Tableau on the Cloud: Challenges with massive data volumes
As the number of dimensions and cardinalities increase, Tableau takes longer to analyze and fetch query results irrespective of whether your data is on the cloud or on-premise data lake. This results in a significant lag for dashboard refresh. When you dive deeper into your data, and add more fields, formulae and schemas– it becomes even more complicated. Any business user looking at a dashboard to answer their business questions would expect it to load and respond quickly. In fact, most users expect instant responses. Business SLAs require queries to return in seconds irrespective of the size of data.
The problem worsens with higher analytical complexities. Complex calculations cause unwanted slowdowns. Also, you may find it difficult to maintain a single standard for consuming and driving analytics across the enterprise.
Another issue arises when both data sources and Tableau servers exist on different networks. It causes delayed response times for communications between data warehouses and BI dashboards.
If you believe Tableau extracts are the solution, you should remember that it is not live data. It is a stale sample of your business data that you are viewing. Will you be able to make informed business decisions using this data?
Tableau generates and executes a SQL statement for every interaction on every visualization. This means, that even if you use extracts, you won’t achieve the speed of thought analysis. While modern data platforms are exceedingly flexible and scalable, running interactive queries directly on them entails long, slow batch processes and extremely complex code.
The Kyvos Solution
Creating a high-performing semantic layer between the cloud platform and Tableau can reduce the query response times exponentially. And that’s exactly what Kyvos does. Tableau and Kyvos together form a powerhouse for fast and interactive business intelligence on massive data. You can query billions of rows of data from your Tableau interface and get the response within seconds. No need to wait for days, and months to pull up reports.
Kyvos pre-calculates and caches all query results, enabling faster performance for queries used by Tableau visualizations and reports. With minimal degradation on high concurrency, it also allows you to make massive data accessible to a large number of team members without adding any extra infrastructure.
Rather than having multiple systems for traditional and non-traditional data, Kyvos easily brings diverse data together and allows you to analyze your data directly without any complex ETL. It removes the complexity of modern data platforms and enables you to develop insights from all data, both structured and unstructured, regardless of size and granularity using a simple drag-and-drop interface.
Let us now see how Kyvos achieves this.
Instant access to massive data through BI acceleration layer
Kyvos creates a BI acceleration layer directly on your cloud or on-premise data platform, enabling you to use Tableau for seamless access at any scale. You can install Kyvos on your existing cloud infrastructure, so there is no data movement or added infrastructure costs.
Further, you can install Kyvos on any cloud platform, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, and leverage big data storage platforms like Hadoop Distributed File System or Amazon S3.
You can also analyze your raw data and drill down to the lowest level of granularity, without using any external code or complex ETL processes.
Next-generation OLAP delivers superfast BI at a massive scale
Our proprietary OLAP technology eliminates the performance challenges that come with massive-scale data. This ensures you can enjoy the speed and interactivity of OLAP combined with the scalability and flexibility of modern data platforms – all this with Tableau’s brilliant visualizations.
Kyvos allows you to process data at any scale, granularity, or complexity. You can then connect to your existing Tableau on the cloud to provide open connectivity and easy integration. With the Kyvos connector already built into Tableau, you can connect to your data in just a few clicks. Query, slice and dice, drill down, and explore data in Tableau dashboards with sub-second response times. Kyvos also supports Open API and Library Connectivity using SQL or MDX queries, full JAVA, and REST APIs, or existing libraries like OLAP4j or Python’s olap.xmla.
Pre-aggregated data cubes for linear scalability
The Kyvos BI server pre-aggregates data into multidimensional cubes directly on your cloud platform without any data movement. These cubes store data in the most granular form supporting deep analytics across many dimensions with interactive response times. The Kyvos cubes are distributed across multiple nodes providing linear scalability. They can be stored on the cloud, making it possible to quickly scale up and build huge cubes while still providing instant responses to queries.
Kyvos’ intelligent resource monitor makes recommendations to optimize your resource usage. As it is a self-service analytical tool, you can get answers to all your business queries, without the tedious work of creating hundreds of reports. Once you have built a cube with all the dimensions and measures that you want to analyze, you can fetch answers directly from these cubes for all your BI and analytics needs. You can also build multiple cubes that store data to the lowest granularity level and serve most queries within seconds.
Instead of getting rid of the granular level of detail that would ordinarily be summarized or aggregated in a traditional OLAP setup, use Kyvos to build a specific dimension for each column or field, whether it’s an individual customer or a particular product.
Intelligent caching with optimized querying for superior performance
Kyvos has an intelligent caching mechanism with features such as cache auto-population, purge, and repopulation that reduce query response times considerably. Caches are used extensively throughout Kyvos to deliver results at unparalleled speeds. The advanced caching mechanism not only ensures high performance but also optimizes the consumption of vital resources.
The caching service enhances performance by reducing the number of trips to the cubes or other external sources for fetching results. Besides this, it also ensures that resources are shared between processes, whenever possible, enabling efficient utilization of resources.
So, when you use Tableau on the Cloud or on-premise data lakes with Kyvos to get answers to your business questions, dashboards are refreshed at superfast speeds, irrespective of the size of your data.
Advanced security features for fine-grained access control
Whenever you think about creating a semantic layer between your data and analytics tool, the first thing that comes to mind is – security. Business data is highly confidential, and any breaches or leaks may have significant legal and financial implications.
To ensure the security and confidentiality of your data, Kyvos provides row and column level security, giving users access to only those data fields that are relevant to them. It also enables integration with enterprise security infrastructures, so organizations are confident that their data is secure. You can easily import users from your organization’s active directory into Kyvos and be assured of access control.
Kyvos also supports enterprise-grade security including single sign-on authentication along with role-based access control till the lowest granular level.
Enable a Single Source of Truth
Kyvos builds a Smart Semantic Layerâ„¢ on your cloud ecosystem to eliminate the limitations of siloed reporting. Instead of dealing with segregated calculations and business logic within your BI tool, you can rely on our advanced technology to define a single source of truth for different user categories. And all this happens without compromising superior BI performance.
Revolutionize your Analytics
Revolutionize your analytics using Tableau’s powerful visualizations with Kyvos’ capability to deliver quick results and unlimited scalability on massive data.
To learn how Kyvos delivers instant insights on massive data with Tableau on the cloud or on-premise data lakes, request a demo now.
You can also watch our video where one of our customers, Walgreens, describes how they use Kyvos and Tableau to analyze two years of historical data instantly and interactively to get deeper insights into their supply chain.
