The best description of untrusted data I’ve ever heard is, “We all attend the QBR – Sales, Marketing, Finance – and present quarterly results, except the Sales reports and numbers don’t match Marketing numbers and neither match Finance reports. We argue about where the numbers came from, then after 45 minutes of digging for common ground, we chuck our shovels and abandon the call in disgust.” How would you go about fixing that situation?
Cloudera SQL Stream Builder (SSB) gives the power of a unified stream processing engine to non-technical users so they can integrate, aggregate, query, and analyze both streaming and batch data sources in a single SQL interface. This allows business users to define events of interest for which they need to continuously monitor and respond quickly. There are many ways to distribute the results of SSB’s continuous queries to embed actionable insights into business processes.
Recently, I published an article on whether self-service BI is attainable, and spoiler alert: it certainly is. Of course, anything of value usually does require a bit of planning, collaboration, and effort. After the article was published, I began having conversations with technical leaders, analysts, and analytics engineers, and the topic of data modeling for self-service analytics came up repeatedly.
As technology advances and digitization takes over, there is an expectation that our lives will be more simple. ‘Self-service’ capabilities like Self-Service BI are the manifestation of this expectation within many technologies. For most, ease of use is no longer enough. Now tools must be simple to use, and flexible enough to cater to a wide range of skills and intricacy of analysis.
