Data analysis tasks, particularly more complex jobs such as online analytical processing, require specialised skills and fairly expensive server software. Inter Netivity new free OLAP service, databeacon.com, lets businesses bypass these barriers to entry, both for internal use and to augment customers' experience.
In tests, PC Week Labs found the Web-based OLAP analysis service simple to use and quick for jobs of up to a few thousand rows of data.
The databeacon.com service is based on InterNetivity's OLAP server package, databeacon (formerly dbProbe). We're impressed with the data beacon server's very small yet quite functional Java client (just 350KB) and its scalable designÃÆ'Ã,¢Ã¢,Ã,¬"each client gets its entire OLAP cube just once and then performs all calculations locally.
These distinctive characteristics make the product well-suited for Web-based OLAP analysis, and databeacon.com is simply a publicly accessible databeacon server with a slightly modified client that provides a set of drop-down buttons at the top of the client to make the user interface a bit simpler.
One excellent use of databeacon.com would be for businesses to provide data analysis services to their customers or business partners. For example, a distributor could provide a Web site for resellers to do historical or categorical analysis of their purchases.
The service's biggest problem is its lack of support for secure Web links. Because the service needs to be able to retrieve customer data from a publicly accessible Web URLÃÆ'Ã,¢Ã¢,Ã,¬"or receive data through a form variable, a more cumbersome approachÃÆ'Ã,¢Ã¢,Ã,¬"it shouldn't be used with sensitive customer data. Company officials said Secure Sockets Layer support will be coming this quarter.
Setting up a link to databeacon.com from our Web site was just a matter of designing a form that submitted a few hidden fields to the databeacon.com server telling it where to find its data. The server expects to receive data as either an HTML table or a text file, both of which need to be accessible over the Web.
Creating this file can be an administrative chore, depending on the Web publishing skills and software that businesses have. We initially tried creating a data file by saving an HTML report from within Seagate Software, Crystal Reports, but databeacon.com requires cleaner HTML than Crystal Reports generates, and we had to do quite a bit of editing to get the HTML file to work. We also created output data files by writing a small program to generate HTML data pages using Microsoft. Active Server Page scripting language, an approach that worked much better and one we recommend.
After we submitted the form to databeacon.com, we got a page from the server that loaded up databeacon.com's client. With test data files of around 300KB, this process took about 30 seconds.
The client is fairly capable, particularly for casual users, and has impressive browser support for a Java package: It works with Netscape Communications Navigator or Microsoft's Internet Explorer browsers, both at Version 3 and later. We tested with both old and newer versions of the two browsers with success.
The client has four chart types and can export data to either Microsoft's Excel or Adobe Systems Acrobat files. However, it lacks higher-end features such as exception highlighting and stackable dimensions, which would allow more than one dimension to be displayed on each axis.
The tricky administrative task that databeacon.com has to handle on its own is building the OLAP cube, a process that requires it to guess how data columns are ordered into a hierarchyÃÆ'Ã,¢Ã¢,Ã,¬"city within state within region, for example. It tries to do this by comparing side-by-side rows to detect nesting patterns and worked fairly well on our simpler test data cases. For more complex test data sets, we used databeacon's cube builder (downloadable from InterNetivity's Web site) to create a cube definition file by hand, which the databeacon.com server then used instead of its automatic hierarchy detection routines.
Senior Analyst Timothy Dyck can be contacted at timothy_dyck@zd.com.
PC Week Labs Executive Summary: databeacon.com
Organizations that want to provide data analysis tools to customers or remote users will find the databeacon.com OLAP service a quick and very inexpensive (free) solution. Lack of secure connection support, however, restricts use to nonsensitive data.
SHORT-TERM BUSINESS IMPACT: Using the service, businesses will find that providing simple OLAP tools now takes no more than a day's work and requires no new on-site OLAP infrastructure.
LONG-TERM BUSINESS IMPACT: Services such as databeacon.com will make OLAP technologies much more accessible for smaller organizations or those without OLAP skills in-house. Customers will start expecting these kinds of value-add services soon.
PROS: Free; server is simple to use and automatically detects simple hierarchical relationships; client is small, easy to use and fairly capable.
CONS: Doesn't support secure Web connections; client doesn't support more than one dimension per axis and can't do exception highlighting.
USABILITY B
CAPABILITY C
PERFORMANCE B
INTEROPERABILITY B
