We at DataPortal run into this problem when we describe our solution as providing “database sharing.” Audiences sometimes look at us as if we were suggesting they share, oh, their ATM passcodes or their car keys. Being specific is important because, as our chart below shows, using the wrong term could lead you to spend more time, effort, and money than you need to.

Here’s what, in our view, the various forms of “sharing” do and don’t mean, and where Data Portal does and doesn’t fit the bill. Remember, as you compare this chart to others you may have seen, when we say we can “share” databases we mean even the largest relational databases, in their full relational form, without adapting the databases, using custom protocols or reworking security architectures.

*Even better, database updating can be automated so that all child databases are updated whenever the parent source database changes.

You see we snuck “share” back into our list at the end, but for a good reason.  To us, database sharing simply means giving users appropriate access to view and change information that is stored in the form of a relational database, which is one of the most direct and efficient ways that business processes can communicate with one another. That’s what our DataPortal software does, without the need to reformat databases, do custom programming or fiddle with security protocols

So whenever you think about how you can “migrate,” “replicate,” “append,” “update,” “copy” or do anything else involving sharing data, take a look at this chart and see if DataPortal might be a less expensive, faster and easier answer. Then give us a call so we can get you started…

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The rise of the Internet and the demand for more open government has resulted in initiatives such as the U.S. government’s Data.gov database sharing site. To cite just a few examples, with this data:

• Businesses can use Census data on housing, income and education to better plan everything from store locations to hiring, sales and production.

• Consumers can track the status of product recalls, government rankings of health care providers or crime rates when looking for housing.

• Citizen or advocacy groups can track the status of legislation, government contracts and political contributions.

• Investors, planners, policymakers and interest groups can use economic information such as gross national product to measure economic growth, and better plan government and public investment and economic policies.

To meet the rising demand for data and government “transparency,” as of 2012 at least forty-three governments and international organizations worldwide have made more than one million data sets available, in areas ranging from education to health, energy and commerce.

Not Just Data: Insights

But pre-chosen subsets of data from a government agency are just snippets of reality. They may not contain all the data a user may need or present it in an easily usable format. These partial data sets in unusable formats make it difficult, if not impossible, to combine different forms of data in creative ways. It is such “mashups” that unleash insights from data, allowing users to answer new questions in new and unpredictable ways.

Using “mashups,” for example:

• Citizen advocates can overlap emissions and weather data on maps to identify sources of pollution for remedial action.

• The unemployed can use the Employment Market Explorer app, a Google Maps mashup, to compare unemployment rates among communities.

• Home buyers can view a database of crime by type before choosing a neighborhood in which to     look for a home.

• Parents in Chicago can assess their child’s chances of getting into a selective public school based on their address.

• Consumers can check the quality ratings of care facilities before choosing a provider for an aging parent.

• Health care providers, vaccine producers or payers can track disease outbreaks in real time.

• Economists can use financial databases to build sophisticated models to forecast market prices and employment levels.

Creating each of these useful applications requires more than pre-chosen subsets of information for a government agency, provided in whatever format the agency chose. Translating raw data into insight requires that developers have access to all the available data, in a format that is easy to access and manipulate.

Free the Data

What does this mean in practice? John Wonderlich, program director at the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation, told CNET that data releases should follow the 8 Principles of Open Data. These require the data is 1) complete, 2) primary (as it is collected at the source), 3) timely, 4) accessible, 5) machine-processable, 6) nondiscriminatory, 7) non-proprietary, and 8) and license-free.

“Search is great, if you are looking to find information about any one thing,” he said. “But original analysis and visualization require access to data in bulk.”

In the same story, David Robinson, the associate director of the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy, echoed the point. “No one person or organization could possibly anticipate all the ways that Americans will want to analyze, reuse, or cross-reference” government data, he said. “And no one person or organization needs to do so, as long as the data itself is readily available.”

