based on user roles and responsibilities without the need to understand the underlying data schemas. Is a data warehouse or other data store the only option to support the goal of consolidated operational reporting and analysis across the organization? THE SOLUTION: THE INFORMER ADVANTAGE: REAL-TIME ACCESS TO MULTIPLE DATA SOURCES Informer Web Reporting was designed specifically to extend real-time self-service reporting and analysis capabilities to front-line users. With only a few mouse clicks, organizations can quickly connect multiple sources of data to provide users with a single point of access to dynamic reports via Informer s easy-to-navigate user interface. Informer presents information in drag-and-drop form to give users choices in how they want to assemble, schedule and deliver reports. Users have access to information from multiple systems, platforms, or locations, eliminating data silo constraints so that organizations can optimize the flow and use of data across the organization without relying on a data warehouse or centralized data mart. Report customization and ad-hoc query capabilities mean end users can query any data source, regardless of where it is stored across relational or MultiValue data, to build their own reports and get fast answers to their own questions. Web-based analysis enables users to

3 Sponsored Content 3 perform on demand analysis in a zerofootprint, Web environment. This selfservice capability means IT can minimize the resources needed to produce reports while providing faster time-to-results for the end user. THE TECHNOLOGY Technology has evolved to a point where reporting and analysis needs can be met without making the big investments in time, money, and people that a data warehouse typically demands. Informer leverages a metadata model that creates consistency among data descriptions and structures so users can effectively access, analyze and report on data coming from multiple sources while masking users from underlying data and system complexities. Informer s intelligent caching mechanism allows users to sort, filter, group, and analyze report results without bombarding the database server with repetitive requests. Users may also save report results as a Data Archive for local viewing later. Informer enables organizations to fully arm operational users with information without sacrificing database performance. BOTTOM LINE Informer represents completely new thinking in real-time data access. Instant access to multiple data sources. Fast implementation. Organization-wide deployment. Quick ROI. High performance on demand queries. Informer has enabled thousands of users worldwide to maximize performance and improve bottom lines by tracking, understanding, and managing information. By delivering instant, up-to-the-second information access, Informer provides organizations with unprecedented operational reporting and analysis capabilities making full use of their data. It s Your Data. We Help You Use It. Informer enabled our College to create efficiencies within our institution s business practices and was one of the key factors in my position being rewritten to allow me to spend 50% of my time in new project development. Wilf Schlitt, Business Support & Student Data Systems, College of New Caledonia ABOUT ENTRINSIK, INC. Since 1984, Entrinsik Inc. has been developing, implementing, and supporting database solutions that enable organizations to maximize performance and improve bottom lines by tracking, understanding, and managing information. Thousands of customers around the world use Entrinsik's Informer Web Reporting software to natively extract data from their production databases to provide a single point of Web-based access to ad hoc reports for on demand reporting and analysis. Entrinsik's Semtek ERP software now drives many of the nation's largest professional and continuing education profit centers. To learn more, visit or call today. Informer has already proven to be an invaluable reporting solution for several of our existing customers. The ability to present information in drag-and-drop form giving users choices in how they want to assemble, analyze, schedule and access reports made a big impact at our recent webinar demo for several Public Housing Authorities. Greg Clark, Director of Technical Services, Progenixx, Inc.

