It is not uncommon for organisations to store their transactional data in dispersed systems. This may be the consequence of the desire to utilised different systems specialised on specific tasks (logistics, sales, finance) or the direct consequences of growth, re-organisations and the high costs of replacing legacy systems. In either case, the task of combining this heterogeneous data sources for reporting and/or analysis purposes becomes an urgent need.

Quella Business Intelligence Solution can help to solve this problem as it can connect and extract data from virtually any data source. Data connections can be established either utilising OLE-Database providers or ODBC-drivers through which both meta data and data can be transfer to a data warehouse file. Meta data or data about data is the descriptive information that clearly depicts the structure, organisation, format and size of a database where actual data is stored.

By using this data warehouse file as a meta data repository, Quella Business Intelligence Solution can offer full access to all relevant aspects of the imported data sources. Connection and complex extraction parameters are easily available and can be changed at any time through an intuitive graphic interface. Large tables can for instance be extracted incrementally in order to reduce processing time, aggregated to save storage space or filtered to quickly test a given solution.

If the structure or location of any of the imported data sources is later modified, all the changes can rapidly be absorbed by just re-importing the meta data in question. These newly incorporated modifications can then easily be propagated within Quella Business Intelligence Solution so that existing objects and business rules will require none or a minimum of updating efforts.

AS400, MS SQLServer, MS Access, MS Excel and Text Files are just some common examples of data sources whose data can easily be extracted, combined and analyse by using Quella Business Intelligence Solution.