Sumit Sarkar

What is Open Analytics?
‘Open analytics’ is the integration of an open data access layer into business applications (such as CRM, ERP, Finance or HR) to be directly consumed by external analytics tools and popular programming languages. In contrast, embedded analytics is the integration of analytics into the business application itself. Open analytics has a somewhat symbiotic relationship with embedded analytics as many business application vendors consider both as part of their complete… Show more

What is Open Analytics?
‘Open analytics’ is the integration of an open data access layer into business applications (such as CRM, ERP, Finance or HR) to be directly consumed by external analytics tools and popular programming languages. In contrast, embedded analytics is the integration of analytics into the business application itself. Open analytics has a somewhat symbiotic relationship with embedded analytics as many business application vendors consider both as part of their complete analytics strategy; they often share common data architectures, especially around data stores for analytics. Show less

It’s no surprise that organizations have made significant investment in big data analytics to date, and now are looking to more broadly democratize their big data insights by bringing them to business applications. That said, what may be a surprise is the growing signals that the next leap forward for big data ROI may lie in the hands of integration developers – rather than big data specialists.

According to a recent Gartner survey, big data investments reached a possible peak in 2016. But these investments show signs of contracting, with 48 percent of companies having invested in big data in 2016 – only three percent more than 2015. This trend signals that organizations have delivered significant big data insights and will now look to operationalize in the coming year (and beyond).

Lumira shops are expanding data discovery to cloud data, and it often starts in sales and marketing operations. Sales is finding new insight through analytics across opportunities, pipelines and other custom objects in Salesforce, MS Dynamics, Oracle Service Cloud or SugarCRM. For marketing operations, we're seeing data driven teams run analysis on campaign and activity data across Eloqua, Marketo, Hubspot and Google Analytics.

Adoption of enterprise-caliber NoSQL databases such as MongoDB or Cassandra is growing across more organizations. At the same time, business sponsors are turning to one-off BI and analytics solutions, further fragmenting enterprise reporting capabilities and creating silos. Learn how organizations are using NoSQL connectivity with Microstrategy to demonstrate thought leadership and take back control of BI and analytics. We'll talk about common challenges and gotchas that shops are facing when… Show more

Adoption of enterprise-caliber NoSQL databases such as MongoDB or Cassandra is growing across more organizations. At the same time, business sponsors are turning to one-off BI and analytics solutions, further fragmenting enterprise reporting capabilities and creating silos. Learn how organizations are using NoSQL connectivity with Microstrategy to demonstrate thought leadership and take back control of BI and analytics. We'll talk about common challenges and gotchas that shops are facing when attempting to consume semi-structured NoSQL data with Microstrategy Show less

Building My First Lightning Connect POC
In the spirit of the Salesforce1 Platform, my project will be completed using point-and-click configuration from end to end. My external data source will be connected using DataDirect Cloud as suggested by our Salesforce Account Team. My integration experiences apply to any corporate business systems or databases. From talking to folks at my local Salesforce User and Developer Groups, the most popular data sources include Oracle EBS, JDEdwards… Show more

Building My First Lightning Connect POC
In the spirit of the Salesforce1 Platform, my project will be completed using point-and-click configuration from end to end. My external data source will be connected using DataDirect Cloud as suggested by our Salesforce Account Team. My integration experiences apply to any corporate business systems or databases. From talking to folks at my local Salesforce User and Developer Groups, the most popular data sources include Oracle EBS, JDEdwards, Microsoft SQL Server, SAP, Siebel, Peoplesoft, QAD, Banner, to name a few. Show less

decided to chronicle the first-hand experiences of a citizen developer–me–in an article featured on Salesforce Developers entitled Building a Data Integration Proof of Concept Using Lightning Connect. The article chronicles my experiences connecting my organization’s Sales Cloud with on-premise corporate business systems to create related lists of invoices grouped by account, and accessed in real-time. Prior to Lightning Connect, this seemingly simple task was well beyond the scope of… Show more

decided to chronicle the first-hand experiences of a citizen developer–me–in an article featured on Salesforce Developers entitled Building a Data Integration Proof of Concept Using Lightning Connect. The article chronicles my experiences connecting my organization’s Sales Cloud with on-premise corporate business systems to create related lists of invoices grouped by account, and accessed in real-time. Prior to Lightning Connect, this seemingly simple task was well beyond the scope of Salesforce developers and admins. I was even able to do most of it over gogo wifi from RDU to SFO which is pretty amazing for a data integration project of this scope. Show less

