Denodo is the eponymous data integration platform from the global company headquartered in Silicon Valley.
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Dundas BI
Score 8.9 out of 10
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Dundas BI is a business intelligence and data visualization software that includes customizable dashboards, reporting, and visual data analytics. Dundas BI can be integrated into users’ existing business applications and its visualization and reporting tools can be customized to their needs.
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.
For all the scenarios I have so far worked on or I am currently working on, Dundas BI has proved to be more than adequate and apt to handle all of those. It is a very easy-to-use tool with quick shortcuts enabling you to prepare ad-hoc reports or dashboards in a matter of minutes.
Project organization from Development to Production, you get a production and development license but I think the best way to do it is with DEV and Prod project in the Production box. Use the development box for testing updates and really crazy things. With the Dev and Prod projects on the same box, you just publish from Dev to Prod and you are done. Users only have access to the Prod projects so no one can mess up what you are working on.
Security - If you have a hierarchy (subsidiaries, divisions, department, teams) and you want each group to see only their data, then Security hierarchies are for you!
Dependent filters! What's this you ask? Here is an example of how it can be used, in your company you have departments and who works for what department is in your database. You make a dashboard that has a department filter (only show these departments), a managers filter, and employee filter. Not every manager or employee is in multiple departments usually only one. With dependent filters you can say that the manager and employee filter are dependent on what is selected in the departments filter so when you go to filter them they only show the managers or employees that are part of that department, and you can even it do so employees are not only dependent on department but on manager as well. Then it gets even better as it can be done in reverse as well so when you select a manager then go to the department it only shows the departments he works for (there are better situations where this is more useful).
It is scriptable! From calculate columns, null replacements, button actions, load actions, hover over events there a way to do what you want.
They are constantly improving and listens to your suggestions.
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.
Not too many cons for how we use the application. It really is easy and powerful. Very powerful.
Licensing is one thing that could be looked into. It is simple, but a little confusing. For example, if I get a license today, but a new release comes out tomorrow, it seems that the license doesn't work with the new release. Maybe that is by design, but it would be nice to clearly understand.
We are still in the implementation phase, but so far we are finding it to be easy to use and learn. The eLearning courses that they have made available for free, as well as User Forums and other training videos have made even difficult concepts easier to understand.
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.
We have bi-weekly calls with our Success Manager, as well as access to support as needed. Any question that I have had, multiple people have been willing and able to jump on a call to talk me through it, or send an email with the solution
Per dollar spent, it offers the widest range of features of the tools that we evaluated. It offers lots of options for how to configure your environment, though they are not always intuitive to figure out. Having an ETL layer was a must have for us, as well as the ability to host to secure HIPAA compliance. It is not a replacement for ad hoc reporting, but does a great job of creating parameterized reports and dashboards that look great.
