CASE STUDY
cCan you tell us about your role at the company ?
Kasperova : I am the Insights and Analytics Director at Dreams . Prior to this , I was heading up the Dreams finance department function . Over the last two years , Dreams has invested in analytical software ( Alteryx / Tableau ) and resources to start a journey of in-house analytical enhancement , centralising the analytical team and building the data analytics strategy . The function today represents six analysts and one primary technologist , James Stewart , who managed the implementation of Exasol in Dreams .
Our key goal is to move away from traditional static Excel reporting and towards building a fully automated suite of pre-defined self-serving crossdevice dashboards , providing faster , more accurate and deeper insights to end-users ; utilising advanced analytics tools and improving our analytical maturity through those as well as resource upskill . At the same time , the aim is to build , grow and maintain a centralised data lake of verified internal and external data sources , overviewing the data capture processes and automation of any data-related tasks .
Stewart : I ’ m the ETL / ELT specialist within the Dreams Data Insights and Analytics function responsible for enabling our three technology pillars : Exasol , Alteryx and Tableau . I ’ m responsible for administration and maintenance of all three platforms , as well as the ingestion of data sources into the Exasol database , and optimisation of ingestion from a varied range of platforms together with providing specialised technical expertise to the analytical team .
Why did you select Exasol as the technology vendor ?
Kasperova : Historically , Dreams ’ internal analytics has been produced within Excel and to a large degree on an ad-hoc high-level basis . As such , Dreams ’ reporting functions didn ’ t have real need for an analytical database . However , with the changing landscape and technological advancement goals , and with greater volume and variety of data being generated and captured , this has certainly changed requirements for Dreams .
We continually strive to be better , more innovative , more technologically advanced in all that we do and this applies to the technology we invest in to support the business needs . Exasol has been recommended as the go-to platform in combination with the other platforms that we use : Alteryx and Tableau . The impressive performance stats followed by a successful proof-of-concept trial have clearly identified the benefits we could gain post-implementation .
Stewart : We selected Exasol as we believe it to be the best-in-class analytical database . From a technical perspective , what we loved about Exasol is its fast performance , but with that it is also extremely important that performance continues to be maintained . Dreams doesn ’ t have the luxury of a large pool of experienced DBAs to call upon , so we are reliant on Exasol managing its own performance tuning , and so far Exasol has delivered on this aspect with no manual tuning required .
The use of commodity hardware and Exasol ’ s licensing options enabled a cost-effective entry point to an analytical database , which we have previously lacked .
With significant reliance on the ERP data , and limited resources , we also required a database that could easily integrate with our ERP , so we welcomed Exasol ’ s Virtual Schema . This has enabled
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