|
Getting the best business intelligence reporting setup always comes down to one thing - Data. What are the data sources you use for connectivity? What's the best way to connect to them? Should you use a data warehouse? How do you balance the need for reporting thoroughness with the need to maintain an acceptable level of performance in your BI system AND in your data sources?
With Context! all those questions are easy to answer. It starts with a multi-source connectivity model that leverages the power of JDBC and MDX to help you connect to any of literally dozens of data sources - be they production systems or data cubes - giving you maximum flexibility without sacrificing control.
Giving your users the ability to work with data also means giving them the ability to use spreadsheets as data sources. With Context! it's once again not only possible, it's also one of the many features you can assign based on role. That means that you can control who has the ability to use spreadsheet data sources and who doesn't.
The big question for business intelligence is always the same. How do you balance the need for self-service and information with the need for maximum performance. How do you prevent users from mistakenly creating a report that is so complex that it brings all your systems to a crawl. With Context! it's as simple as leveraging a sophisticated cascading performance control model that lets you set limits based on key values. Limit the total number of rows any report can generate, control how many reports can be run against a data source at any given time and even set limits on how frequently a report can refresh its data from the data source.
Managing performance, however, means more than setting global limits. It also means giving power users the ability to control performance on their own. With Context! you can do this easily by setting additional limits at the meta-data level (or views) to further restrict the performance of individual views, giving you maximum flexibility, security and performance.
The ultimate success or failure of any reporting system is tied to the users. With Context! creating snapshots of data that make reporting easy and intuitive is simple and flexible. Use an intuitive drag-and-drop interface to build meta-data views without writing a single line of script. Expose the fields you need to expose and format them according to your user needs. You can even create custom fields - on the fly - giving your users the information they need aggregated in a way that makes sense. Of course, you can also achieve all of this by using SQL code since Context! can just as easily let you build meta-data views through SQL scripts.
How do you manage the problem of reports from multiple data sources? Build a new data warehouse? What if you could do it simply from within your BI platform? With Context! you can! Build sophisticated consolidated views of data by leveraging meta-data views you have already created - regardless of data source - letting you create, for example, a consolidated view of sales and marketing information that leverages both your CRM and marketing automation systems!
|
