Barre Data Mart

Historical reports? Freely selectable BI tools? All this with Open Source tools?

Almost without exception, today’s companies can find themselves at a competitive disadvantage in the open market if they do not make good use of the data they produce or have access to. Of course, not every company’s management can afford to have a dedicated data scientist or a controlling group producing reports to deliver up-to-date analysis. However, managers who are open to data consumption are increasingly willing and able to use data that is properly prepared and relevant to them in a self-service manner.

In our view, the key to successful corporate and business data utilization is proper data preparation. Why shouldn’t even a small or medium- sized company take advantage of data warehouse technologies without the need for specialized IT expertise?  In our solution, we have sought to provide an analytics platform that, unlike operational work reports, stores data from one or more operational applications in a historical way and offers it to arbitrary and easy-to-use self-service BI tools for analysis purposes, organized into multidimensional data markets (business coherent data stores).

Advantages of the solution:

• Any report produced in the past can be reproduced with 100% of the original content. Today’s OLTP systems (ERP, invoicing, work management software) are not able to do this.
• With any self-service BI tool (PowerBI, Qlik, Tableau, IBM Cognos, SAIKU, etc.), the enterprise data can be reported.
• With the help of multidimensional data models and self-service BI tools, managers can support decision- making by using color graphical analysis worksheets that can be self-assembled, “drillable” and “filterable” by managers, instead of hard-to-understand list reports and spreadsheets.
• Easily connect to multiple business systems and be able to produce consolidated reports and explore deeper correlations because the data warehouse automation solutions used make it quickly extensible.
• It can help to offload the systems that serve your day-to-day work, so that analysis no longer interferes with and burdens them.
• The data warehouse can run in either on-premises or cloud environments, allowing management information extracted from applications supporting operational work that may only run on-premises to be easily published in the cloud.

In the implementation, we have tried to avoid too close a technological dependency, so the Barre Data Mart:

• handles a wide range of data sources
• the RDBMS engine of the Barre Data Mart is freely selectable
• supports a wide range of BI tools (no vendor locking)
• can be deployed in on-premises or cloud environments
• its data sources can run on-premises or in the cloud, or in a hybrid or multi-cloud environment
• the connected BI tools can run in either on-premise or „in the cloud” environments

The Barre Data Mart is built on data models following the DataVault 2 methodology, the physical design of which is accelerated with data warehouse automation solutions. The solution is freely available, but can also be ordered through enterprise licensing, using Pentaho Data Integrator ETL tool to perform data loading and data transformation tasks. It can be used with almost any popular RDBMS, supported by PDI ETL.