Description
Toad BI Suite The Joy of Self-Service
© The Bloor Group 1
Toad BI Suite: The Joy of Self-Service
by Robin Bloor,
Chief Analyst
New Kids on the Block
Business Intelligence (BI) is evolving. The ?rst generation of BI products had the
virtue of superseding the traditional reporting capabilities of production systems.
They enabled the collection of useful subsets of data for presentation to users as
dashboards and other graphic visualizations. If nothing else, their popularity and
extensive usage was a tribute to their value.
However they were not so easy to deploy and support. BI applications are fed by
data, and a signi?cant drawback to these products was the amount of IT effort that
they necessitated. This revealed itself in IT having to organize and manage data ?ows
from operational systems via ETL and data cleansing, possibly through a data
warehouse and/or data mart, before getting data to a user’s BI application.
This need for signi?cant effort by IT has always acted as a constraint on BI. In
practice, the supply of data to users has rarely, if ever, met the demand for it. And
now, with the advent of Hadoop and its associated technologies, the explosion of new
data sources such as log ?les and social media, and the increasing importance and
prevalence of unstructured data, the problem has been magni?ed.
And yet business intelligence, in all its manifestations, is a major area of investment
and expansion for most organizations. BI has become critically important for business
ef?ciency, productivity and competitiveness.
Dell Software’s Toad Business Intelligence Suite
Dell Software’s release of the Toad Business Intelligence Suite is important for several
reasons, but primarily because it provides a genuine self-service capability to BI
users, and it is complementary in the sense that its users are not obliged to replace
their existing BI capabilities.
The BI suite is based on Dell Software’s Toad information management technology,
and as such it brings a proven ability to access a multitude of data sources. However,
comprehensive data access is only one of the capabilities it brings to the table.
The suite is designed for two speci?c types of users: data experts and BI users. You
can think of data experts as individuals who have an understanding of the
company’s data and who are capable both of con?guring data access to provide data
to BI applications and creating useful BI capabilities for others. BI users cover the
range from business analyst to departmental staff.
The Toad BI Suite consists of three components:
• Toad Data Point
• Toad Intelligence Central
• Toad Decision Point
The way that the product is deployed and used is illustrated in Figure 1 on the
following page.
© The Bloor Group 2
Toad BI Suite: The Joy of Self-Service
“Toad Data Point
complements
other ETL tools
rather than
seeking to replace
them. It can
either harvest
data from their
data sources or
from the
front-end BI
applications.”
Figure 1. Toad BI Suite Con?guration
First consider Toad Intelligence Central. This is the server-side component that
provides virtual data integration and collaboration. Data gathered by Toad Data
Point and Toad Decision Point is published in Toad Intelligence Central, making it
available for any authenticated user. This “hub” incorporates a patent pending query
engine which allows processing of multi-platform queries. The query results can be
published and stored there in the following ways:
• As a View: This is a virtual view of a stored SQL statement. It is immediately
updated from the appropriate data sources when a user connects to it.
• As a Snapshot: This is a persisted data set that is refreshed on a scheduled
basis – once every 10 minutes, once a day, once a week, etc.
• As a Dataset: This is a static view of a data set that is never refreshed.
All these publishing methods allow both private use of the data and sharing within
or across departments. The BI Suite imposes governance on the data, with users
requiring authentication before being granted access to the published data.
Toad Data Point is the component that provides access to data. It offers native data
connections to a vast majority of commonly used databases, and it also provides
access to BI platforms and Cloud applications. So it can gather data from other BI
products such as BusinessObjects, MS Analysis Services and Excel, and it can also
gather data from Salesforce.com and Hadoop.
As the diagram indicates, Toad Data Point complements other ETL tools rather than
seeking to replace them. It can either harvest data from their data sources or from the
End Users Data Experts
Cloud Apps and Data
Sources
DBMS App
Hadoop
Unstructured Data
Data Access
Toad
Data
Point
DBMSDBMSDBMSDBMSDBMSDBMS
Local Data Sources
Analyst
BI Apps
Data
Exploitation
BI User
Apps
Toad
Intelligence
Central
Toad
Decision
Point
Other
ETL
Other
ETL
© The Bloor Group 3
Company: Dell
www.dell.com
Products: Toad Business Intelligence Suite
Data integration and self-service BI
“Most
impressive, and
as far as we
know, unique, is
its ‘storyboards’
capability.”
front-end BI applications. Users can also leverage Toad Data Point to cleanse and
query data before deciding whether to pass the data on to Toad Intelligence Central.
