The Good Data BI platform is accessible through the stateless
REST API. This HTTP-based API can be simply used from any 3rd party application as well as from a plain browser. The API provides the full power of our platform (we actually use it as the backend for our web frontend).
In fact the Good Data application consists of a handful types of services. Instances of these services can be dynamically added or removed (via simple HTTP load-balancing) on as needed basis. Add the
Amazon EC2 cloud that allows us to add or remove a new machine and only pay for the CPU ticks that we really use. The net result is the great flexibility, scalability and cost efficiency.
The
demo video below points at the fundamental architecture differences between our approach and some other on-demand BI vendors who simply deployed an existing BI package (e.g. Pentaho or MS Analytics) on the web (which unfortunately does not prevent their marketing from using the multi-tenant, SaaS mambo jumbo).
This video might help you to better understand the Good Data architecture. I apologize for no audio. Hopefully the simple step-by-step description below helps:
1. The /gdc suffix in the GDC BI platform URL shows the list of the REST API services that the platform provides.
2. Then we navigate to the
metadata services that manage metadata for a selected BI project (the FoodMartDemo in our case).
3. We first show the
FULL-TEXT SEARCH service. We specify the search term ("sales") directly in the service's URL. The list of matching results is shown.
4. We select one of the reports from the search result to inspect the report's definition. We can spit out the definition in many formats (e.g. JSON, YAML, ATOM, or XML). We use YAML as the default.
5. Then we demonstrate the metadata
QUERY service. We list all reports in the
FoodMartDemo project. We again inspect one of the reports:
Salary by Year and State.
6. Then we are going to demonstrate the
using service that shows us all dependencies (metadata objects that the selected report references) of the report. For example the report depends on it's definition (reportDefinition) object. We copy and paste the link of the report definition to the browser URL bar to inspect the report definition object structure. It contains all attributes and metrics that the report displays (all inner objects have their URLs too, so we could continue investigating them).
7. Then we navigate to the
XTAB service. The XTAB can execute and cross-tabulate (or pivot if you like) the report's definition. We supply the report definition URL and it spits out the representation of the report result (you can see the the machine representation of the report's data). Notice the asynchronous processing here.
8. Then we go back to the original report
Salary by Year and State. The report contains a reference to it's result.
9. We will copy and paste the result's URL to the
EXPORTER service that returns (again asynchronously) the report result's data in MS Excel format.
If you have the Good Data platform
demo account, you can try this script yourself at
http://demo.gooddata.com/gdc (hint - you'll need to take a look at the
LOGIN service).
