Business Intelligence Lowdown

Visual Treat From Business Objects

Visual models that are updated with the latest data as and when events happen – this is the latest offering from business intelligence provider Business Objects for enterprises that wish to improve and enhance performance management.

The Crystal Xcelsius Viewer offers a visual dashboard of interactive data, with security capabilities and live data connectivity through web-based services for users in a company. Corporate databases are linked interactively to provide visual displays that lend themselves to analysis of business performance.

Crystal Xcelsius Viewer combines the power of Business Object’s BI platform, BusinessObjects XI Release 2, with Crystal Xcelsius, the data visualization tool purchased from Informmersion.

Data Reduction Techniques

Organizations are struggling to maintain quality information, what with the vast amount of data floating around in all their departments. Effective data storage and data management techniques involve reduction of the data by minimizing the storage capacity or the bandwidth used. A few data reduction techniques are:

• Single-Instance Storage: which are used by e-mail applications to store only one instance of multiple copies of the same e-mail or attachment.
• Content Addressed Storage (CAS): which are systems used in archival of data to ferret out identical files or chunks of files and then minimize the number of copies that need to be stored.
• Wide Area File Services (WAFS): which try to minimize bandwidth used by transmitting only the bytes that have changes between multiple site servers.
• Backup Agents: which are used to reduce the amount of data sent by backup clients to the backup server by sending only parts of files that have changed since the last backup.
• Disk-based Backup Systems: which are used to maintain backup data over long periods of time with only the minimum amount of disk capacity.