Of all the database formats, the most standard, universally accepted and easiest to work with is the original relational format in which most data was created. Organizations of every size own and must share relational databases. They also have administrators familiar with the industry-standard SQL query language. This makes it easy for them, and others, to create mashups that present the data in new, creative and visual ways to help consumers, businesses and government make better decisions.

Needed: Data Sharing

Before developers can create mash-ups from relational data, they have to receive it. Currently, that often requires clumsy and hard to use FTP software, custom programming, data reformatting and negotiating complex security requirements with data users.

Our patented DataPortal lets you securely share databases of any size over the Internet through an intuitive point-and-click interface.  Unlike other solutions that require data to be reduced to flat files or another “least common denominator,” DataPortal retains the table structures required to process database queries and the table references that describe the relationship among data in various tables, and supports the complex data types often stored in today’s relational databases. In short, DataPortal lets you share your data across database vendors without any additional steps.

If you’re a government agency (or any organization) charged with making data available to the public, we invite you to see how easy it is to use DataPortal to share databases of any size in their original format. And if you’d like to get started with DataPortal today, just contact us for more information.

The post Sharing Government Data in a Way it Can Be Useful for Everyone appeared first on Data Portal.

I recently got off a one hour call with an EDI (electronic data interchange) veteran, discussing his experiences with the venerable data sharing format.

EDI has been around since the ‘60s, and for some purposes it’s absolutely the way to go. But hearing the questions this EDI user asked made me realize how much extra work EDI customers are doing, especially if all they need to do is share relational databases. Folks who’ve been using EDI for years may not realize how much of the work that costs extra time and dollars in EDI is handled automatically by relational databases.

Here are six quick examples of EDI hassles you can avoid, without damage to your business, through direct database sharing.

1. Converting data to a standardized EDI form on the sending end, and converting it back to a form the recipient’s systems can use. If you’re sharing relational databases, all both sides need to do is agree on a common database design (e.g. tables, columns, data types). Since all work is done within the database, there’s no need to get network, security, firewall, or software development staff involved. If any data must be pre- or post-processed, it can be done using standard database tools by your database staff.
2. Avoiding duplicate entries and other data integrity issues. Database transaction processing capabilities prevents data from being written unless it can be written without error and repeat data writes until they are successful. Each data entry is tagged with a unique identifier set, preventing the same data from being entered repeatedly. No further coding or other work with specific EDI formats is required.
3. Creating an audit trail to assure no loss or corruption of data. Using familiar database queries, the source and destination data can easily be compared to the last byte to assure integrity. Unlike EDI systems where transactions must be tracked through multiple components, the results of these simple queries serve as your audit trail.
4. Integration with ERP and CRM systems. Since many of these systems are built on relational databases, business data from one partner’s database platform can be transferred directly and securely over the Web to another partner’s database. No integration or reformatting of data to match specific EDI formats work is required.
5. Agreeing on, and implementing, common security protocols. DataPortal uses secure Web protocols (e.g. HTTPS) and has layers of password protection for access control. You therefore avoid the work and complexity of implementing other secure network protocols and coordinating with multiple network and security staffs.
6. Arranging notifications of data arrival. In EDI systems. data can arrive in multiple ways and the receiving system must be notified so the data can be processed. With direct database transfer the data is sent directly to the destination system with no processing required. If notifications are required for some reason, they can be executed with a simple database trigger.

If your trading partner requires you to use EDI, you obviously have no choice but to continue using it. But if database transfer would work as well – or if you’re beginning to share data with a trading partner – consider whether direct database sharing might be far easier, faster and less expensive for you both. Our own Data Portal software provides a secure, point and click solution for database sharing over the Web. Learn more about Data Portal’s benefits compared with EDI, learn more about Data Portal or see how easy DataPortal is to use.

*image courtesy of zine.starkcrew.com

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Big Data is the process of creating insight from the increasing masses of raw data every organization generates.  Most Big Data is made up of loosely structured or unstructured data such as text, photos, genomic or other scientific data. But some of it also originates in structured relational databases. In addition, many of the results of a Big Data analysis are distributed in the form of a relational database.

