Connection Manager

The connection manager acts as a semantic layer between the report author or consumer and the actual data source, It provides an abstraction layer hiding al the technicalities to deliver a business oriented view of information elements that are widely understood by  business users. The connection manager uses a common metadata repository across all available data sources.  Whether data comes form a Relational data base, an xml file or excel spread sheet it uses a common enterprise vovcabulary. The connection manager provides a panoramic view of an organizations data sources and provides a centralized framework to organize data assets. Once Data sources are set up within connection manager, data can be consumed from information consumers, such as the Information portal or Dashboard Manager. What’s beneficial is that these modules view data sources and elements under a commonly acceptable business vocabulary, regardless of data format and location. 

Key Benefits

• Simplifies the developers job by giving one interface and one set of metadata for all data sources, thus speeding up information delivery
• Provides the ability to leverage proprietary information that is scattered across multiple databases, spreadsheets, mol files and discover information  relations across disparate data sources
• Provides cost savings in an organizations integration efforts since data is retrieved from original data source and  no investments in data warehouses or ETL infrastructure is required 
• Delivers immediate results since data connections are easily set up and are consumable instantly from other applications
• Utilizes query optimization by accessing data using native data processing operations
• Can easily be incorporated in an organizations Integration strategy providing a more comprehensive view of the enterprise’s information assets. It can easily co-exist with with any data warehouse initiatives to deliver information from transactional sources.
• Provides centralized data source administration and promotes re-usability to multiple data consumers.

Key Features

• Provides simple to define connection capabilities to well known RDBMS (SQL Server , Oracle , MS Access , IBM DB2, MySQL etc)
• Integrates data from excel files, xml files, flat files etc.
• Allows categorization of data elements in specific domain areas and   meaningful business terms, hiding technical descriptions from end users. 
• Supports multilingual translation of data elements to accommodate reporting needs of users according to language of preference.
• Validates connections to data sources to ensure connection integrity across data sources
• Combines multiple views of information from disparate data sources into an integrated view (Union queries)
• Incorporates unstructured forms of information (documents) under the same integration framework