The ability to combine multiple data sources in a cube environment is essential. The speed has been very good as well.
Sisense Review
The rapid development of the product is good, but it has limited inner join functionality of the cubes.
What is most valuable?
How has it helped my organization?
We are now able to increase our visibility into our business beyond the canned reports available in our ERP (NetSuite) and provide actionable, timely insight to our leadership.
What needs improvement?
The document is definitely a sore spot as well as the limited inner join functionality of the cubes.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using this product for approximately two months now and are close to our final implementation.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
Only trying to understand some of the functionality and our internal business rules.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
No issues with stability have been encountered yet.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We are very early in our project but do not see any major limits yet.
How are customer service and technical support?
Customer Service:
Customer service has been excellent.
Technical Support:Technical support is very good. The rapid development of the product has some features that are new even to the tech support staff.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
No previous solution was in place.
How was the initial setup?
The connections to the SQL data were straightforward.
What about the implementation team?
We utilized the Sisense staff for implementation along with our internal BI group. They are very helpful, knowledgeable and responsive.
What was our ROI?
Unknown at this time.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
- Tableau
- PowerPivot/PowerBI
- Birst
- Sisense
What other advice do I have?
Understand your business hierarchies intimately. Create flattened data files for roll-ups.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Jun 18 2015
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3 Comments
Vendor
Hi there,
As Director of Product Management of Sisense I would love to shed some light on the inner join issue you mentioned. In general I will say that there are two ways to address it:
1. You can still always create an inner join with the custom SQL feature, if it's absolutely necessary.
2. It's true that the ElastiCube Manager (visual data modeling environment) doesn't show inner joins as a configuration option. However, it's quite possible that if you find yourself looking to do inner joins, you're not utilizing the full power of the product:
Most solutions rely heavily on joins in the data prep phase to create a single view.
What's unique about Sisense is that you don't *need* to flatten the data during the data preparation stage. Sisense only performs joins when it needs to answer a query, such as when a new visualization is created. The joins are performed ad-hoc and the system automatically detects which type of join is most effective for that particular data scenario. So 99% of the time, you shouldn't be dealing with these join headaches in the first place.
2
Author
it_user5220
Senior Manager of IT at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees
Vendor
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