4 4 Sponsored Content Introducing Best Practices in Analytics, Business Intelligence and Performance Management WELCOME TO DATABASE TRENDS AND APPLICATIONS (DBTA) MAGAZINE S FIRST BEST PRACTICES SECTION Beginning with this June 2009 issue, each issue of DBTA will incorporate a new themed Best Practices section designed to deliver relevant case studies, customer references and technology overview/benefits in a clearly defined area of information management. These special sections will be printed and delivered within every issue of DBTA in print, and posted at for easy PDF downloading by both you and members of your information management team. The editorial department at DBTA has chosen the area of analytics, business intelligence and performance management as the first to be covered. According to DBTA research, 42% of our subscribers spend more than five hours per week on BI reporting while 15% of our readers spend more than half of their time every week preparing BI reports. Three-quarters of our subscribers report that either IT alone, or IT in collaboration with line-of-business management, evaluate BI solutions. With all of that work and evaluation going into BI within our reading audience, this is a highly relevant topic for you and a great place for DBTA to provide deeper background information on solutions. Of course, the need for BI will only intensify for most of our readers sites as well, since nearly two-thirds (63%) of our readers report that the number of BI users in their organizations will increase over the next 12 months. Take a few moments to review the articles that follow, visit the websites for further information, hang on to this section in print for reference or pass it along... and tell your peers that they can find the same information at for downloading as well. Let us know if there are topics you are having difficulty with and where future issues of Best Practices can help you in your job. Tom Wilson President Unisphere Media Division of Information Today, Inc.

5 Sponsored Content 5 The Value of Open Source to Enterprise Data Warehousing By Yves de Montcheuil, Vice President of Marketing, Talend Data Warehousing isn t a new idea; conceptually it s been around for 30 years. From its initial inception as a method of storing relevant data from relevant systems into a specific application used for query reporting analysis, Data Warehousing has evolved into a technology that consolidates all information for the organization into one repository. An Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) consists of multiple subject areas (financing, marketing, sales, etc.) and represents areas of interest for groups and for individuals who examine the data across several subject areas. Open source is definitely mature enough and robust enough to handle Enterprise Data Warehousing (EDW). In just a few short years open source has evolved from something geeky into an enterprise-ready solution. However, it s not just that today s open source solutions are feature-rich and can handle user requirements. If you re building mission-critical systems, you need to look beyond the technology and find a vendor who can support and extend these solutions. Successful EDW requires a network of software, hardware, consultants, developers, etc. to support customers and manage the effort over the time it takes to get a reliable ROI from an EDW project. The key here is sustainability and the defining acceptance criterion lies in determining which companies (and products) will be here for the long haul. And these will be commercial open source vendors (such as Talend) with well-developed business strategies surrounding service, support, and valueadded software products. COMMERCIAL OPEN SOURCE VENDORS SHARE A NUMBER OF CHARACTERISTICS They are for-profit organizations that have dedicated R&D teams at the core of the development effort. Although they depend on the community, they contribute the bulk of the code and control the product road map. There are clear differences between a commercial open source vendor and a community-driven open source project. The first is backed by a company, while the second is hosted by volunteers who contribute their time and, of course, can t provide any level of commitment or service agreement. They are often venture-backed and are in business for the long term. In just a few short years, open source has evolved into an enterprise-ready solution. They provide the same level of commitment as proprietary vendors and the same level of expertise. They rely on the same level of partners to help customers implement their solutions. One of the strengths of open source software is the partner network that exists to provide customers with customized packages that address their most fundamental requirements. Another factor that makes commercial open source vendors better than proprietary vendors is that their products need to be easy to use and must perform really well. A recent IDC report indicates that growth in U.S. tech spending may decline to 0.9% in Its prediction for Worldwide IT sales is down to 2.6% from a pre-september forecast of 5.9% growth. These aren t good numbers. Companies are under pressure to cut IT budgets. However, as budgets drop, companies needing to do more with less are turning to open source solutions, and removing the cost of license acquisition can reduce costs by up to 90%. In addition, current customers are increasing use, adding collaboration, customer relationship management, and supply chain management to the open source solutions that already run their servers and database management systems. The community is also a big draw for many customers, and a significant number of open source users would rather call on the community for help addressing issues than get support from a dedicated service. In addition to reducing the cost of support (and thereby decreasing their data integration budget), the return they get from the community is comparable in quality to traditional support from a proprietary vendor. The community also tends to be more responsive and community tools are no cost to the enterprise. Because the development cycle of open source applications is usually quite short, users know that the chances of getting a feature request developed and made available is significantly greater than a similar request in the proprietary domain. Open source is ready for EDW and offers far better value for the price. Because open source is designed to be modular, an enterprise can start with one piece say ETL or reporting and can add on as needed. For comparable power and features an open source solution in this arena will cost 10 to 20 times less than a proprietary product. Whether large or small, companies today are being asked to do more with less. With open source, you can have an EDW without compromise. TALEND The recognized leader in open source data integration, Talend makes data integration and data quality solutions available to organizations of all sizes, and for all integration needs. Talend offers open, innovative and powerful data integration solutions, used primarily for integration between operational systems, ETL, migration, and data quality.