Toad Decision Point provides the BI capability. This is a desktop tool that allows data
consumers to rapidly explore, analyze and understand data via data reporting and
visualization. Part of its utility is in the self-service capability it provides. Users can
connect to all the data provisioned into the Toad Intelligence Central hub as well as
other data sources to which they have access. This includes data from Salesforce.com,
data from Hadoop, desktop data from a custom Excel spreadsheet, public data
sources, and so on.
Users can integrate the data sources of their choosing and can modify graphs and
statistical functionality with the click of a button. The interface, like all of the Toad BI
Suite, is drag and drop, intuitive and easy to learn.
The data visualization focuses on the familiar line charts, area charts, scatter plots
and bar charts that are the hallmark of BI visualization. Most impressive, and as far as
we know, unique, is its “storyboards” capability. Rather than sharing several
individual data visualizations, the user can construct storyboards that “tell the
analytics story,” in a similar manner to a PowerPoint presentation.
Storyboards are data visualization documents that can be published to Toad
Intelligence Central, individually or in galleries. Once published they are available
to users immediately, via desktop or mobile device. They can also be scheduled to
remain up-to-date.
The Bottom Line
Toad Business Intelligence Suite furnishes an end-to-end BI service which requires
little or no participation from IT technicians. It is designed to be, and is, a self-service
BI environment that provides data access to multiple sources of data including BI
applications, SQL and NoSQL databases, Cloud data sources and Hadoop.
It caters for ETL and data cleansing, and it establishes a BI collaboration hub that
empowers users of all levels to collaborate and share the results of their activities. It
allows for the scheduling and automation of repetitive tasks. It is designed to scale
and thus is suited to both small and large business environments.
On top of its collaborative capabilities it provides an innovative and productive set of
BI capabilities. Most of what could be automated has been automated. It is easy to set
up, use and maintain.
We advise businesses that are currently considering their BI options to take it for a
test drive.
Toad BI Suite: The Joy of Self-Service
doc_854555108.pdf
Toad BI Suite The Joy of Self-Service
© The Bloor Group 1
Toad BI Suite: The Joy of Self-Service
by Robin Bloor,
Chief Analyst
New Kids on the Block
Business Intelligence (BI) is evolving. The ?rst generation of BI products had the
virtue of superseding the traditional reporting capabilities of production systems.
They enabled the collection of useful subsets of data for presentation to users as
dashboards and other graphic visualizations. If nothing else, their popularity and
extensive usage was a tribute to their value.
However they were not so easy to deploy and support. BI applications are fed by
data, and a signi?cant drawback to these products was the amount of IT effort that
they necessitated. This revealed itself in IT having to organize and manage data ?ows
from operational systems via ETL and data cleansing, possibly through a data
warehouse and/or data mart, before getting data to a user’s BI application.
This need for signi?cant effort by IT has always acted as a constraint on BI. In
practice, the supply of data to users has rarely, if ever, met the demand for it. And
now, with the advent of Hadoop and its associated technologies, the explosion of new
data sources such as log ?les and social media, and the increasing importance and
prevalence of unstructured data, the problem has been magni?ed.
And yet business intelligence, in all its manifestations, is a major area of investment
and expansion for most organizations. BI has become critically important for business
ef?ciency, productivity and competitiveness.
Dell Software’s Toad Business Intelligence Suite
Dell Software’s release of the Toad Business Intelligence Suite is important for several
reasons, but primarily because it provides a genuine self-service capability to BI
users, and it is complementary in the sense that its users are not obliged to replace
their existing BI capabilities.
The BI suite is based on Dell Software’s Toad information management technology,
and as such it brings a proven ability to access a multitude of data sources. However,
comprehensive data access is only one of the capabilities it brings to the table.
The suite is designed for two speci?c types of users: data experts and BI users. You
can think of data experts as individuals who have an understanding of the
company’s data and who are capable both of con?guring data access to provide data
to BI applications and creating useful BI capabilities for others. BI users cover the
range from business analyst to departmental staff.
The Toad BI Suite consists of three components:
• Toad Data Point
• Toad Intelligence Central
• Toad Decision Point
The way that the product is deployed and used is illustrated in Figure 1 on the
following page.
