I'm investigating options for reporting on data in a custom salesforce application, since the built-in reporting tool is a bad joke.
The requirements are that the data needs to be accessible on-demand through the Salesforce website (likely through a web-tab, visualforce page, etc.), and must be able to do arbitrary joins of the tables, like ANY other relational database reporting tool. It is a huge plus to be able to give much of the specific report-design power to the end user, as well. Ideally it would play well with Oracle if an external DBMS is required, though this is not a strict requirement.
I hear good things about MS SQL Reporting Services, and there has been some talk around here about Crystal Reports. I'd be much obliged to get any thoughts and opinion on the various options and approaches out there.
It may be worth looking at tools similar to Teiid. What this does is provides a standard sql jdbc interface to any data source - including salesforce. With that in mind, that means you can then use any reporting tool. It also allows you to join across data sources etc.
I'm glad you call the current salesforce tool a joke! :)
As for reporting, we use Pentaho from the open source world, which is a very powerful tool, but does take some learning. Of course, the final decision wont just come down to functionality, but cost too, and this is where Pentaho is likely to win hands down. Pentaho plays very well with Oracle, and also MySQL too. (And many more dbs)
Finally you probably want to nail down your requirements a bit more. Do you need plain reporting, dashboards, more advanced analysis? Data mining? How far do you need to go..
Related
I work for web hosting company looking to integrate different data sources with BigQuery but the question now is what would be an ideal reporting/BI tool to get the data from BigQuery so proper/fast/easy retrieval/analysis/ reporting can be done with it.
I'm looking into the options suggested by google here: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/partners/ but I was wondering if someone out there has possibly a more hands-on experience that could make a recommendation.
the company works with a mysql based billing system (with client, support, service data) which is the main source of info, along with other chat, cms and inhouse-developed systems that provide other sources of information that allow to maintain the web infrastructure where the business depends on.
Thank you.
It's really hard to answer this. Depends on the personnel you have at hand.
We are doing for idea validation mostly Data Studio.
Some personnel knows Tableau, but once you are out from GCP, all become a slow process, queries and interface updates in 30-60 seconds, as they all relay and store on their own the data.
We have wired some data to ElasticSearch as well, and we use Kibana.
But once it's all validated, we consolidated into our own Dashboards the reports. Mainly because we are mostly developers and can do the programming. If you have a data analyist or data scientist with their own tools, let them use what they are comfortable with.
Always do iteration and versioning, you as a developer should be driven by a good product manager who tells exactly what charts to build out.
As a Front end developer I have less knowledge on Databases. But recently we started to develop an CRM application.
My question is, how feasible to migrate from one database to other. Lets say our application now supports mysql but later customer comes up with IBM's DB2 or sql lite. What are the things that we need to take care while developing to support easy migration ?
How cloud will help to solve my problem?
Just keep your data model separate from actual database calls and you should be good. Use a database abstraction layer in your model to make calls to the database. You'll only have to change the bottom layer for specific databases.
Some best practices:
Avoid DBMS specific features, data types and SQL/DDL constructs; keep to the SQL[92] standard. Test against e. g. SQLite, which keeps rather close to the standard.
Use an Entity Relationship Modeling tool that supports exporting DDL files for all targeted DBMS, or to standard SQL. Or write and maintain your DDL scripts by hand. Vendor specific tools usually don't do this.
Use the existing SQL abstraction layer that comes with your language/toolkit/environment, or implement one with an eye on portability (which reinvents the wheel another time).
Keep the logic in your application; the DB is for data only. Avoid triggers, stored procedures etc.
Generally apply the KISS principle to your data storage.
You may get more help on specific questions about general/abstract issues (not the implementation details, which belong here) over at Programmers.
Trying to determine if it is feasible to use SharePoint as a SQL Query development repository...
We do quite a bit of query development in SQL Server 2012 for data analysis/discovery and it would be great to be able to share valuable queries among team members without having to constantly email SQL back and forth. The email flood is just an ugly mess that we need to stop.
Ideally, it would be great to be able to save directly to SharePoint within SQL Server (File > Save > Save to SharePoint) and then allow SharePoint to do version management for the team. I know there are pretty robust tools out there for version management but we are currently just looking for something lightweight at this point and something that can be implemented quickly to test our options out.
