Entrinsik

PAGE 2
ANALYTICS,
THE INFORMERTM
ADVANTAGE
Real-time access to
BUSINESS
multiple data sources
INTELLIGENCE,
& PERFORMANCE
Talend
PAGE 5
THE VALUE OF
MANAGEMENT
OPEN SOURCE TO
ENTERPRISE DATA
WAREHOUSING

WhereScape
PAGE 6
eHEALTH RAPIDLY
BUILDS DATA
WAREHOUSE WITH
WHERESCAPE RED

Composite
Software
PAGE 7
DATA VIRTUALIZATION
BEST PRACTICES

Best Practices Series

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 understand the underlying data schemas. Is presents information in drag-and-drop
data structures and queries, reporting a data warehouse or other data store the form to give users choices in how they
should use easy-to-understand language only option to support the goal of want to assemble, schedule and deliver
and present information clearly. For consolidated operational reporting and reports.
reporting and analysis to drive better analysis across the organization? Users have access to information from
performance, organizations must engage multiple systems, platforms, or locations,
the majority of users—casual business THE SOLUTION: THE INFORMER™ eliminating data silo constraints so that
users, managers, and executives—who ADVANTAGE: REAL-TIME ACCESS TO organizations can optimize the flow and
need to securely interact with the data MULTIPLE DATA SOURCES use of data across the organization
when and where they need it. Informer Web Reporting was without relying on a data warehouse or
In addition, front-line and business designed specifically to extend real-time centralized data mart. Report
users need the flexibility to analyze rapidly self-service reporting and analysis customization and ad-hoc query
changing data from multiple sources, in capabilities to front-line users. With only capabilities mean end users can query
multiple ways, to change how they view a few mouse clicks, organizations can any data source, regardless of where it is
data, to access data in real time to help quickly connect multiple sources of data stored across relational or MultiValue
drive business decisions, and to manage to provide users with a single point of data, to build their own reports and get
reports based on user roles and access to dynamic reports via Informer’s fast answers to their own questions.
responsibilities without the need to easy-to-navigate user interface. Informer Web-based analysis enables users to
Sponsored Content 3

perform on demand analysis in a zero- BOTTOM LINE ABOUT ENTRINSIK, INC.

