Considering a Business Analysis tool? Consider Toad Data Point.
It is also relatively easy to learn and has many of the same cool features of the Toad (database development tool) product. You don't need to know anything about SQL to do serious data analysis.
Toad Data Point is also integrated with Intelligence Central so it is very easy to share your workflows AND your data with others in your department/your company. It is more of a department kind of tool though. Intelligence Central also allows you to automate things so your data is organized and ready for use upon your arrival in the morning.
- Ease of building SQL/accessing data, using the Query Builder.
- The new workflow feature mimics products like Hyperion and is centered on how business analysts are used to working with their data.
- The dimensional views are definitely a hidden gem. This feature allows you to display similar data in multiple windows, then filter on specifics. ALL windows will then reflect the same data. An example here would be salaries organized by dept then salaries organized by job type. As you filter, both analyses will reflect the filtered data.
- You can easily create spreadsheets and pivot table spreadsheets.
- You can email the results to the team/you can save the results in the intelligence central repository so others can access it.
- You can automate all of these things.
Discoverer was easy to extract data from Oracle and save to Excel. OBIEE needs a lot of training.
- Automatically subset the data for business analyst use the next day
- Ease of sharing work already done
- Even the novice can create and analyze data using Toad Data Point
- Create spreadsheets easily for additional analysis. ie: use Toad Data Point for a data access tool
- Provide some additional data analysis using its dimensional views (comparing similar data with data filtering)
- Common interface for both the novice and SQL savvy business analyst
- Ability to automate the steps
- To gather and organize the data for specific departmental needs.
- Ease of sharing of the work between users (vacations, out of the office, etc).
- Ease of using the Query Builder. You know your data, and Toad Data Point can access it.
- Building the work flows are easy and intuitive.
- The query builder allows data access via mouse operations.
- Saving data and sharing data and workflows/spreadsheets with others is easy.
- In the traditional interface, the Automation can be a bit dicey for the novice.
- If you don't buy the Intelligence Central, your ability to share data is limited.
- There is not a lot of assistance with the Report Writer feature of the traditional interface.