6 6 Sponsored Content ehealth Rapidly Builds Data Warehouse with WhereScape RED Are you challenged to meet the BI needs of your business users because you can t get the data pulled together properly? Building and managing a data warehouse may be easier than you think. Leading online health insurance provider ehealth moved from a manual reporting environment to a fast, accurate and fully documented reporting and analytics infrastructure with a fully documented data warehouse in just three months using WhereScape RED. ehealth s reporting was causing headaches. Producing reports took specialist IT knowledge, so reports could only be produced by the technical team. This was a major bottleneck. Depending on complexity, reports took anything from a few days to a week to produce. ehealth had a data warehouse that used hand-written Oracle PL/SQL code to load and transform the data. How the data warehouse scripts were crafted, and how they were maintained, was specialist knowledge. ehealth wanted this specialist knowledge to become common knowledge, so that a wide variety of team members could develop reports. As a public company, ehealth was also working to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley regulations. Compliance requires full documentation that includes change control, auditing, and the distribution of reporting functions to ensure data integrity. ehealth decided to solve all these issues by redeveloping its data warehouse. We needed guidelines, code and structure not just piecemeal tools, says Brett Emerton, ehealth s Manager of Business Analysis. We chose WhereScape RED because it enabled our team to achieve a quick delivery. We found other tools either do pretty layouts and no coding, or they do it all and charge a fortune. We also wanted the whole team to understand the data warehouse, and WhereScape works in a clear, simple way. ehealth began by importing existing logic and processing into the WhereScape environment. It then converted hand written procedures into generated code within WhereScape. Some of ehealth s transformations aren t that easy they use iterative calculations and customized functions. With WhereScape they got rid of every function except one. It runs an order of magnitude faster than the custom code it replaced, says Brett Emerton. When one of our team saw the data warehouse rebuild they asked, how many years did it take you to do that? It took three months. We rebuilt the existing data warehouse in far less time than we could have done manually. While our business rules are complex, when broken down visually it looks very simple. WhereScape shows all the different steps that make up the code you can see from the visuals if something doesn t look right. This visual capability helped us perform debugging, and rebuild smaller procedures without changing the constant code, he says. With WhereScape it only takes a few minutes to change schema and tables. The current schema is designed for running reports, but WhereScape s give us the flexibility to run analytics, which is a huge benefit. THE BUSINESS PROBLEM Only one person understood the data warehouse Only one person was able to fill report requests Reports took a few days to a week to build There was no documentation on data warehouse processes THE WHERESCAPE SOLUTION The original hand-coded Oracle PL/SQL data warehouse was re-developed, using WhereScape RED guidelines and methodology RETURN ON INVESTMENT Users can produce and customize their own reports Able to run analytics Sarbanes-Oxley compliant Cubes are generated on the fly, with no code needed Speedy disaster recovery Nightly aggregates of data from 10 web servers Overnight processing slashed to minutes ehealth, INC. is the parent company of ehealthinsurance Services Inc., the leading online source of health insurance for individuals, families and small businesses. ehealth has more than a million insured customers, and is headquartered in Mountain View, California. Licensed to market and sell health insurance in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, ehealthinsurance has developed partnerships with more than 160 health insurance companies. It offers more than 7,000 health insurance products online through the website at WHERESCAPE provides a product, WhereScape RED, which enables organizations to ensure that the structure of their data always meets the changing needs of the business. WhereScape RED is the only comprehensive Integrated Development Environment for data warehousing that supports the entire data warehouse management life cycle. Over 300 customers worldwide are using WhereScape RED on a variety of platforms. Users report that projects performed using WhereScape RED typically come in under budget, ahead of schedule, with improved performance, greater transparency and built on more solid foundations over the systems they replace. WhereScape has head offices in Auckland, New Zealand; Portland, Oregon; and Wokingham, UK.

