Alex Solutions headquartered in Melbourne offers their enterprise data catalog, a marketplace for enterprise data that enables data-centric business outcomes.
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Denodo
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Denodo is the eponymous data integration platform from the global company headquartered in Silicon Valley.
If you have information systems with lots of information but need a solution that ties together the data Alex Solution is really a great tool for this. We're a large international company, so this was our case. But if you are a smaller local company with not that much data available it could be you should look for other solutions for a start.
Denodo allows us to create and combine new views to create a virtual repository and APIs without a single line of code. It is excellent because it can present connectors with a view format for downstream consumers by flattening a JSON file. Reading or connecting to various sources and displaying a tabular view is an excellent feature. The product's technical data catalog is well-organized.
Caching - but I am sure it will be improved by now. There were times when we expected the cache to be refreshed but it was stale.
Schema generation of endpoints from API response was sometimes incomplete as not all API calls returned all the fields. Will be good to have an ability to load the schema itself (XSD/JSON/Soap XML etc).
Denodo exposed web services were in preliminary stage when we used; I'm sure it will be improved by now.
Export/Import deployment, while it was helpful, there were unexpected issues without any errors during deployment. Issues were only identified during testing. Some views were not created properly and did not work. If it was working in the environment from where it was exported from, it should work in the environment where it is imported.
Denodo is a tool to rapidly mash data sources together and create meaningful datasets. It does have its downfalls though. When you create larger, more complex datasets, you will most likely need to cache your datasets, regardless of how proper your joins are set up. Since DV takes data from multiple environments, you are taxing the corporate network, so you need to be conscious of how much data you are sending through the network and truly understand how and when to join datasets due to this.
I have seen companies with Alex and Collibra, and if I should choose one of these tools based on my knowledge and feedback from the users, I would definitely choose Alex Solutions. From a user perspective Alex Solutions is easier to use - it really is just more intuitive and for most users that can make the difference between using and not using the solution
It's always difficult to predict the future, but the feedback from our organization is clear. Data-driven decisions are better decisions for sure.
No service or solution is free, but seen in the bigger picture the better decision making surely outweigh the costs of Alex Solutions
Our organization has way more focus on data and ensuring correct data collection. This is probably the best impact we have had seen from a data manager's perspective