© The Bloor Group 2
Toad BI Suite: The Joy of Self-Service
“Toad Data Point
complements
other ETL tools
rather than
seeking to replace
them. It can
either harvest
data from their
data sources or
from the
front-end BI
applications.”
Figure 1. Toad BI Suite Con?guration
First consider Toad Intelligence Central. This is the server-side component that
provides virtual data integration and collaboration. Data gathered by Toad Data
Point and Toad Decision Point is published in Toad Intelligence Central, making it
available for any authenticated user. This “hub” incorporates a patent pending query
engine which allows processing of multi-platform queries. The query results can be
published and stored there in the following ways:
• As a View: This is a virtual view of a stored SQL statement. It is immediately
updated from the appropriate data sources when a user connects to it.
• As a Snapshot: This is a persisted data set that is refreshed on a scheduled
basis – once every 10 minutes, once a day, once a week, etc.
• As a Dataset: This is a static view of a data set that is never refreshed.
All these publishing methods allow both private use of the data and sharing within
or across departments. The BI Suite imposes governance on the data, with users
requiring authentication before being granted access to the published data.
Toad Data Point is the component that provides access to data. It offers native data
connections to a vast majority of commonly used databases, and it also provides
access to BI platforms and Cloud applications. So it can gather data from other BI
products such as BusinessObjects, MS Analysis Services and Excel, and it can also
gather data from Salesforce.com and Hadoop.
As the diagram indicates, Toad Data Point complements other ETL tools rather than
seeking to replace them. It can either harvest data from their data sources or from the
End Users Data Experts
Cloud Apps and Data
Sources
DBMS App
Hadoop
Unstructured Data
Data Access
Toad
Data
Point
DBMSDBMSDBMSDBMSDBMSDBMS
Local Data Sources
Analyst
BI Apps
Data
Exploitation
BI User
Apps
Toad
Intelligence
Central
Toad
Decision
Point
Other
ETL
Other
ETL
© The Bloor Group 3
Company: Dell
www.dell.com
Products: Toad Business Intelligence Suite
Data integration and self-service BI
“Most
impressive, and
as far as we
know, unique, is
its ‘storyboards’
capability.”
front-end BI applications. Users can also leverage Toad Data Point to cleanse and
query data before deciding whether to pass the data on to Toad Intelligence Central.
Toad Decision Point provides the BI capability. This is a desktop tool that allows data
consumers to rapidly explore, analyze and understand data via data reporting and
visualization. Part of its utility is in the self-service capability it provides. Users can
connect to all the data provisioned into the Toad Intelligence Central hub as well as
other data sources to which they have access. This includes data from Salesforce.com,
data from Hadoop, desktop data from a custom Excel spreadsheet, public data
sources, and so on.
Users can integrate the data sources of their choosing and can modify graphs and
statistical functionality with the click of a button. The interface, like all of the Toad BI
Suite, is drag and drop, intuitive and easy to learn.
The data visualization focuses on the familiar line charts, area charts, scatter plots
and bar charts that are the hallmark of BI visualization. Most impressive, and as far as
we know, unique, is its “storyboards” capability. Rather than sharing several
individual data visualizations, the user can construct storyboards that “tell the
analytics story,” in a similar manner to a PowerPoint presentation.
Storyboards are data visualization documents that can be published to Toad
Intelligence Central, individually or in galleries. Once published they are available
to users immediately, via desktop or mobile device. They can also be scheduled to
remain up-to-date.
The Bottom Line
Toad Business Intelligence Suite furnishes an end-to-end BI service which requires
little or no participation from IT technicians. It is designed to be, and is, a self-service
BI environment that provides data access to multiple sources of data including BI
applications, SQL and NoSQL databases, Cloud data sources and Hadoop.
It caters for ETL and data cleansing, and it establishes a BI collaboration hub that
empowers users of all levels to collaborate and share the results of their activities. It
allows for the scheduling and automation of repetitive tasks. It is designed to scale
and thus is suited to both small and large business environments.
On top of its collaborative capabilities it provides an innovative and productive set of
BI capabilities. Most of what could be automated has been automated. It is easy to set
up, use and maintain.
We advise businesses that are currently considering their BI options to take it for a
test drive.
Toad BI Suite: The Joy of Self-Service
doc_854555108.pdf