Birst makes it possible to extract, transform and load data into a versatile data warehouse design in a fraction of the time needed using conventional Business Intelligence (BI) tools. Thanks to Birst’s patent-pending automation features, IT is finally in a position to quickly serve the analysis and reporting needs of business users without having to give up control over the data.
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Using conventional Business Intelligence (BI) tool sets, designing and creating a data warehouse is a resource intensive and time consuming process. Creating and maintaining the database schema for a data warehouse and mapping source data to it has traditionally been done manually. Birst automatically generates and maintains all facts and dimensions, joins and the required routines for loading data into an analytical data store. The advantage of automation is that it enables rapid iterative development of a data warehouse by enabling IT to focus on the logical model underlying business processes and not the physical instantiation of it.
Birst compiles a logical dimensional model into a fully modern star schema design. Logical measures are automatically analyzed for calculation grain, while logical dimensions are analyzed for levels requiring persistence. Facts are automatically generated, while dimensions and mini-dimensions are created as needed. Birst generates and manages all key relationships, including surrogate keys where necessary.
Full and incremental data loading strategies are available automatically, No additional scripting is required for an incremental load and changes are detected automatically. Birst also provides for automatic management of historical data including automated support for dimensional attribute history and automated support for snapshots. No additional coding or scripting is required to leverage these capabilities. Load optimization allows combining calculations that can be grouped in the same loading pass. Such load groups enable segmentation and parallelization of the loading process. Each load group can be defined to have its own periodicity (e.g. day, week, month) and own specific content (e.g. organization). Time-shifting variants (e.g. month ago, quarter ago, etc.) and rolling-time variants (trailing 3, 6, 12 months, year-to-date, etc.) are automatically supported and do not need to be separately setup.
For cases where source data cannot be directly mapped onto a desired logical dimensional model - either the structure of the source data is too different or complex data manipulations are needed to ensure the data maps correctly - Birst offers ETL Services.
ETL Services provides a powerful and flexible mechanism to transform and manipulate data. It was designed explicitly to provide a high level of flexibility to designers. With ETL Services you can:
- Control your own data transformations
- Leverage a fully scalable, in-memory middle tier for transformation processing
- Stage intermediate tables and perform transformations on data prior to loading
- Enable procedural scripts across records as well as one-by-one
- Create complex manipulations like sequence analysis or hierarchy tree navigation
Birst provides native connectivity for Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 and MySQL as well as ODBC connectivity for importing Access, Excel, flat files and other ODBC data sources. In addition, Birst allows you to quickly and easily connect to cloud data sources like Salesforce.com and Google Analytics. With out-of-the-box data mapping for these cloud sources, accessing your data for analysis in Birst is as easy as entering your application credentials and making a connection.
