Sandbox solution for BI reporting and business analytics

At beginning, I’d like to share a story from my client and business partner. One day, my team worked on a big marketing project, data from all kinds of source like spreadsheet, csv, mainframe and SQL Server, we had to do cross reference all those data to generate analysis reports but the headache thing was they were isolated and no way to put them into a single unique environment to run one time query then return the results so we could only open multiple windows to compare them by eyeballs.

During the project, we often composed some complex queries then ran for a long time to return the result dataset, those datasets were quite important for future further analysis and share with the whole team, but the another panic thing was we could not save those dataset into database due to insufficient access so what we did was copy and paste everything in excel spreadsheet, after for a while, we found number of excel file explode and hard to find the report among those huge files, we feed up with the tedious work and decided created a bunch of views in database but that was also not controlled by us but infrastructure team, all we could do was submit the request then followed infrastructure team’s schedule and waited for month end deployment, no matter how urgent those reports would be.

That is the story, I think if you had ever experienced that, that solution might be right for you.