Whenever Big Data relies on relational data as either a source of information or a way to distribute Big Data insights, DataPortal can share those relational databases quickly, easily, cost-effectively and securely.

“Point and Click” Database Sharing

DataPortal is a patented tool for moving, storing, and sharing database data across platforms and over the Web. It was designed to be used by people at all technical levels. It requires no coding, entering command lines, opening ports or installation of software.

Using DataPortal, each database is published to a DataPortal server. From there it is available over the internal LAN or the Internet to any authorized DataPortal client. This server-to-client communication avoids the security risks of exposing the database directly to a WAN or the Internet. Any user can transfer a full relational database or a subset of that database, in relational form, with the push of a button. All they need is a Web browser and authority to share the database. Using DataPortal, subject matter experts can stay focused on their critical, value-added analytic work without wasting time on the mechanics of sending and receiving data.

DataPortal for Data Gathering

DataPortal is an efficient way to gather structured data from various database sources at a central location for Big Data integration, analysis, conversion and storage.

DataPortal complements Big Data frameworks such as Hadoop, which allow users to access massive quantities of data spread over hundreds or even thousands of processors. These frameworks allow queries to be performed using the familiar SQL used in relational databases.  The results of such queries can also take the form of structured data. Sharing the result set returned by Hadoop with end users can be problematic, but Data Portal makes it easy to deliver them to the user’s database platform of choice.

Whenever Big Data takes the form of a relational database, DataPortal makes it as easy to share as pointing and clicking.

DataPortal: Sharing Big Data Insights

The results of Big Data analysis can only help the business when they can be shared among the employees and managers who will act on that analysis.

Here, again, DataPortal can speed the results of Big Data analysis by making it easy to distribute and share SQL query results (often in the form of a relational database) among users, partners and customers. Using DataPortal, any user can easily access that database without, again, standardizing on a particular database platform, opening additional network ports, exposing the databases directly to the internet or performing any scripting or programming.

It Takes All Kinds of Big Data

When most organizations think of Big Data, they think unstructured data – and much of the time, they are right. But there’s a lot of important enterprise data in their “traditional” relational databases, and a lot of users who are most comfortable using SQL queries to analyze that data.

Whenever your Big Data effort requires or produces relational rather than unstructured data, DataPortal can ease the headache of sharing it so your users can move on to generating business insights. Learn more about how DataPortal is the easiest, fastest, least expensive and most secure way of sharing relational databases.

*image courtesy of Marc_Smith on Flickr.com

The post Getting Big Data Where It Needs To Go appeared first on Data Portal.

We cover the basics from what sets DataPortal™ apart from other data sharing tools like EDI to how DataPortal™ works and who has has success with it.

Scroll down to learn more »

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According to experts John Wonderlich, Policy Director at the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation and Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, in order to provide any value in the information being shared, the entire back end database needs to be shared. It is impossible for any person or organization to determine how others will use, analyze or cross-reference the data being provided so making the data, in its raw format (relational databases) available is essential.

DataPortal helps companies meet this need with database sharing using cloud technology that is a vast improvement over traditional database replication. DataPortal provides instant and effortless data sharing over the web, allowing multiple recipients to receive the same full database by simply clicking on a URL. DataPortal also keeps data in standard database form and works across multiple vendors, platforms and operating systems. The tool also offers a more flexible and efficient alternative to traditional Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) by eliminating unnecessary conversion of data, as well as the costly set up involved with EDI.

Data is transferred from a DataPortal server to any supported database system (including MS SQL Server, Access, Oracle, DB2, MySQL and Firebird) using a DataPortal client – either Applets, that do not require installation, or Applications, which must be installed but provide more features than the simple Applet client.

How does DataPortal Differ from Traditional Database Replication?

