Document your BI and database analytics assets

For a medium to large enterprise that has grown through mergers and acquisitions or simply through years of success, just knowing what custom software source code assets you have can actually be a daunting challenge.  However, having this knowledge can lead to better decision making and tremendous cost savings.

Analytics-Stack

Take this first example from a recent customer inquiry.  “We know that we need to upgrade some of our middleware and underlying database version due to advances in technology.  We need to migrate to for security compliance, lower support costs and to benefit from improved performance.  But we don’t even know how many Crystal and SSRS reports we have!  We estimate there is over 5000 reports and we would like to extract and move any embedded SQL statements within them into the new target database as either a view, function or procedure.  Where do we start?

Perhaps not surprisingly, this is a very common challenge for a large organization relying on a complex, multi-language and multi-tier software applications to run their business.   The software itself is big part of what distinguishes them from their competitors.  It is a mission critical proprietary asset that needs it’s inventory ( content ) to be documented, current and relevant.  This in turn facilitates efficient and cost effective ongoing enhancements and upgrades to the underlying operating system or middleware as needed from time to time.

IT staff and skills come and go.  When some of the senior staff move on, you often lose valuable knowledge and understanding of complex system inter-connections.  You need a way to have new staff find those relationships with current and up-to-date documentation to maximize their productivity and minimize introduction of programming errors.

Analytics-stack
FinditEZ supports technology across the entire analytics stack.

FinditEZ has built in documentation and search supporting the entire BI analytics stack.  Automatically generate current documentation, extract SQL statements, create database cross reference reports and more.  Download your free trial today or contact us for a free one-on-one demo with one of our product specialists.

About the author

Ken Gnazdowsky holds a Bachelor of (Computing) Science degree from Simon Fraser University. A recipient of the Governor General of Canada bronze medallion, he began his post-secondary education at Brandon University on an academic scholarship, Ken has worked in the software development industry for over 30 years. Ken is co-founder and President of Find it EZ Software Corp., creators of the Microsoft award-winning products, Code Search Pro and Dev Surge 365.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: