Beyond Traditional Business Intelligence

Today’s BI tools are similar to reading an interactive newspaper. Normally they’re read-only views looking at data about a day old (depending on when the transactional data was moved into the reporting warehouse), and they provide some slicing / dicing and drill down capabilities. Tableau and Qlik are probably the most widely used tools for this. Don’t get me wrong, interactive dashboards are cool and provide great eye-candy for PowerPoint decks …. but what business problems are they solving after deployment? The act of creating these dashboards is where the true insights are found. Normally, once created, data scientists have already discovered the interesting things with the data …

The biggest problem is your business isn’t read-only … people need to actually do things … manipulate data … and move the business forward. That’s where Composable fits in. Composable allows for all the operations in C.R.U.D. – Create, Read, Update, Delete …. not just Read. With Composable, you can actually build data models, and users can perform line-level updates.

Let’s say you need a database and a Web UI for viewing and manipulating data. You’re probably now asking, if you’re doing more complicated stuff than dynamic SQL queries and ETL, won’t you need a massive software engineering budget? After all, a software engineering team is going to need to develop:

The Data Model
ORM (Object Relational Mapper)
SQL Queries for more complicated queries
Web Services
JSON Contracts
HTML
CSS
Javascript
Ajax calls

The answer: No. Composable can do all that for you. Here’s how:

Just define your model in Excel. Essentially each tab is a table.

Then upload it to Composable. We’ll generate the database, ORM layer, and produce a beautiful web UI for you to navigate. And we’ve got all the knobs for customizations.

Database:

Here’s we can see the database auto-generated for you. Composable lays out the tables perfectly – creating the primary and foreign keys, constraints, and categories.

ORM:

An ORM is generated for you. Now you can reference and code directly against this if you need it. Internally, Composable uses this ORM to do most of the the data manipulation and querying.

Web UI:

And finally, you have a UI for navigating your entire data model. Note that the Url perserves the hierarchy of your data model.

Please check out Ryan’s post for more details on our Forms feature.

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Lars Fiedler

Lars has comprehensive expertise building large complex software systems, and has served as a Software Engineer at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory from 2010-2014, where he began developing Composable Analytics. Prior to joining Lincoln Laboratory, Lars worked as a Software Engineer at Microsoft Corporation from 2006 to 2010. Lars received his MS in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2004, and his BS in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 2003.