With traditional database replication, when data is updated at the source, it must ripple through all replicated databases before the update can take effect. This is time-consuming and can cause conflict if multiple updates are being conducted at the same time. With DataPortal, the data being updated is read and written directly to and from the database without the unnecessary ripple effect. Because of this, more complex, high value data can be updated more quickly and easily.

Traditional database replication can also become difficult when it comes to scaling up the sharing of data. Data scale-up has two dimensions: horizontal and vertical. Horizontal scale-up involves the addition of more data replicas, while  vertical scale-up involves data replicas being located further away in distance. Since DataPortal shares and updates data through the cloud, the problems of horizontal and vertical scale-up are eliminated.

With DataPortal, databases are shared over the Web. Most of the other database tools share via direct data connections, which many customers aren’t comfortable with for security reasons. While the data itself travels over the Web, DataPortal passes it first through a client application on one end and a server connection on the other rather than a direct database-to-database connection over the Web. With DataPortal, the databases never talk to one another directly, but go through clients and servers. This approach is not only more secure, but it also makes the sharing easier. With traditional database replication, you need to install applications at the various locations and arrange for them to make a direct connection to the databases in order for the data to be shared.

Examples of these direct connections include database tools and utilities, normally designed for a specific platform like DB2 or Microsoft SQL Server, doing some sort of replication through direct connections among the instances of the database. When these can work cross platform, often it is just between different databases from the same vendor, such as from Microsoft SQL Server to its (lower end) Access. One example of cross-platform software we just learned about is Double-Take which requires a direct connection, the installation of software and the opening of specific ports. Data Portal is still easier, with a point and click interface – determine where you want to send the data to and press the button.

Is Database Replication Your Answer?

Some situations may warrant the use of traditional database replication. Replication is useful when multiple sites or groups need read-only access to the same data without the need to alter or update the database.  If users do need to make changes to the data, they can work with copies of data offline and then propagate changes they make to other replications when they are connected, giving them greater autonomy to make such changes.

Other advantages include: quicker access to data locally rather than connecting to a remote database server over a network; access to remote copies of data if the local copies are inaccessible; and in the event of loss of data, the replicated database in a secondary location can be utilized to prevent system downtime.

Data Portal: When To Consider It

DataPortal is worth considering whenever you need to share entire  structured databases in the cloud; when users need to integrate data from their partners into a central database and share that data using a  Web browser, and when you need to share data among  different database platforms. DataPortal is most useful when data structure is critical, when time and security is of the upmost importance and when data need to be transferred on a regular or on-going basis.

DataPortal’s cloud storage technology is perfect for manufacturers who need a way to manage their supplier chains and inventory, government agencies who are mandated to share complex information, companies performing field audits that need to upload or share data in real time, and companies that need to share data in its original, complex form.

This streamlined database sharing is available as software for purchase or as a scalable SaaS solution. Interested in learning more? Contact us today!

*image courtesy of creativecommons.org

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This manufacturer works with hundreds of suppliers sourcing specialized components ranging from custom fasteners to sophisticated avionics.  In the fast-changing aviation industry, recruiting a cadre of suppliers who can meet demand quality specifications while ramping production quickly at the right price is critical for success.

Yet this manufacturer was finding it difficult to even evaluate prospective suppliers, much less start doing business with them. Just sharing information about the details of future production plans and designs required each potential supplier to go through the lengthy and expensive process of implementing an electronic data interchange (EDI) system.

As an attempt at more agile data sharing, the manufacturer started providing order data that could be viewed on Web pages. However, many orders involved thousands of items and Web page data could not readily be processed by business applications. The order data really needed to be delivered where it could be directly accessed by business applications – through sharing a relational database.

The manufacturer, and we, thought there had to be an easier way for the supply chain to be managed. Our solution was an easy-to-use Web portal that would allow a potential or actual supplier to log in and easily see the manufacturer’s future orders. This portal provided data on both short-term needs as well as future, six-month forecasts to give all potential suppliers the widest view into the manufacturer’s needs.