Use cases for amazing Lightning Connect OData integration
While Salesforce integration is nothing new, Lightning Connect changes the game by treating live external data as native objects driven from the platform using APEX triggers and classes, SOQL, SOSL, Lookup Relationships, Custom Tabs and Details. The most common use case I have heard at Dreamforce is by far integration with on-premise Oracle or SQL Server databases. From talking to architects, admins and developers at Dreamforce ’14… Show more

Use cases for amazing Lightning Connect OData integration
While Salesforce integration is nothing new, Lightning Connect changes the game by treating live external data as native objects driven from the platform using APEX triggers and classes, SOQL, SOSL, Lookup Relationships, Custom Tabs and Details. The most common use case I have heard at Dreamforce is by far integration with on-premise Oracle or SQL Server databases. From talking to architects, admins and developers at Dreamforce ’14, I am hearing about potential projects to integrate with sources such as... Show less

The latest standard is OData, or “ODBC for the web”. DB2 is the core of many on-premise business systems, and this data has tremendous potential in the growing world of web and mobile. Not surprisingly, Progress DataDirect (world’s leading contributor to data API standards) introduced instant and secure OData production from any DB2 system in a self service way for everyone, including those without specific DB2 knowledge.

Sumit Sarkar from Progress DataDirect just posted a great blog on connecting to Eloqua in ODI 12c using the DataDirect Cloud JDBC driver. You can find the article here: http://blogs.datadirect.com/2014/07/oracle-data-integrator-etl-connectivity-eloqua-jdbc-marketing-data.html

DataDirect introduces the first reliable MongoDB ODBC connector that provides flexible normalized “schema on read” functionality to query MongoDB using SQL, while optimizing SQL queries against the expanding MongoDB query API. This logical schema does not require additional ETL steps or data movement, and is yet another engineering marvel for DataDirect R&D.

“The ODBC integration enabled GSB business users—in just three months-to build a metadata model and access data in real time directly from the transactional source. Data is accessed without either staging or physically moving it, ensuring the data quality and integrity needed to make the best decisions.”

SQL access to your salesforce.com data enables standards-based data access for business intelligence, data warehousing, and ad-hoc reporting and analysis. Join us to learn how to achieve this with real-time SQL-92 access, using ODBC and JDBC. We’ll show examples of organizations using SQL access, and you’ll see how you can get even more value out of your business data with these techniques.

SSIS was completely rewritten for ODBC data connectivity for which DataDirect is the worldwide leader and the specification was co-founded by our very own John Goodson. Below are the top 3 reasons I am excited about the 2012 release from my experience connecting enterprises from SSIS 2005 and 2008.

My sentiment analysis research on the ODBC/JDBC application landscape produced some interesting results. The rationale for this project was to leverage our customer data to help SaaS, BigData and other vendors predict patterns for data consumption and make the world a better place.

With the increased adoption of SaaS, many organizations are feeling pretty good about their data being hosted. However, challenges may be introduced when clients require SQL access to their data for reporting and analytics. The solution to avoid a potentially costly architectural overhaul is DataDirect OpenAccess.

Let’s take a closer look at how data access strategies impact organizations. Using my experiences as the world’s leading consultant on direct SQL integration with SaaS, I have built a visualization contrasting the different strategies with data collected from our user base. In addition, I will expand on each strategy with specific feedback on challenges that we have solved that would otherwise block adoption or renewal.

The Universe is a semantic layer across all the data sources in your organization. Web intelligence users connect to the Universe and perform data analysis and create reports without ever seeing the underlying data source objects. This enables seamless and real-time integration of data in Salesforce that can be aggregated with the rest of your organization’s data including ERP, financials, SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW), etc.

One challenge writing about big data is that content can get outdated before you even finish the first sentence! Thanks to the Oracle Database Gateway for ODBC and the DataDirect Apache Hadoop Hive ODBC driver, I am confident this article is still a great read.