by Haley Burton | June 30, 2021

3 Integration Strategies for Data Analytics and Business Intelligence

When freely available to your key stakeholders, data can give you a 360-degree view of your customers and your enterprise to help you make solid business decisions. To make the most of their data, organizations need to invest in data connectivity infrastructure.

Integration Options for the Analytics Connectivity Problem

Analysts and data scientists are often faced with the challenge of establishing custom BI integrations, rather than focusing on providing value to the business. If analysts aren't well versed in connectivity, more time is lost waiting for their IT department to find the time for data access projects.

How can organizations extend analytics data access to analysts and decision-makers to make the most of their critical data? In this article, we cover three common solutions to this problem:

  • Embedded, real-time data connectors
  • Data connectivity platforms for analytics teams and enterprises
  • Data warehousing for analytics

Real-time Data Connectors

Many popular analytics platforms like Power BI and Tableau provide users with a limited number of built-in data connectors, which offer at least a minimal level of data access. They run in the background and wait for authorized requests for access to different data sources.

But what happens when your analysis platform of choice lacks the built-in connections you need? It's on you to find some way to build your own data analytics integrations or source them elsewhere. Pre-built data connectors that work with your analytics tools can dramatically simplify this process.

Embedded Application Connectors

CData Drivers, or connectors, give analysts and data scientists the ability to establish vital data connectivity for analytics and BI. We offer native connectors you can embed directly into popular data analysis platforms:

Once installed, these connectors provide the same user experience as the built-in connectors inside these platforms. You can simply install them once, then work with your data, no code or integration required.

Drivers for Data Connectivity

Driver technologies like ODBC, JDBC, and ADO.NET give users virtualized data access directly from platforms like Sisense, Looker, Amazon QuickSight, and more. They install onto your machine and act as a bridge, allowing you to run simple queries from your analytics platforms to your underlying data sources.

Create charts, construct reports, perform data analysis, and visualize data with ease, all through familiar SQL queries you already use every day.

Why 3rd Party Connectivity?

Even applications with some out-of-the-box data connectivity features may only support import mode. While that is sufficient for creating smaller volumes of data, it doesn't help you much with massive amounts of data. Querying large datasets, you end up running into performance issues and even complete functionality loss.

3rd party connectors, like the ones that we provide at CData, can work with large amounts of data without worrying about the limitations inherent in data analysis platforms.

Learn More About CData Connectivity for Big Data

Connectivity Platforms: Analytics Connectivity for Enterprise Teams

Data connectivity platforms come with configurable integrations that let your team members access multiple data sources in one place. After installing the connectivity solution, you confirm that users with the proper credentials can access it from different analytics platforms.

CData Connect is a code-free data connectivity platform that provides self-service data access to business intelligence professionals. It delivers reliable, robust data connectivity for analytics and enables various data integration approaches in business intelligence.

CData Connect's analytics data hub supports more than 250 data sources, allowing users to enable data access from inside every major analytics platform. Analysts and BI users get all the power of CData Drivers pre-installed and ready for deployment in spaces like:

  • Public or private cloud environments
  • On-premises
  • AWS
  • Azure
  • Oracle

With the data virtualization capabilities provided by CData Connect, data professionals can work with large amounts of data without worrying about the limitations inherent in data analysis platforms.

  • Comprehensive connectivity within every major data analysis platform‌
  • High-performance data connectivity optimized down to the socket level
  • Full support trusted by more than 10,000 customers worldwide
  • Simple install and setup
  • No-code data access

The CData Connect helps businesses provide self-service data access to entire teams of knowledge workers who need reliable data analytics integration on-premises or in the cloud.

Data Warehousing for Analytics

One common option provided to data analysts and data scientists is to access a centralized data warehouse. Standard implementations typically involve platforms like Snowflake, SQL Server, Azure, S3, and BigQuery.

Establishing a data warehouse for business intelligence usually involves setting up a data pipeline using an ETL/ELT tool, which extracts data from key sources and loads that data into a central database, allowing all the data to fit a common data model (transformation). With the data unified in a central data warehouse, you provide analysts with a login that permits them to write queries against the new data source.

CData Sync is a scalable, lightweight ETL/ELT solution with industry-leading data connectivity to 250+ enterprise data sources and every enterprise database and data warehouse of consequence. Sync simplifies the data replication process for data warehousing, providing powerful automation capabilities to schedule regular, mass-volume data replications.

Try CData Sync for analytics data warehousing or schedule a live demo.

Get Assistance with Your BI and Analytics Connectivity Needs

CData provides companies with everything needed for business intelligence and data analytics integration. You don't have to alter your existing integration processes to extend analytics data access throughout your organization or to any member of your team.

We understand there's no one-size-fits-all solution for providing companies with the data they need. That's why we've built data connectivity solutions for any analytics data access need.

Whether you need simple, one-off data connectors, an analytics data hub platform, ETL & data warehousing to support analytics, or any other connectivity - we are here to help.

Set up a demo with the CData team to see which connectivity solutions are right for you to drive actionable insights for business growth.

Book Time with a CData Expert