Our work with this customer was one of the first uses of DataPortal technology for sharing relational databases over the Web. Across industries, more and more trading partners are sharing more and more information – everything from production plans to engineering change orders to media files – outside of traditional EDI or ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems. In these days of just-in-time inventory, short product cycles and relentless cost pressures, they must share this data quickly and efficiently.

Our DataPortal software enables secure, instant and effortless sharing of relational databases in their original, relational form across the Web. It’s as easy as sharing a URL, with no programming, configuration, firewall modification, data conversion or even client software installation required.

The need to recruit new suppliers is only one of the use cases  DataPortal fills. It is, of course, just as useful for a specialized supplier who can meet a custom need for a global manufacturer, but needs insight into its production needs without deploying an EDI or ERP system. It is also a far more agile alternative to traditional EDI, reducing time, effort and cost.

In fact, DataPortal makes it easier to do business wherever two partners use relational databases to either share actual data, or as a metadata catalog making it easier for either partner to find what they need out of hundreds of thousands of engineering change orders, legal filings, video clips or medical research reports. It is also an excellent choice for trading partners in developing economies who need to share data in relational form, but have not yet invested in EDI or ERP software.

This streamlined database sharing is available as software for purchase or as a scalable SaaS solution. If you are having trouble with your supply chain management work flow, or simply want to learn more about DataPortal, request a quick demo here or, if you’d like to get started today, contact us.

*image courtesy of kurafire on Flickr.com

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EDI can be useful and necessary, such as when your trading partner requires it. It works less well if you must pull the data you’re sharing from a relational database, and your trading partner must restore it to its relational form on receipt. In those cases, keeping the data in its original structured database form is a far more direct and efficient solution.

EDI also requires extensive configuration and coordination with your business partners.

This extra cost and effort can make it harder for you to bring on new suppliers who could help your business – or to sell to new customers attracted by your innovation, quality and low costs. That’s a burden you can’t afford.

If you can answer “yes” to any of the following questions, we suggest considering an alternative to EDI as a way to share supply chain information with your business partners.

1) Does it take weeks or months, rather than minutes or days, to bring on a new customer or supplier?
Buying and deploying EDI software, reconfiguring your internal systems and agreeing on data sharing methods with a new customer or supplier is a long, tedious process. This not only eats up expensive staff time, but makes you harder to do business with. In an age when speed and agility is everything, you owe it to yourself to see if there’s an easier and quicker way to share order and production databases with new partners.

2) Do you find yourself turning away potential suppliers – or customers – because it’s just too hard to share data with them?
Rather than go through the cost and delay of agreeing on how to use EDI, many customers or suppliers simply give up on new business partners. This is especially true if the customer needs parts or raw material ASAP to meet a sudden surge in demand. In this age of anywhere/anytime data access, you should make your partnering decisions based on business, not technical, considerations.

3) Are you bogged down in negotiations when you should be sharing data?
Using EDI requires agreeing with every new trading partner over everything from which firewall port to use to appropriate network and security protocols. That doesn’t count the time you’re spending fighting internal battles with security, legal and audit over every change required to implement EDI with every partner. This means weeks or months of hassle you could better spend filling orders and making money.

4) Are you burning staff time extracting and converting your data to the rigid form required by EDI?
This manual process is an error-prone waste of expensive staff time, and makes it harder to quickly adjust to sudden changes in production schedules. It’s no way to run a business in 2013.

5) Has it been more than five years since you took a hard look at whether you still need your EDI system?
Many organizations implemented EDI years or decades ago, and stick with it because of past investments, familiarity or because “It’s how we’ve always done it.” It’s bad enough if EDI is still weighing you down with excess licensing and technical costs. It’s a danger to your business if it’s getting in the way of selling to new customers (or sourcing from new providers) because it’s hard to share data with them.