7 Sponsored Content 7 Data Virtualization Best Practices by Composite Software Grow revenue. Cut costs. Increase productivity. Reduce risk. Meeting these mandates requires more data, from more places, faster than ever before. This means new approaches including data virtualization. Composite data virtualization enables enterprises and government agencies to better leverage the valuable data scattered throughout their organizations. Composite integrates data from multiple, disparate sources anywhere across the extended enterprise in a unified, logically virtualized manner for consumption by nearly any front-end business solution, including Business Intelligence, Mashups, Applications, and more. Advancing beyond its roots in highperformance query or enterprise information integration (EII), Composite data virtualization can be deployed on a project basis as a complement to other data integration approaches such as data consolidation / ETL and data synchronization / EAI /ESB or implemented across an enterprise as virtual data abstraction layer, often in service-oriented architecture (SOA) environments. DUAL DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENTS REQUIRED To best match data virtualization tools with development teams, Composite supports two popular techniques, an Eclipse IDE and traditional relational data modeling. ECLIPSE IDE The Eclipse IDE is a powerful IDE framework with strong support from the open source community. Composite Software s Designer supports the Eclipse environment for XML/SOA and Javacentric developers. Moreover, Composite Designer enables the top-down or contract-first approach to development of standards-based Web services as well as a range of enhanced graphical editors for XML, XSLT, XQuery, XSD, WSDL, etc., development. RELATIONAL MODELING DBAs and BI developers prefer relational modeling-oriented development tools when building virtualized views and lower level data services. Composite Software s Studio is the environment of choice for these SQL-centric developers. RUNTIME PERFORMANCE AND RELIABILITY ARE KEY Rather than move all potential data that might possibly be queried into a second consolidated source, Composite only queries the minimum data required by the consuming application. This mitigates load on the source systems while also providing up-to-the-minute information. To achieve such low latencies while not impacting source systems, Composite speeds performance using advanced federated query optimization; saves cycles using caching, and increases capacity and improves reliability using multiple-server clustering. Business Solutions Source Data Enterprise Data Warehouse BI, CPM, and Portals and Custom and Enterprise Reporting Mashups Composite Apps Search Enterprise Enterprise Data Virtualization Approach Physical Data Consolidation Options Data Virtualization Options Data S ynchronization Options Project Options Physical Mart / ODS Relational Views / Web Data Services Virtual Mart / ODS Messages R eplication Files Legacy Packaged RDBMS Web Mainframes Applications Services COMPOSITE SOFTWARE, INC. is the leading independent provider of data virtualization software. Global organizations, including 10 of the top 20 banks, five of the top 10 pharmaceuticals, leading energy, media, and technology companies along with U.S. Defense and Intelligence agencies, use Composite s technology to integrate disparate data regardless of location or source format and fulfill critical information needs, faster for less. Composite s platform scales from individual business applications to enterprise-wide Information-as-a-Service architectures, automating the entire data virtualization life cycle, while complementing traditional data warehousing investments.

8 8 Sponsored Content Entrinsik, Inc Creedmoor Road, Suite 102 Raleigh, NC Phone: (888) SILVER SPONSOR Talend 8700 Warner Avenue, Suite 200 Fountain Valley, CA Phone: (714) WhereScape USA 2100 NW 133rd Place, Suite 76 Portland, OR Phone: (503) Fax: (503) Composite Software 2655 Campus Drive, Suite 200 San Mateo, CA Phone: (650) Thomas J. Wilson, President, Unisphere Media Leslie Pinho, Advertising Coordinator