A Great Way to Get More Value from Toad Data Point (That You Probably Haven’t Heard of)

You know that feeling you get when a friend tells you about a great feature or shortcut you didn’t know existed in an app that you use all the time? Feels great, doesn’t it?

That’s what I’m hoping to do for you here.

I want to introduce you to a great way to enhance the value of your Toad Data Point application, and help improve the productivity of everyone on your team who deals with data management.

Meet Toad Intelligence Central — a complement to Toad Data Point that lets your data analyst and data preparation teams create a centralized repository for all of your latest files, queries, objects and datasets. Toad Intelligence Central creates a single point of access for all of your most up-to-date Toad files and settings accessible anytime by all of your organization’s Toad users as well as a data repository for all of the curated datasets you are providing for everybody else.

Over the next few posts, I will discuss in detail how Toad Intelligence Central can add significant value to your data management and data preparation processes. For now, though, here’s a brief overview.

Centralize Toad Files in a Single Point of Access

You already know that Toad Data Point lets data analyst and data preparation teams leverage the knowledge contained across different data sources to develop clean and integrated datasets that lead to deeper, data-backed insights. But how do individual Toad users communicate to the rest of their teams the connections, relationships, settings, queries, transformation rules, and other work elements that they find so useful? How do they collaborate with other Toad users working on the same or similar initiatives?

Typically by email.

Toad Intelligence Central removes the steps that require users to leave Toad and collaborate on a different platform. With Toad Intelligence Central, all Toad users can publish and share all elements of their data preparation work to a centralized, shared server —fault-tolerant, accessible 24/7 — essentially boosting the knowledge and productivity of every user and streamlining the workflow for entire teams.

Bulletproof and Share Your Automations

There’s a good reason production systems aren’t run on C drives.

Toad Data Point has a powerful automation engine, but if your automations are the engine behind critical production processes then your data analyst and data preparation teams need a more robust solution.

With Toad Intelligence Central, you can publish all of your Toad automation scripts to run on a shared, always-on server — so you’ll never have to worry about missing a data prep and refresh or other automated process due to a failed computer, office power outage or other desktop mishap. And just as important, unlike the silo’ed environments created when each individual runs their critical automations on their C drive, when you and your team publish automation scripts to Toad Intelligence Central, everyone you share with has visibility into everything the team is running.

Share Data Easily With Consumers — Regardless of the Tools They Use

Finally, Toad Intelligence Central can dramatically streamline your process for delivering new data to all of your constituencies.

Toad Intelligence Central can connect to virtually any data source — nearly all RDBM systems and data warehouses, BI platforms like Oracle BI and Business Objects, Cloud-based sources like Salesforce and Google Analytics and NoSQL sources like Hive, MongoDB and Cassandra.  This means your data analyst and data preparation teams can easily share refreshed, integrated and prepped data with your consumers without the extra steps of dumping the data repeatedly into Excel or different data repositories. Indeed, Toad Intelligence Central can handle the entire process for you — from automatic refresh to an email alert notifying them that a new report is available, through a self-service download through the Toad Intelligence Central URL.  Your consumers can also connect directly to your curated datasets, be they refreshed or even real-time, through popular 3rd party analysis tools like Qlik or Tableau.

Over the next several posts, I’ll give more detailed examples of the benefits of adding Toad Intelligence Central to your Toad workflow.

But in the meantime, I recommend you try the full-featured product for yourself.

Comments or questions?  Feel free to reach out to me directly at julie.hyman@quest.com.