Informer 5 makes it very easy to get started. Someone within your organization will need the technical know how to connect Informer to your database. Once the connection is made, Informer will scan the database for all the tables and columns that are present and add that information into the metadata layer. Then, your database administrator or someone else who has knowledge of the database structure can go in and define relationships between the tables and link them together.
Once these steps are complete, those within your organization who are authorized and capable of creating Datasets would be presented with a friendly metadata layer. Unlike other BI solutions on the market, you won’t need to deal with lots of technical jargon used in writing a join definition in SQL. This metadata layer includes a nice intuitive user interface that shows all the different tables including all the other tables related to that table, and you simply select the data you need from those tables.
Your authorized employees creating Datasets would need to have some knowledge of the data itself and where the data resides within the tables in your data warehouse or database. Fortunately, Informer presents all that information within a very intuitive interface so it’s just a matter of knowing where the data lives within the data warehouse or database you’re connected to.
There are 2 parts to working with Datasets or building reports, etc.:
- The tool
- The data itself
The tool is the easy part because of Informer. However, although we’ve reduced the barrier to entry, the thing we can’t eliminate is understanding the data, where to start, and where to go to get the data. That can be the challenging part.
But once users start using Informer and start building their own content, a lot of activities become repetitive. For example, someone within sales, or accounting, or inventory control will be working with the same tables over and over again. They are not going to have to go searching for data in other tables.
Instead of needing to write a query definition every time to pull data, the Dataset can have that already built into it behind the scenes. The data is then shared with users who need to create reports from it so they don’t need to worry about how the data was pulled. They already have the data there and can put it into any kind of format they want. That’s a nice benefit of Informer’s Dataset.
For more please contact sales@entrinsik.com or call 888-703-0016.
