Change nothing else, just make your data faster

How Exasol works as an acceleration layer for your analytics

Your data engineers, analysts and data scientists are working to find answers to your questions and deliver insights to help you make decisions. They, like most of us, are not particularly fond of seeing the ‘spinner’, testing their patience as they wait while running queries and algorithms, testing hypotheses and building dashboards.

To support your data experts in doing their best work, enable them to get into the ‘flow’, that state of mind where they become fully immersed in their task and can enjoy laser focus and concentration. Remove anything that interrupts or prevents the flow state. The spinner is one of those obstacles.

Make your data faster

If your most urgent requirement is to simply speed things up because the people working with data are getting frustrated with the performance of the existing system, there is a simple way to do this.

By adding an Exasol database into your architecture as a thin BI acceleration layer, you can ensure ultimate performance for all your data loading, transformation and processing steps. This extends right through to the end user accessing interactive dashboards and reports.

This means you do not need to replace or remove the components of your architecture. You simply add an analytical database to speed things up.

Not only is this a quick and easy way to address performance issues, it also means that existing business processes are neither impacted nor changed.

How do you get started?

I recommend starting with a process that is particularly slow and painful right now. Whether your data engineers struggle with the time it takes to run ETL processes or your analysts have to wait for their analytics tool to process their queries, identify the challenges you have, their impact on the business and the expected benefit you could achieve through a better solution.

Once you have clarity on the performance pain points, it’s time to run a test that proves the value of the new solution. You’ll need room to experiment with different parameters, such as data volumes used, number of concurrent users, etc. and show the performance improvements that can be achieved.

You can run such a Proof of Value (POV) phase either on your own, using our free trial version   or have our sales engineers support you  in assessing the right approach and process.

What can you expect?

Once you have your test environment set up, it’s time to really put it to work. Run through your existing business processes and make the system work in the way you expect to use it. Document the results and compare them to the ‘current state’, those pain points you identified earlier. Then make the system work even harder so you can assess how it would cope with future demand by your analytics department and your end users. This gives you the confidence that the solution doesn’t just work right now, but will also be ready for your future requirements.

When it comes to scaling your Exasol environment, the sales engineering team can advise you on what a roadmap for your analytics architecture could look like and how it can grow with your needs.

Scaling further

Getting started and testing how we can accelerate and improve the performance of your various analytics processes and applications, is straight-forward and is something we have helped our customers with in countless situations.

When it comes down purely to making things go faster, a simple acceleration layer will often address your requirements.

If you need more than ‘just’ performance and want to address questions around advanced Loading...data governance, security and multi-tenant deployments, consider taking a more structured and longer-term approach to finding the right solution.

In my next article, I will share how we address these questions with Exasol, covering ultimate performance and applying features that target those specific requirements.

Eva Murray, Technology Evangelist, Exasol