Is something like this feasible (saving directly to SharePoint through SQL Server)?
If not feasible (or heck, if it is just a bad idea) what low cost/no cost options are there for sharing code/sql between team members? And better yet, something that we can get up and running very quickly...
Thanks in advance for your input and insight!
Great idea, think I might make one myself.
Say you have
http://my.sharepoint.dom/cool_repos/sql
You should be able to access the same through explorer using
\\my.sharepoint.dom\cool_repos\sql
We store a lot of metrics from our service (approx 80 million events).
We have to generate reports based on the data.
My question is rather general,
What tools do use for your metrics/reporting need?
Is there anything recommended?
We use Apache to write the log files, back-process to add it into the DB, and a daily MySql script to generate reports.
Many thanks,
SenSage. Expensive and worth it.
It really depends on the type of reports you are generating.
If you are handling things at the level of mean/count/sum/deviance/min/max of a population, there's a variety of tools that can handle what you want. Open source tools like Graphite/Statsd (using Statsd can also give you things like the quantile of a population) work well. There are commercial tools like my company's Instrumental product which provide some of the same features, as well as niceties like a good UI and well documented API.
Depending on the nature of your data, there are other services that offer more specific report types like cohort analysis (see Mixpanel ). Services like Splunk can let you create some great ad hoc reports of live data as well, generated from your application logs and other data sinks.
Our organisation lacks any data mining or analytical tools, so I'm trying to persuade them to implement a Business Intelligence solution using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2. They've asked for a prototype, so they can get a better idea of what Business Intelligence can do for them.
I'm assuming that the prototype will consist of -
A subset of data from a critical application
Integration Services (SSIS): Used to clean the data subset?
Analysis Services (SSAS): Used to create and maintain a dimensional model based on that data subset? Data Mining?
Reporting Services (SSRS): Used to create, maintain and update a 'dashboard' of reports.
I want to show how a Business Intelligence solution with data mining and analytic capabilities can help their organisation perform better.
As this is the first time I've done this, I'd value advice from other people on whether this prototype is realistic or not. And does anyone know of any easily-accessible real-life examples that I can show them?
my thoughts …
Don’t overestimate the size (in terms of time) of a new DWH project.
Start with something not very complex and well understood in terms of business rules.
The biggest problem we have had with new DWH projects/pilots (we are a DWH consultancy so have a number of clients) is getting management support of it. Often the DWH will be sponsored by someone in IT and there is no real board level support, so the project takes a long time to progress and it is difficult to get resources for it.
The best projects we have found are ones that have levels of support in three areas: Management (board level), IT and Business (preferably someone with good understanding of the business rules involved).
Have a look at Ralph Kimball’s Data Warehouse Toolkit which goes through different styles of DWH design for different industries. It is very good!
The tools I expect you would use (I’ve added a couple of technologies here)
SSIS (ETL tool) is used to Extract (from source systems) Transform (data into appropriate form the load) and Load (into Dim and Fact tables)
SSAS (OLAP tool) is used to create/process an OLAP cube. Warning: there is quite a large learning curve on this tool!!
SSRS (reporting tool) is used to create static and dynamic reports/dashboards.
MS Excel. There are free data mining models that can be added in and when connected to an OLAP cube which will allow very interesting DM to be performed.
Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) (comes free with a Windows Server operating systems) to deploy your SSRS reports onto.
This is a good prototype scope in terms of technologies (if you are from the MS background), but the spread of technologies is very large and for one person coming in cold to them, this is perhaps unrealistic.
The most critical thing is to get the DWH star schema design correct (and there will be a number of solutions that are “correct” for any set of data), otherwise your OLAP cube design will be flawed and very difficult to build.
I would get a local DWH consultant to validate your design before you have built it. Make sure you give them a very tight scope of not changing much otherwise most consultants will “tinker” with things to make them “better”.
Good Luck!
It's been 2 years since the question was posted and of course, there has been updates in the world of business Intelligence. We now have couple of great tools for prototyping in the Microsoft Business Intelligence World:
- Power Query (Self Service ETL)
- Power Pivot.
Hope this helps someone just getting started w/ building prototypes.