Connect – a Simba Technologies Blog

The case for a custom ODBC driver

I was talking to a customer recently and they were telling me they have a very high performance database that scales very well, but they have poor reporting.  They were complaining that they spent so much time on building such a great database product and all their customers see is that they cannot get the reports they need.  So what to do?

The answer is simple, build a custom ODBC driver for the database.  The database product already supports SQL so all they need is ODBC.  The customer complained that they didn't have anyone in the company who understands ODBC.  Again, the answer is simple.  I asked one of our engineers to work with the customer and they literally had Crystal Reports talking to their database using the custom ODBC driver in about a week.  The customer was amazed.  They went to one of their users and gave them a demo of the proof of concept ODBC driver.  The user loved it.  Our customer was ecstatic because they now had access to all ODBC compliant applications to show off their database.  Win-win-win.

EMC buys GreenPlum

Interesting news yesterday about EMC's acquisition of data warehouse appliance company GreenPlum.  GreenPlum had of course partnered heavily with Sun Microsystems which was recently acquired by database giant Oracle.  GreenPlum has some interesting customers including eBay, NYSE Euronext, and NASDAQ OMX Group.  GreenPlum plays in the same space as veterans Teradata and Oracle and upcomers like Aster Data, Kognitio, ParAccel, InfoBright, Vertica, etc.  This is a very interesting space which saw Microsoft acquire DataAllegro and coming out with SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Edition as well as SAP's pending acquisition of Sybase.  SAP is also working on their own in-memory column-oriented technology and their upcoming HANA appliance.  As the volume of data continues to grow exponentially, the ability to store and analyze large amounts of data continues to be a challenge for every enterprise and so we will continue to see more action in this space.  As the databases scale to be larger and larger, one question that always comes up is how do we access and analyze all of this data.  The SQL query language accessed via ODBC and JDBC drivers continues to be the language of choice in the database world.  The MDX query language accessed via ODBO and XMLA is now the de-facto language of choice for analytics.

I was recently asked who supports MDX and the answer is, everyone.  The major database players - Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and SAP all support MDX query language.  The major BI players - SAP/Business Objects, Microsoft, Oracle/Hyperion, and IBM/Cognos all support the MDX language.  Microsoft Excel is on virtually every desktop in the enterprise and if you look at Microsoft's recently released Excel 2010, the BI capabilities in Pivot Tables has been extended with the addition of sparklines, slicers, and even write-back.  Excel Pivot Tables talks to analytic databases using the MDX query language.  SQL and MDX are both necessary for analytics today.

The Kingdom of Excel

Whoa!  At the Gartner BI Summit, they suggested we "Wave the white flag on using Excel for business intelligence".  What breakthrough thinking!  This is something we at Simba have seen for years.  Many BI/OLAP vendors have come to us looking for an MDX Query Language solution for their OLAP/data warehousing products. We have found that a key driver for supporting the MDX Query Language was connectivity with Excel and specifically Excel Pivot Tables.  Microsoft continues to invest heavily in the BI capabilities of Excel and having an MDX Provider for your OLAP/multi-dimensional data source allows Excel to connect natively.  Native Excel connectivity is something we have now brought to Oracle OLAP cubes and we will even be at the Oracle Collaborate 10 conference next week where we have two sessions on showing users how to use Excel to connect to Oracle 11g database: http://www.simba.com/news/Simba-Provides-Free-Training-Connecting-Excel-PivotTables-to-Oracle-OLAP-at-COLLABORATE.htm.

Excel connectivity is a very important feature of any data source be it relational, multi-dimensional, ISAM, object-oriented, XML, etc.  Excel can connect to anything that has an ODBC or an ODBO interface.  Once someone can see how their data can be pulled live into Excel and how an Excel user can then get creative in their tool of choice, it becomes a very powerful reason to have an ODBC driver or ODBO provider.

You can read more about what Gartner is saying here: http://searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com/news/2240018042/Gartner-BI-Summit-Wave-the-white-flag-on-using-Excel-for-business-intelligence.

The new efficiency/normal according to Steve Ballmer

I was reading Steve Ballmer's latest email entitled "The New Efficiency" (http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/execmail/2009/09-29NewEfficiency.mspx) in which he basically says the new normal in business is that "people borrow less, save more, and spend with much greater caution."  This is a simple yet powerful premise to do more with less.  At Simba, we have always tried to help our customers do more with less.  Simba started out helping ISVs deliver custom ODBC and JDBC drivers to their customers to increase value.  With our ODBC and JDBC SDKs, our ISV customers were able to quickly and efficiently build open standards based data connectivity for their databases which then gave their customers tremendous advantage in they could now use a wide variety of applications with these databases.  Then, Simba broadened what we did by also adding an OLAP SDK that supports ODBO and XMLA.  Today, Simba is going a step further.  We are now adding value directly for enterprise customers.  Our new MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP lets any user of Oracle OLAP connect to their data directly from Microsoft Excel.  The user gets to leverage all the power of Excel and Oracle OLAP without having to either use an Excel spreadsheet add-in which requires learning new software or a separate mid-tier server which can be quite expensive and take time to install and configure.

ODBC 3.80 is here!

Finally, ODBC 3.80 is here!  According to Pak-Ming Cheung from Microsoft, “We’re excited to announce that version 3.8 of the Microsoft ODBC DM (Driver Manager) will be released in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2”.  You can read more in his blog post at: http://blogs.msdn.com/data/archive/2009/07/06/odbc-dm-3-80-in-windows-7-and-windows-server-2008-r2.aspx.

 

Basically, there are 4 main new features in ODBC 3.80:

1.       Streamed Output Parameters

2.       ODBC C-Type Extensibility

3.       Asynchronous Connection Operation

4.       Better Management in ODBC Connection Pooling

 

As a leader in the data connectivity space in general and ODBC in particular, Simba is definitely committed to supporting ODBC 3.80.  If you would like more information, please don’t hesitate to contact us to discuss further.