I was just wondering whether there were plans in the future to allows additional sources as data feeds in the future? Linking directly to source data in SQL and Oracle Databases would certainly provide a more powerful platform, although I can see the need for manipulation of this data within applications such as excel priop to import due to the limitations of 'operators' within MashZone.....
Chris
Hi Chris,
of course there are plenty of other data sources imaginable. After long thinking about it we finally decided not to include JDBC database connectivity in the very first release of ARIS MashZone.
As we intend to address the self-service Business Intelligence user handling technical SQL-syntax seemed not the right way to start. But of course one still might ask its IT-Department to implement a web service which publishes the required data from the database online. ARIS MashZone is ready to consume such web service by, e.g. importing XML documents or reading standards based RSS/Atom feeds.
You talk about limitations of MashZone's data feed operators. Do you think about a certain use case which works for you in Excel but not in MashZone?
Regards
Stephan
Hi Stephan,
Thank you for your reply. I think the word limitations wasn't quite right. I was more referring more generally to the processing of large volumes of data, whereby you would only want to display key figures and overall results in a mashapp. Processing all the rows + columns of data and combining/concatinating them to be able to extract the data required may be more time consuming within MashZone than Excel. In terms of the functional capabilities, it has achieved what I have needed it to so far.
I think from my point of view, I need to spend more time with MashZone, perhaps I am to blame for being more used to Excel than MashZone!
Regards,
Chris
Hi,
I agree, take your time to get used to the concept of working with data feeds. To reduce large data volumes there are multiple ways in MashZone.
- Operators to filter large volumes of data within the feed.
- Each data source is able to select a subset of columns to read from.
- There is the option to consume web services - this allows you to delegate expensive aggregations to different machines. ARIS PPM 5 - for instance - implements such services to handle exactly this feature.
- The XML data source contains a feature named preprocessing. This even allows you to do on the fly XSLT-transformations to reduce or manipulate the content read.
Have fun diving deeper into ARIS MashZone.
Regards
Stephan
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