February 2023 Summaries

Business leaders are increasingly strategic about choosing the right data storage solution due to the growing amounts of data being created, and picking the right file format to store the data is a crucial part of this decision. Data can be stored using different file formats such as CSV, XML, JSON, AVRO, and Parquet, each with its own unique structures and benefits. A data storage driver provides access to metadata or raw data within a storage solution, while a data file format driver consumes the data within a file that is stored in a data storage solution. CData offers comprehensive solutions for both drivers, enabling improved reporting, analytics, and management for files and storage solutions, empowering every stakeholder in an organization to get the most value out of their files and repositories.

CData provides real-time access to various file storage applications, including Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, and others. The company's data storage connectors offer relational models of the storage application itself, allowing users to analyze usage, determine staleness, and perform actions like creating new buckets or folders. Additionally, CData provides options for authenticating with 250+ supported platforms, including JSON, XML, CSV, Parquet, SAS Data Set & SAS xpt file formats. The company's connectors create a relation model of the data stored in files, enabling users to easily drill down into attributes and build data models from a single table or multiple related tables representing nested objects and arrays in JSON documents. CData also offers three options for drilling into nested Parquet files: Document modeling, Flattened Documents, and Relational modeling, each with its own benefits and use cases. With self-service solutions and real-time connectivity, CData empowers organizations to get deep, actionable insights into their systems and data files.

Competitive data is essential for businesses selling on Amazon as Vendors to stay ahead of their competitors, providing valuable insights into pricing, sales volume, customer behavior and product selection. By tracking this data, you can identify trends and patterns that help inform decisions about pricing, product selection and marketing strategies. Tools like CData Virtuality allow you to access and analyze competitive data on Amazon's API, extracting insights such as price tracking, customer shopping baskets, and review and rating data. With these tools, businesses can create dashboards to display their competitors' data, identify gaps in the market, and optimize product listings and marketing strategies to drive sales and increase average purchase value. By partnering with a specialist agency like Boomd, businesses can extract, analyze and bring this data to life to gain valuable insights into their competitors' strategies and stay ahead on Amazon.

The company CData Software provides data access and connectivity solutions to help organizations overcome major data management challenges. Their standards-based connectors simplify data integration with on-premise or cloud databases, SaaS, APIs, NoSQL, and Big Data, shielding customers from the complexities of integration. Additionally, CData Software offers ETL/ELT solutions, cloud and API connectivity, OEM and custom drivers, and data visualization tools to further support its customers' data management needs.

Real-time data connectivity solutions are being explored as a way to streamline access to information across departments and applications at work, reducing the need for physical copies of data and promoting a zero-copy approach. This can lead to reduced costs, delays, and risks for enterprises. By providing on-demand data connectivity platforms, employees can browse data directly from sources across the organization, simplifying the process of discovering exactly the information they need and enabling them to make more relevant and timely decisions. These solutions also enable departments to access and analyze their data as it comes in, reducing the need for custom-coded API integrations and propelling teams past prep phases into visualization and data analysis.

Stored procedures are a great way to abstract out complexity, promote code reuse and automate tasks in data virtualization environments like CData Virtuality. They can be used as bridges between BI tools and web services, transferring large amounts of data using batch processing, and reusing business logic to mask column data with language-specific strings. Stored procedures can also simplify onboarding new clients by automating the creation of new schemas, views, stored procedures, and permissions. By leveraging stored procedures in CData Virtuality, developers can unlock the full potential of their data and streamline their workflows.

Next-Generation Data Architectures are reshaping how enterprises manage and deliver data, aiming to combat data silos and operational delays. These modern approaches enable lines of business to access data on-demand, bringing benefits such as improved collaboration, streamlined operations, and real-time reporting. By adopting cloud-based platforms, data fabric, or data mesh, organizations can improve scalability, flexibility, resilience, and efficiency, while reducing custom IT labor demands. To successfully implement these new architectures, enterprises must consider modernizing legacy systems, adapting to change, securing sensitive data, keeping all stakeholders involved, and leveraging connectivity solutions to unite their platforms into a cohesive data ecosystem.

Enabling Citizen Data Analysts with No-Code Data Connectivity IT is bogged down with ad hoc requests for data access, and support ticket wait times are impeding organizations' ability to move with agility and compete in a fast-paced market. LOB users often know better than IT what their departments want and need from their data, but they require self-service connectivity tools to help them access and work with that data. Real-time data connectivity platforms are lowering the skill barriers to invite LOB teams to self-manage their department's data needs as citizen data analysts. Citizen data analysts build business intelligence reports in a similar approach to how citizen developers use low-code/no-code tools, empowering LOBs to access and analyze not only their own departmental data but also data from across the entire organization. Data initiatives no longer need to live behind the red tape of IT, and organizations can prioritize data literacy and allow LOBs to take ownership of more data management and preparation tasks. Real-time data connectivity tools like CData Connect Cloud simplify how data connects, establish guardrails for compliance and security, and accelerate data use in real-time.

