5 Reasons You’ll Love Creating Your Own Analytics with OpenBouquet

Today’s release provides a complete overhaul of the OpenBouquet interfaces. In fact, the changes are so essential that we came up with a new name for the product: OB1. “OB1” stands for OpenBouquet for 1 (single) standalone user — and is of course unrelated to any fictional character that you may know.

So what do you get?

1. A free, unlimited, standalone environment to rapidly develop analytics apps

OB1 is free of charge. It’s also free of the hassle of IT constraints. And most of all, it’s free as in the FREEDOM that you have to build whatever analytics you need.

We’ll have a specific post about that, but do check out our new Analytics API. It is so simple, straightforward and fast it makes me want to cry. Take a minute to view our our online demo to see with your own eyes how to add an analytics API on top of your database… in seconds.

What does this mean? What happens when you have a beautiful new query language for your database via a standard RESTful API? It means no more server side code, no more lock-in with analytics vendors, no more data movements: you’re free to go right ahead and code your client-side app. How cool is that?

What’s behind these really simple endpoints? An in-database analytics engine tightly integrated with Elasticsearch and Redis that provides, basically, a scalable top notch architecture for free. Would you believe it?

OB1 lets you do a bunch of configuration to tune this API to your specific needs. It’s a single-user analytical app that you can install on your laptop. It is available as a Mac & Linux application and as a Docker Image.

Will you ever be charged for using OB1? No. But you’ll soon have the option to upgrade to an Enterprise edition called OBe with multi-user support and collaboration features that will be paid for.

2. A clear view of your work

OB1 is all about building knowledge on top of your data sources. You’ll use it to create metrics, define relations, index dimensions and then use that knowledge to explore your data in a simple, interactive way.

OB1 includes a new app called Navigator where you browse all of your data dictionaries in one place, making it easy to view and manage all of your work. From there you can enrich your dictionaries and explore your data sources. This is also where you access your saved analyses, which we call Bookmarks.

3. Automatic data management features

OB1 is designed for the citizen user: the tech-savvy innovator sitting in a line-of-business who wants to change the way their company performs. If you work in Finance, Marketing, Sales, Logistics, Product Management, Customer Support then it’s for you.

OB1 has cool features that make it very easy to use for citizen users:

• “Zero-commute” automatically creates and maintains a logical datamodel so you can run your first analyses in minutes without having to worry about setup & maintenance.
• “Auto-indexing” lets you create filters in one click and search for values instantly even with millions of values like SKUs, articles, names etc..
• “In-database” analytics generates on-the-fly queries to your data sources, which removes the need to move data or write SQL code.
• “Smart caching” provides automatic query analysis to reduce the number of queries submitted to the database, avoiding your queries (and you) to be blasted by the IT folks .

4. A powerful design environment to enrich your data

OB1 includes a new Modeler app where you edit metrics, relations and dimensions. A brand new Expressions Editor provides visual assistance, autocomplete and syntax validation to write functions, however simple or complex, in a fast and easy way.

The Editor will suggest paths to browse the datamodel and makes it very easy to use joins between tables. It also provides in-line documentation of dozens of available analytic functions to help you edit formulas in an Excel-like way, without you having to know anything about things like windowed functions.

5. An interactive data exploration app

OB1 embeds a brand new Analytics app where you can explore data right away. This app has cool features such as powerful filtering, period comparison, drill-down, pivoting and exporting as a flat file in various formats.

So far, you can view data as a table or as a time series — and we’ll be adding more dataviz along the way. You can save your analyses and easily get back to them directly from the Navigator when you need to do so using Bookmarks.

So where does this take us? It just a couple of seconds from the moment you connect OB1 to your database to when you enjoy the OB API. From there, you can enrich your data on a daily basis to grow your knowledge of the data. We hope you’ll uncover great new insights and save the planet!

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