The Analytics Cloud is only as good as the data you put in it. BI implementations often require months to prepare the data before doing any of the analytics. The faster organizations can get their datasets in front of real users, the better. Because of this, we wanted to make it as simple as possible for customers who want to start exploring data sets in the Analytics Cloud. To that end we have built an exhaustive set of assets to help move data into Analytics Cloud. These assets include ETL scripts, custom force.com applications for exporting SOQL query results to Analytics Cloud, and a Heroku app to load big data sets into Analytics Cloud. Also, we will publish three open source adapters for Clover, Talend and Kettle. Our team’s goal is to get the data loaded in minutes and have the customer experience the real power of the platform.
One scenario for Analytics Cloud is bringing in data from MongoDB. A lot of enterprises are looking to MongoDB as solid way to store a lot of data. First of all, It does not require a schema to be set up like a traditional relational database does. It also stores data in BSON format (Binary JSON), which is the language of web data. For this and several reasons MongoDB has been an increasingly common choice in companies. For example, Foursquare uses MongoDB on Amazon AWS to store venues and user check-ins at venues.
In the video below, Appirio consultant Dustin Weaver demonstrates how he uses Talend to push data into Analytics Cloud. Over the course of several months we’ll be sharing more tips from the Appirio Analytics team on how to work with Analytics Cloud and various other data sources.