As Exasol heads to the Tableau Conference Europe, Carsten Weidman, Technical Alliance Manager, looks at the importance of granular data analytics to gain valuable insights.
Businesses run on data, they always have. Whether it is sales, marketing, accounting or manufacturing – the data all gets collated, aggregated and passed up the chain of command to help decision-makers do their job and support the wider organization.
However, now more than ever, businesses are striving to become data-driven, rather than being data-led. The difference might appear subtle, but the implications can be market-shaping. There’s a desire that every decision in the business is backed by data, because a decision backed by data is a decision backed by fact. The days of running a business based on instincts and hunches are limited. As indeed are the days of being reactive to market and customer demands. It is one thing to be lead by knowledge, it is another to be motivated by it. Companies want to be ahead of the game, not chasing after it. Data opens up businesses to use technology to make better decisions and be predictive and proactive. Artificial intelligence and Loading...machine learning are also coming into their own as businesses try to get the edge on their competitors.
This quest for knowledge has led to businesses hoarding data and the rise of the term “Loading...Big Data.” Having terabytes or more of data at your disposal is great – bragging points earned – however, it’s often the case that the microsecond-accurate data points that have so carefully been captured and stored in your data warehouse are just being aggregated when it comes to reporting. If your database isn’t powerful enough to deal with millions of rows in real-time, and you don’t fancy waiting seconds – or even minutes – for dashboards to refresh, then the usual solution for business intelligence reporting is to aggregate and combine the data to the point at which the reports become responsive after the fact, rather than being proactive and anticipating need, demand and opportunity.
Aggregated reports are fine in some instances – it probably gives your time-pressed C-level executive enough to go on for now. But the devil is in the detail, and if you don’t have the ability to drill down to the underlying information, and run your reports at a granular level, then important insights might be missed, or anomalies averaged out.
With the market-leading data visualization software from Tableau, it’s now easier than ever to visualize large datasets and using interactive dashboards using Exasol behind the scenes, you can enable anyone to explore the data in real-time.
