Since my last post about Tableau, I have been thinking much harder about the viability of putting a visualisation tool on top of a well architected and implemented dimensional warehouse.
I don’t think there is much dispute that in terms of exploring data through play, there are some pretty sophisticated visualisation tools out there and potentially these can help you find startlingly obvious things in your data that you simply hadn’t realised were there.
The problem for me previously was that these tools were great at manipulating small volumes of pre-aggregaeted data in a spreadsheet or simple client database but throwing large volumes of highly granualar data around from an enterprise-scale data warehouse was a completely different ball game.
Some of these tools could interrogate a proprietary OLAP cube and do so rapidly but but what is that if not a highly specialised set of pre-aggregated data?
An industrial-strength BI product such as Cognos that gives you ETL-to-Delivery in a single platform is certainly an attractive single-vendor solution and it comes with all manner of report scheduling and delivery capability - truly an end to end solution.
The downside of the sledgehammer is where it misses the specialisation that can only comes with the niche products. There is no way you can get outputs from Cognos to look like those from Tableau but they aren’t meant to, they are entirely different products for entirely different purposes.
So are they complimentary?
Well yes, that would have been my initial suggestion. Have a high-end visualiastion tool to do some really smart reporting on a set of aggregate tables or even Excel output from your main BI platform. This is definitely a workable solution although the downside is that you move away from what was probably a hard-fought stance of having a single BI platform in your organisation. I could probably live with that if the platform was administered and managed by the same people who administer and manage the main BI platform. Also, this is an ever-changing world and we shouldn’t be constrained by yesterday.
But is there another option?
You know I think there is, or at least I think there will be very soon. These niche products are evolving very rapidly but I don’t think we will end up with more of the same. I believe we are rapidly approaching a point where you can have your warehouse and ETL entirely separate from your BI visualisation tools without compromising performance and all the other elements that have traditionally only been provided with a mainstream BI vendor - things like enterprise-level security, integrated scheduling, delivery and formatting options, browser-based interfaces, dashboards etc.
If extremely powerful end-user visualisation tools can effectively sit on top of an enterprise data warehouse in an organisation with large volumes of high quality dimensionally-modeled data then this is an exciting prospect indeed.
