Unlock the full potential of cloud databases like Snowflake, BigQuery, etc

Orbit Reporting: Helping enterprises run self-service reporting and BI on top of Cloud Data platforms like Snowflake and BigQuery

In today’s world, it is becoming hard to measure the volume of data being generated. One estimate puts it at 44 zettabytes at the beginning of 2020 and is expected to be 463 exabytes generated every day globally by 2025.

Data is a mine of information that can help businesses with informed decisions across functions — to improve in several areas: a company’s competitive advantage, efficiency within the organization, productivity, customer delight and revenues. To be able to do this, businesses need vast storage, real-time access to data, tools to process this data and run analytics to gain insights. Legacy, on-prem systems are incapable of fulfilling all these requirements and so businesses are moving to the cloud to keep costs low while tapping the vast quantities of data to their advantage. 

Cloud databases such as Snowflake, BigQuery, Teradata, Redshift, Synapse, etc. are among some of the top cloud data platforms that businesses invest in. Sometimes the data is spread across multiple clouds and databases. To protect their existing infrastructure as well as for security reasons, some of the data and processes continue to be run from on-prem systems. This creates the need for reporting and analytics tools that can pull data from these multiple sources. 

The Different Strengths of Various Cloud Databases like Snowflake and Google’s BigQuery 

Apart from spreading out the data for security and cost reasons, the different cloud databases also offer unique advantages.

Snowflake, for instance, is easy to deploy and configure and can handle structured and semi-structured data. It also has its own SQL query engine and a centralized data repository accessible by different compute nodes.

Google BigQuery enables the querying of large data sets and offers machine learning capabilities. It is a flexible database with data stored in distributed, replicated storage with compute clusters of nodes used to process it.

Teradata is built for flexibility and scalability. A hybrid cloud data warehousing tool, it can process large volumes of data. 

Azure Synapse is a cloud relational database that enables loading and processing petabytes of data along with real-time reporting.

 Reporting and Analytics on top of Snowflake, BigQuery, Teradata and Azure Synapse  

The data stored in these are raw and for businesses to be able to gain insights, they need reporting and analytics tools. There are several available in the market, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.

Some of the disadvantages one may come across include:

• Absence of interactive dashboards
• A steep learning curve
• Limited data delivery capability
• May require a desktop version of the reporting tool 
• Maybe OS or platform-specific
• Needs IT support to generate the reports
• Limited customization of visualizations
• Inability to pull data from multiple sources or from on-prem databases
• Lack of BI capabilities
• Limited functionality

Orbit – A Multi-Faceted, Next-gen Solution for Reporting and Analytics

The Orbit Reporting and Analytics solution is a cloud-agnostic tool that works with a variety of cloud databases and servers. Some of the features that make it ideal for businesses for their operational, financial and strategic reporting include:

• • Unified View of Data: The Orbit reporting and analytics tool pull data from all the databases in the enterprise, both on-cloud and on-premise, to provide a unified view of data and create a single source of truth. This helps with version control too, preventing silos from being recreated as often happens when tools cannot work with different sources.

• Self-Service: The tool is intuitive and easy to use, not requiring any training. Even business users can create the reports they need without depending on the IT teams. They can even schedule the reports to be generated and access real-time data at all times.

• Ability to Handle Large Datasets: The tool can handle large amounts of data and facilitates mash corporate data with external datasets that might be in flat files like Excel, CSV, JSON, XML, or directly accessible as web service URLs.
• Visualization and Dashboards: Allows building of reports, customizing visualizations and interactive dashboards quickly and as per user needs. Collaboration across functions is also possible through sharing of reports for faster decisions.
• Metrics and KPIs: The Orbit tool enables tracking business metrics and KPIs in real-time, with mobile-ready dashboards. This is especially useful for quick review even when on the move. 
• Drill-Down Capability: The tool allows drilling down from the summary to the lowest level of detail in any report, critical in financial reporting. 
• Excel Integration: Plugins like Excel Edge for Excel Reporting and GLSense for Financial Reporting allow users to use Excel for real-time reporting and analytics. Excel is a very popular tool but does not access data in real-time. Orbit enables this by integrating with Excel and allowing refresh for users to view the latest data in real-time anytime.
• Secure Access: Orbit provides secured access to data based on authentication and authorization. With role-based access, users can see only the data they are allowed to, thus ensuring compliance and privacy.

If you would like to benefit from the Orbit Reporting and Analytics tool for your data on Snowflake, BigQuery, or any other cloud database, Contact Us now