Selection of the hottest Bi front-end presentation

The selection of Bi front-end presentation tools

such as data warehouse, ETL and OLAP are all background products, mainly at the data level or application service level. This time, let's talk about the front-end products. They are responsible for directly facing users, forwarding users' requests to the service layer and data layer, and also showing users the required information

at present, the manufacturers that provide front-end products can be divided into two categories: first, professional front-end product providers, which are generally not too large in scale. There are proclarity and insight in foreign countries, while fenette is slightly famous in China; Second, full solution providers, almost all of which are foreign companies, such as Bo, Cognos, Hyperion and so on, provide front-end products. ⑤ Repeat steps ③ and ④ until the pointer remains unchanged. Although the front end of Bi has something in common with common IT applications (such as MIS, ERP and other systems), it can also be divided into report presentation, OLAP presentation, dashboard and portal according to different analysis applications; According to the presentation form, it can be divided into web, client-side analysis tools and electronic forms

applications: four weapons

bi front-end applications are mainly reports, OLAP, dashboard, portal, etc

there has been a popular view in the industry that domestic statements are very complex. Foreign reporting tools did not seem to adapt to this Chinese style reporting in previous years, so there is a place for Chinese reporting tools, such as Runqian, Huabiao, etc. In addition, there is also a phenomenon that you develop the report front end yourself. This method has a big common problem, that is, in order to save development costs, you generally omit the development of the report designer and only develop the presentation part. In this way, the apparent workload is reduced, but it is transferred to the ETL in the background. However, once the report style is modified, the ETL program needs to be modified, which is not as convenient as dragging visually on the designer. Of course, with the improvement of domestic enterprise management, the demand of decision-makers for reports is also standardized. Therefore, the architecture of both foreign and domestic reporting tools is converging

the front end of OLAP is mainly to submit users' multidimensional analysis requests to the OLAP server and display the returned data. The multidimensional analysis request here mainly includes operations such as drilling, slicing, and rotation. In the early stage of the large-scale construction of business analysis system in the telecommunications industry, great expectations were placed on this application, but it seems that it is not very successful. At present, standardization organizations or enterprises have defined the standard of data exchange between OLAP front-end and server, allowing automobile manufacturers to choose PC or other plastic standards by themselves, such as xmla promoted by Microsoft, Hyperion, SAS, and jolap based on Java API

dashboard, a front-end display form, is becoming popular with the rise of performance management software. Its interface is very simple, which is very suitable for decision makers to understand macro information at a glance. At present, the mainstream Bi manufacturers Bo, Cognos, Hyperion and SAS all have their own CPM (Corporate Performance Management) products. Of course, there are also those called BPM or EPM (business/enter automatically breaks, as shown in Figure 2). It can be said that these front-end functions are not complex, and the main difficulty lies in the definition of performance indicators and the standardization of management processes

from the current practical application, many domestic projects mostly adopt more than one product. For example, powerplay of Cognos will be selected as the OLAP server, Bo as the report server, and webi or crystal report will be used for report presentation. In addition, the enterprise may already have a set of portals such as Weblogic as the enterprise portal

so, the problem for enterprises now is to consider how to integrate these products into Weblogic portal. It is not difficult to make these three look similar in the visual effect of the interface; The difficulty is the unification of authority authentication, because each system has its own user, role and authority system. If single sign on is realized, user information must be synchronized between the three products

therefore, users need to consider the authority authentication mechanism of these products when selecting models. It is best to choose open products that support LDAP protocol

show: two faces

in the early era of weak PC functions, the computing power of the server was strong, and the client could only do very few things; Later, the functions of PC became more and more powerful, the applications of desktop system became richer, and the c/s system became more and more mature; In the 1990s, the three-tier structure gradually replaced the c/s structure, and web applications became popular, and were favored because of its "zero client" deployment; In recent years, with the emergence of Ajax technology, application computing seems to be biased towards the client again

in the change of the whole software system, the front end of BI products also follows this general trend. Nowadays, almost every product has its own web application, and even some products have the trend of turning all application front ends into web interfaces. For example, Bo, its report designer can design reports on the web

1 these standards are formulated for the first time in the world; 3. The standard content is scientific and fair. Of course, not everyone welcomes this trend, because for decision makers, they want to see the results and do not need too much interaction, so they pay more attention to the simplicity of the interface; For analysts and designers, what they need is a client with rich functions, which is convenient to manipulate data and customize the interface provided to decision makers. Therefore, for report designers, web applications feel a little uncomfortable, because they are not as convenient as traditional c/s clients

electronic form is a sharp tool that is very convenient for making reports and data analysis. Over the years, several products competed with each other. After the waves washed away, Microsoft Excel finally unified the Jianghu

in Excel, PivotTable rotation is also supported without connecting to any OLAP server, which is a very simple OLAP front end. However, because it is too simple, it also leaves room for other manufacturers to develop excel plug-ins to enhance their OLAP access ability. Microsoft will greatly enhance the Bi function in the next version of office. Predictably, its analysis ability will also become richer

in short, the front end can be simply regarded as a human-machine interface. The front end of Bi is how to present data and analysis applications to users. Some people value the beauty of the interface, some value the richness of functions, some emphasize the simplicity of operation, and of course, others will require a leading architecture. Different user roles have different requirements for front-end products. (end)