CData Power BI Connectors enable real-time connectivity in Power BI by expanding the capabilities of DirectQuery mode, allowing users to connect with over 250 SaaS, Big Data, and NoSQL data sources, including ERP and CRM systems. The connectors provide uniform access to enterprise data, enabling mid- to high-level enterprises to analyze large datasets in real-time, reducing effort and increasing flexibility. By leveraging DirectQuery connections, organizations can generate reports in real-time, catering to their dynamic reporting needs, while also providing automatic dataset refreshes every 15 minutes, ensuring current and up-to-date data visualization.

CData Mobilizes CData Sync to Boost Our Product Management Processes` CData is leveraging its own data integration tool, CData Sync, to improve its product management processes. The company's Director of Product Management, Jaclyn Wands, uses CData Sync to collect data from various systems and applications into a single source of truth, enabling her team to monitor metrics like trial downloads and activations, sales funnels, closed and lost deals, etc., to ensure a seamless buying experience for prospective customers. With CData Sync, Jaclyn can track how product releases and updates influence lead generation, visualize how marketing campaigns align with sales funnels over time, and discover roadblocks in the customer journey. The tool helps her team identify new market opportunities and extract deeper business insights from organizational data, ultimately leading to improved product development processes and user experience.

To accelerate digital transformation, businesses are leveraging modern DevOps practices and technologies like Kubernetes to deliver applications quickly and scale their IT infrastructures. With the introduction of CData Sync in Kubernetes environments, organizations can now easily deploy and manage their data and application infrastructure, providing high availability, scalability, and backup-and-restore capabilities that support business objectives and customer experiences. By harnessing the power of Kubernetes, businesses can unlock the full potential of their data and drive innovation, agility, and growth in the digital transformation landscape.

CData Sync is getting a major UX/UI refresh to make it easier and quicker for users to navigate the interface. The team listened to customer feedback and made design improvements, including modernizing the look and feel of the tool's user interface, revising the layout of content, and enhancing accessibility. The goal of the update is to provide a greater user experience that surfaces Sync's more robust features for users to easily find and leverage in their day-to-day tasks. Minor updates are already available, with a full launch planned for April, and subsequent updates will include enterprise-centric changes such as a 'views' feature, improved ease of use, performance enhancements, and setup and monitoring improvements. The team is committed to collecting customer feedback and taking user experience into consideration when evolving Sync.

Microsoft has deprecated the Data Export Service (DES) add-on feature, which provided data replication from Dynamics 365 instances to an Azure SQL store in a customer-owned Azure subscription. DES reached end-of-support and end-of-life in November 2022. Microsoft announced Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse as the replacement, but it lacks the same functionality and control over database tables on the Synapse side. This has led many Dynamics 365 clients to look for alternative solutions. CData's connectivity solutions offer an efficient way to replicate data using their SSIS Components and Sync tool. The SSIS Components provide a point-and-click interface with common elements of SSIS Source, Lookup, and Destination components for various data sources, including Dynamics CRM and SQL Server. CData Sync offers a point-and-click interface to replicate data between hundreds of data sources and destinations, allowing users to set up incremental loads and track changes using an Incremental Check Column. With CData's solutions, users can easily replicate Dynamics CRM to their SQL Server warehouses, providing simple alternatives to the deprecated DES.

Procedural SQL allows developers to create reusable recipes with multiple instructions to manipulate, transform, read, and write data. This language is implemented by various database servers and virtualization software, including CData Virtuality, Oracle, and MS SQL. Stored procedures can be used to automate tasks such as onboarding new clients, creating requests using Adobe Analytics, updating data lakes, converting data to HTML tables, and implementing functions from other SQL dialects. They can accept parameters, return data, and be used in queries as if they were tables. With their ability to create temporary tables, control logic, and perform various operations, stored procedures are a powerful tool for harnessing the power of data virtualization.

CData is leveraging its own Data Connectivity-as-a-Service tool, CData Connect Cloud, to improve product development sprints and gain visibility into account health. The company needed easily-digestible reporting processes to inform product decisions, but faced challenges with native reporting in business applications being simple, flexible, or robust enough to meet their needs. By using CData Connect Cloud, the team was able to streamline reporting processes, expose key opportunities, and improve the user experience. Specifically, they used Connect Cloud to import data from Jira into Power BI for workload visualizations and to pull live Stripe data into Excel Online dashboards, saving hours of manual work and enabling real-time insights into customer data. The company is now confident in its own tool's ability to provide real-time connectivity and unlock vital insights from across the tech stack.