footprint, Web environment. This self- Informer represents completely new Since 1984, Entrinsik Inc. has been
service capability means IT can minimize thinking in real-time data access. Instant developing, implementing, and supporting
the resources needed to produce reports access to multiple data sources. Fast database solutions that enable organizations
while providing faster time-to-results for implementation. Organization-wide to maximize performance and improve
the end user. deployment. Quick ROI. High bottom lines by tracking, understanding, and
performance on demand queries. managing information. Thousands of
THE TECHNOLOGY Informer has enabled thousands of customers around the world use Entrinsik's
Technology has evolved to a point users worldwide to maximize Informer Web Reporting software to natively
where reporting and analysis needs can performance and improve bottom lines extract data from their production databases
be met without making the big by tracking, understanding, and to provide a single point of Web-based
investments in time, money, and people managing information. By delivering access to ad hoc reports for on demand
that a data warehouse typically instant, up-to-the-second information reporting and analysis. Entrinsik's Semtek
demands. Informer leverages a metadata access, Informer provides organizations ERP software now drives many of the
model that creates consistency among with unprecedented operational nation's largest professional and continuing
data descriptions and structures so users reporting and analysis capabilities education profit centers. To learn more, visit
can effectively access, analyze and report making full use of their data. It’s Your www.entrinsik.com/offer/dbta or call
on data coming from multiple sources Data. We Help You Use It. ■ 888-703-0016 today.
while masking users from underlying
data and system complexities. Informer’s
intelligent caching mechanism allows “Informer enabled our College to create “Informer has already proven to be an
users to sort, filter, group, and analyze efficiencies within our institution’s business invaluable reporting solution for several of
report results without bombarding the practices and was one of the key factors in our existing customers. The ability to present
database server with repetitive requests. my position being rewritten to allow me to information in drag-and-drop form giving
spend 50% of my time in new project users choices in how they want to assemble,
Users may also save report results as a
development.” analyze, schedule and access reports made a
Data Archive for local viewing later. big impact at our recent webinar demo for
Informer enables organizations to fully several Public Housing Authorities.”
arm operational users with information —Wilf Schlitt, —Greg Clark,
without sacrificing database Business Support & Student Data Director of Technical Services,
performance. Systems, College of New Caledonia Progenixx, Inc.
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 www.dbta.com 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 www.dbta.com
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.
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; depend on the community, they contribute customers are increasing use, adding
conceptually it’s been around for 30 the bulk of the code and control the collaboration, customer relationship
years. From its initial inception as a product road map. There are clear management, and supply chain
method of storing relevant data from differences between a commercial open management to the open source solutions
relevant systems into a specific application source vendor and a community-driven that already run their servers and database
used for query reporting analysis, Data open source project. The first is backed by a management systems.
Warehousing has evolved into a company, while the second is hosted by The community is also a big draw for
technology that consolidates all volunteers who contribute their time and, many customers, and a significant number
information for the organization into one of course, can’t provide any level of of open source users would rather call on
repository. An Enterprise Data Warehouse commitment or service agreement. the community for help addressing issues
(EDW) consists of multiple subject areas • They are often venture-backed and than get support from a dedicated service.
(financing, marketing, sales, etc.) and are in business for the long term. In addition to reducing the cost of support
represents areas of interest for groups and (and thereby decreasing their data
for individuals who examine the data integration budget), the return they get
across several subject areas. In just a few short years, from the community is comparable in
Open source is definitely mature enough quality to traditional support from a
and robust enough to handle Enterprise open source has proprietary vendor. The community also
Data Warehousing (EDW). In just a few evolved into an tends to be more responsive and
short years open source has evolved from community tools are no cost to the
something “geeky” into an enterprise-ready enterprise-ready solution. enterprise. Because the development cycle
solution. However, it’s not just that today’s of open source applications is usually quite
open source solutions are feature-rich and short, users know that the chances of
can handle user requirements. If you’re • They provide the same level of getting a feature request developed and
building mission-critical systems, you need commitment as proprietary vendors and made available is significantly greater than a
to look beyond the technology and find a the same level of expertise. They rely on similar request in the proprietary domain.
vendor who can support and extend these the same level of partners to help customers Open source is ready for EDW and
solutions. implement their solutions. One of the offers far better value for the price.
Successful EDW requires a network of strengths of open source software is the Because open source is designed to be
software, hardware, consultants, partner network that exists to provide modular, an enterprise can start with one
developers, etc. to support customers and customers with customized packages that piece—say ETL or reporting—and can
manage the effort over the time it takes address their most fundamental add on as needed. For comparable power
to get a reliable ROI from an EDW requirements. Another factor that makes and features an open source solution in
project. The key here is sustainability and commercial open source vendors “better” this arena will cost 10 to 20 times less than
the defining acceptance criterion lies in than proprietary vendors is that their a proprietary product. Whether large or
determining which companies (and products need to be easy to use and must small, companies today are being asked to
products) will be here for the long haul. perform really well. do more with less. With open source, you
And these will be commercial open A recent IDC report indicates that can have an EDW without compromise. ■
source vendors (such as Talend) with growth in U.S. tech spending may decline
well-developed business strategies to 0.9% in 2009. Its prediction for
surrounding service, support, and value- Worldwide IT sales is down to 2.6% from TALEND The recognized leader in open
added software products. a pre-September forecast of 5.9% growth. source data integration, Talend makes
These aren’t good numbers. Companies data integration and data quality solutions
COMMERCIAL OPEN SOURCE are under pressure to cut IT budgets. available to organizations of all sizes, and
VENDORS SHARE A NUMBER OF However, as budgets drop, companies for all integration needs. Talend offers
CHARACTERISTICS needing to do more with less are turning open, innovative and powerful data
• They are for-profit organizations that to open source solutions, and removing integration solutions, used primarily for
have dedicated R&D teams at the core of the cost of license acquisition can reduce integration between operational systems,
the development effort. Although they costs by up to 90%. In addition, current ETL, migration, and data quality.
6 Sponsored Content

