Eclipse Data Warehouse

Eclipse is an awesome operational system for your service organization. It provides fast and accurate information to help your technicians be the best they can be. They win, you win and your customers win. So after you have been succeeding with Eclipse, you'll have created a lot of data. Data that contains valuable information that can help you navigate through the turmoil of running your business. Eclipse provides a lot of standard reports built in that help you keep up with the day to day demands. However we know that we can't be all things to all people when it comes to reporting. We know that organizations, particularly large ones, need access to answers to business questions quickly. And although we think we have the normal questions covered with the standard reports in Eclipse, if the organization has unique or specific metrics that it looks for in managing the direction of its operations, often this information is buried deep into the database of Eclipse. If you are a database savvy 'power user', its likely that you will be able to find the answers you are looking for in the raw Eclipse tables. But these tables have been optimized to give you the fastest performance in Eclipse - not specifically for business decision reporting.

Sure, Eclipse has its own custom reporting generator. And you can also get basic access to raw Eclipse tables through ODBC if you want to use external tools (with limitations). And we even let you export out the data in XML form so you can analyze it externally. But larger organizations need more. They need a DATA WAREHOUSE.

What is a Data Warehouse?

Imagine if your organization has a lot of seperate systems. Maybe a sales system, financial accounting system, manufacturing system and a service system. But you want to combine all of this data together in management reports. Maybe a sales report that also takes into consideration number of service calls received. Or an engineering report showing manufacturing numbers, but cross linked with failure rates that are coming from the service data. A data warehouse lets you extract the core business data from all of your systems and put it under one roof. In one powerful, fast database so that you have a 'one stop shopping experience' to produce your reports, graphs, and other business intelligence that helps you make high level accurate business decisions.

A data warehouse is stored seperately to the transactional systems that feed it. This means that you can apply very complex, time and resource consuming queries against it and know that it won't affect the performance of your operational systems. Typically data warehouses are fed with some form of load process that runs nightly or even weekly as this high level data doesn't typically need to be up to the minute. Its used more for 'bigger picture' queries that look for trends, etc. So normally all participating transactional systems will feed their data into this data warehouse so that business decision reporting can be done.

Take advantage of other tools & technologies

Its also important that a data warehouse be able to allow users to take advantage of business decision tool programs. Programs such as Crystal Reports, Brio Query, Impromptu and PowerPlay, and many others. These tools require certain types of technology to be available for their reports. Or it might also be that you need to integrate the data from your service operations with other transactional data, and provide custom solutions based on the data from these systems combined. The Eclipse Data Warehouse provides the framework for such a solution because it buffers you from the day to day operational changes going on in your Eclipse database.

Third party developers of solutions know just how dangerous it is to couple their solutions with a vendor's database solution, by tieing to the core table structure of the vendor's transactional system. The reality is that this integration has a limited life because the second that the vendor chooses to change their database structure due to a software update, etc. it will break the system connected to it. This isn't going to provide a long term solution for anyone. The only way to make this work is to provide an abstraction from the vendor systems and the developers solution, and the Eclipse Data Warehouse provides exactly that as well.

Firebird SQL

We have chosen the incredible power of the open source SQL database engine, Firebird, to be the core of the Eclipse Data Warehouse. Firebird is one of the fastest, most reliable and lowest resource SQL databases on the planet and is supported by ODBC drivers that let you have full and unlimited access to the data in the Eclipse Datawarehouse. By using Firebird SQL, we can ensure if you need to create reports that span other database technologies, Firebird will participate without question in your reporting requirements. And there are no license fees required to use Firebird. We bundle its installer with the Eclipse Datawarehouse suite and its a simple 'set and forget' database solution. Firebird is the world's #3 most popular open source database, behind MySQL & PostgreSQL. But unlike those other two options it has no license fee requirements for commercial use, or requires a DBA to setup and manage the database. So its the perfect solution for Eclipse users.

The Eclipse Data Warehouse comprises technology that is 'switched on' within the Eclipse system, a scheduler that can allow it to run as frequent as once per day (you choose the time) or less frequent if that suits the organization's purpose. Once set, Eclipse will empty the target Firebird database, and pump the latest copies of the core business data from Eclipse into the Eclipse Data Warehouse. Once completed, all applications that hook to the data warehouse have the latest data available for their purposes.

Summary

So if you are looking to get more out of your Eclipse data, consider the Eclipse Data Warehouse solution. Or if you have a software application your organization is developing and wishes to integrate with Eclipse data, this is the answer that will protect your application from needing constant re-development as the core Eclipse database is changed from version to version. By leveraging the power of Firebird SQL, you get the best solution for now and for the future.

CONTACT US for more information