Overview of Toad Intelligence Central

Every now and then, we get asked questions about what Toad Intelligence Central is-- how it fits into the BI Suite architecture, what value it brings to your organization. This video is intended to answer some of those basic questions. Now let's see what Toad Intelligence Central does. As you can see in this architecture diagram, Toad Intelligence Central is the collaboration tier of the BI suite. That's the middle level that you're seeing here. Once you have data that has been queried, extracted, cleaned using Toad Data Point, and you want to share it-- share that specific data set with different users within your organization, you would be using Toad Intelligence Central. So a lot of users-- depending on their privileges-- that you will be able to assign-- will be able to consume that data using our data discovery platform Toad Decision Point. Let's take one example at a time and start looking at Toad Data Point. This is a result set that I have extracted using a query. And now-- assuming that this query took three hours to run, because it's extremely long-- the conjoins are extremely complex. It's just a hypothetical situation where you had a couple hours to run this query. And to avoid everybody that needs this data to run the query each time they need it, you can share this data onto Toad Intelligence Central. Right-click on the results set, send to publish data, brings up this dialogue about what Toad Intelligence Central instance that we want to publish it on, what the destination folder is, and what's the mode in which that data needs to be published. We can publish it as a snapshot, a view, or a dataset. A snapshot is a point in time. A view of the data, a view, will give you real time data because you will be publishing just the query itself. A dataset is a static table view. For example purposes let's use the a name that I have not used before. I'm just going to call it five. I can choose whether or not I wan to overwrite the object. Now to the most important one. Who can consume this data? As the owner of this result set, you have the control to be able to assign the users that can access this data. You can keep it private so you and only you alone can manage it and view it, or you can share it with any user, allow them to manage it, or you could have select users that can view this data. For demonstrative purposes I'm just going to leave it a public dataset. Say apply. And just say publish. So in a minute here you'll see a notification, as you see here, snapshot was published successfully. So basically, the query that took you a couple hours to run, now we're just giving the results to everybody else, so they can just consume the data without having to go through and re-run the query themselves. But if the need is to get real time data, you can publish it as a view. And the query is run at the time of invocation. OK? So that's one example of what you can do with Toad Intelligence Central. The second one, this is a very simple example, but if you had a complex query that you took four or five hours to build with sub-queries and multiple joins, et cetera, you want you co-workers to validate it for you. Or you can let them re-purpose it for another project or whatnot. You could just select publish file. What that means, you're just pushing the SQL out. You're not executing it. You're just publishing the SQL file, the query builder file. The paradigm of sharing remains the same, the server that you need to publish it on, destination folder, type of the file, and name of the file. It appear to have already used that name. So let me just use another suffix here. And I can choose overwrite or not overwrite. Again, set up permissions and hit apply. Just hit publish. So basically now you're not publishing the results of the query, but you're publishing the query itself. This is extremely useful when you have development teams that are collaborating around different artifacts. One person is working on one piece of the query, the other one's working on the other, and this is a very neat way of collaborating with each other using Toad Intelligence Central. Same thing with transformation and cleansing. If you had a complex transformation you had built, you could either publish that transformation, or you can publish transformed result sets to Toad Intelligence Central. Automation, if you had an automation flow that you have set up, and you can publish that to Toad Intelligence Central. So the server takes over the automation piece. The oneness to keep your laptop up and running, to keep it logged on, to keep it connected to the network. So your automation would run. It's not on you anymore. The server takes over that piece of the automation. Not only that, if your systems admin, your database admin, needs to know what scripts are running on the source systems at what times, that's a nice way to organize it on Toad Intelligence Central, so he or she can get a better view of what scripts are hitting the source systems at what times, and so on. So that's the piece using Toad Data Point, how it pushed data out, artifacts out, to Toad Intelligence Central. This is the admin console for Toad Intelligence Central. I'm just going to refresh it. That way we can see the newly published result sets. So let's go to the default folder. We have snapshot five, that we have just published, query builder file that we have just published. You can right-click on any of the objects and manage this object appropriately. You can share it, allow anybody to manage