eHealth Rapidly Builds

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

Data Virtualization Best Practices

by Composite Software
Grow revenue. Cut costs. Increase synchronization / EAI /ESB or for XML, XSLT, XQuery, XSD, WSDL,
productivity. Reduce risk. Meeting implemented across an enterprise as etc., development.
these mandates requires more data, from virtual data abstraction layer, often in
more places, faster than ever before. This service-oriented architecture (SOA) RELATIONAL MODELING
means new approaches including data environments. DBAs and BI developers prefer
virtualization. relational modeling-oriented development
Composite data virtualization enables DUAL DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENTS tools when building virtualized views and
enterprises and government agencies to REQUIRED lower level data services. Composite
better leverage the valuable data scattered To best match data virtualization tools Software’s Studio is the environment of
throughout their organizations. with development teams, Composite choice for these SQL-centric developers.
Composite integrates data from multiple, supports two popular techniques, an
disparate sources—anywhere across the Eclipse IDE and traditional relational data RUNTIME PERFORMANCE AND
extended enterprise—in a unified, modeling. RELIABILITY ARE KEY
logically virtualized manner for Rather than move all potential data that
consumption by nearly any front-end ECLIPSE IDE might possibly be queried into a second
business solution, including Business The Eclipse IDE is a powerful IDE consolidated source, Composite only
Intelligence, Mashups, Applications, framework with strong support from the queries the ‘minimum’ data required by the
and more. open source community. Composite consuming application. This mitigates load
Advancing beyond its roots in high- Software’s Designer supports the Eclipse on the source systems while also providing
performance query or enterprise environment for XML/SOA and Java- up-to-the-minute information. To achieve
information integration (EII), Composite centric developers. Moreover, Composite such low latencies while not impacting
data virtualization can be deployed on a Designer enables the top-down or source systems, Composite speeds
project basis as a complement to other contract-first approach to development performance using advanced federated
data integration approaches such as data of standards-based Web services as well query optimization; saves cycles using
consolidation / ETL and data as a range of enhanced graphical editors caching, and increases capacity and
improves reliability using multiple-server
clustering. ■

B us ines s COMPOSITE SOFTWARE, INC. is the

S olutions leading independent provider of data
B I, C P M, and P ortals and C us tom and E nterpris e
R eporting Mas hups C ompos ite Apps S earch virtualization software. Global
organizations, including 10 of the top 20
E nterpris e banks, five of the top 10 pharmaceuticals,
E nterpris e Data V irtualization
A pproac h leading energy, media, and technology
companies along with U.S. Defense and
P hys ic al Data Data V irtualization Data S ync hronization
C ons olidation Options Options Options Intelligence agencies, use Composite’s
P rojec t technology to integrate disparate data—
Options regardless of location or source format—
E nterpris e Data P hys ical R elational Views / Virtual Mes s ages R eplication
and fulfill critical information needs, faster
Warehous e Mart / ODS Web Data S ervices Mart / ODS for less. Composite’s platform scales from
individual business applications to
enterprise-wide Information-as-a-Service
S ourc e architectures, automating the entire data
Data
F iles Legacy P ackaged R DB MS W eb virtualization life cycle, while
Mainframes Applications S ervices
complementing traditional data
warehousing investments.
www.compositesw.com
8 Sponsored Content

Entrinsik, Inc.
7501 Creedmoor Road, Suite 102
Raleigh, NC 27613

Phone: (888) 703-0016

Email: [email protected]

www.entrinsik.com/dbta
SILVER SPONSOR

Talend WhereScape USA

8700 Warner Avenue, Suite 200 2100 NW 133rd Place, Suite 76
Fountain Valley, CA 92708 Portland, OR 97229

Phone: (714) 465-4794 Phone: (503) 466-3979

Email: [email protected] Fax: (503) 466-3978

www.talend.com www.wherescape.com

Composite Software
2655 Campus Drive, Suite 200
San Mateo, CA 94403
Thomas J. Wilson,
Phone: (650) 227-8200
President, Unisphere Media
Email: [email protected]
973-665-1120 • [email protected]

www.compositesw.com Leslie Pinho, Advertising Coordinator

973-665-1125 • [email protected]