As technology advances and digitization takes over, there is an expectation that our lives will be more simple. ‘Self-service’ capabilities like Self-Service BI are the manifestation of this expectation within many technologies. For most, ease of use is no longer enough. Now tools must be simple to use, and flexible enough to cater to a wide range of skills and intricacy of analysis.

Cloudera SQL Stream Builder (SSB) gives the power of a unified stream processing engine to non-technical users so they can integrate, aggregate, query, and analyze both streaming and batch data sources in a single SQL interface. This allows business users to define events of interest for which they need to continuously monitor and respond quickly. There are many ways to distribute the results of SSB’s continuous queries to embed actionable insights into business processes.

Recently, I published an article on whether self-service BI is attainable, and spoiler alert: it certainly is. Of course, anything of value usually does require a bit of planning, collaboration, and effort. After the article was published, I began having conversations with technical leaders, analysts, and analytics engineers, and the topic of data modeling for self-service analytics came up repeatedly.

Over the past handful of years, systems architecture has evolved from monolithic approaches to applications and platforms that leverage containers, schedulers, lambda functions, and more across heterogeneous infrastructures. Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) is no different: it’s a hybrid data platform that meets organizations’ needs to get to grips with complex data anywhere, turning it into actionable insight quickly and easily.

The value of embedded analytics is unmistakable. Application teams that embed dashboards and reports drive revenue, reduce customer churn, and differentiate their software from the competition. While embedded dashboards create real value, they can also come with real costs. These costs are not always visible when companies plan for their analytics offering but can significantly impact production, scale, and the speed of bringing analytics to market.