If you answered yes to any of these questions, we can help. Our DataPortal software enables secure, instant and effortless sharing of relational databases in their original, relational form across the Web. It’s as easy as downloading a flat file. No programming, configuration, firewall modification, data conversion or even client software installation is required. Since DataPortal transmit data over the Web, it takes advantage of the many accepted standards developed for the Web, eliminating the need to work out details with every trading partners. If you and your partners use databases to manage your data, DataPortal allows you to avoid EDI and share your data directly in its natural database form without unnecessary conversion to other formats.

This streamlined database sharing is available as software for purchase or as a scalable SaaS solution. You can request a quick demo here.

*image courtesy of JoshuaDavisPhotography on Flickr.com

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But you also know that one cost that can damage your business the most is not being able to share databases quickly enough to take advantage of a new opportunity. This agility tax kicks in when, say, an auto parts manufacturer finds itself short of a specialty heat-treated connector due to a burst in sales or an earthquake near their overseas supplier. If its IT systems can’t easily share the databases of production forecasts and parts it needs with potential new suppliers, production will stop and it will lose sales to its competitors.

The same is obviously true for potential new suppliers, who may be able to beat the incumbent on price or quality, but can’t bid for the business because it would take too long to share the required databases.

EDI: Right Answer, Wrong Problem

Often, the legacy system standing in the way of new business opportunities like these is EDI (electronic data interchange.) Most major manufacturers, suppliers, shippers and retailers (not to mention government agencies) have used EDI for decades to eliminate the use of paper in common business transactions.

Despite its name, EDI was designed not to share data in the form of relational databases, but to share standard business forms such as purchase orders, invoices, shipping notices and carrier-to-carrier waybills. It does a good enough job of solving that problem, assuming you and your business partner have enough volume to justify its expense and complexity.

But if you need to add new business partners quickly – say, in the wake of a strike, natural or man-made disaster that takes a key supplier offline – EDI is not a good way to quickly share relational databases containing the production and order data you need to ramp up quickly.

To know why, it helps to understand what it takes to implement EDI.

EDI Under the Covers

EDI is a software interface that sits between the different computer systems, and the different data structures, used by the sender and receiver’s systems.

That means both parties must buy, configure and maintain EDI software to convert the sender’s form or data into a standard EDI transaction, and to convert the form into a format acceptable to the receiver’s systems (such as an order processing application.)  They also must agree on which network protocols and firewall ports they will use, as well as which security and encryption technologies.  Both parties must also to agree on a trading partner agreement (TPA) that governs the formats both parties must use, as well as on legal and other terms.

All this work, which can take weeks or even months for each of the five,  10 or 20 potential customer or suppliers you need to partner with, assumes you’re transferring standard business forms. If you’re instead using relational databases to share order information, EDI also requires agreeing on which databases you will share, in which formats, and paying developers to write scripts to convert your relational databases into a form shareable via EDI – and to then convert them back into relational form at the receiving end.

The bottom line: Using EDI, while useful for sharing standard forms with existing business partners, exacts too high a price in money and time when you need to quickly share databases to bring on new business partners.

Time is the Enemy

It’s easy to identify the dollar costs of EDI. They include licensing and maintenance costs for EDI software, the costs to modify your own systems or translate your databases, as well as any specialty hardware required. Then there are the costs of the programming, development, security, legal or consulting costs around implementing EDI or safeguarding yourself in the trading partner agreement.

The less visible, but even more important costs, are the time you lose implementing EDI when you could instead be updating your production plans to meet customer demand. In an age where manufacturers and retailers hold just enough inventory to meet demands for the latest hot product, the agility to quickly ramp production means more revenue and higher profit margins.

If you want to avoid the costs and, more importantly, the delays involved in using EDI for database sharing, we suggest our own DataPortal. This software is not only 10 to 100 times less expensive than EDI, but enables secure, instant and effortless sharing of relational databases from any supported database platform in their original, relational form across the Web. There’s no programming required because you can share any database, retaining the table structure that makes it usable, with any recipient simply by sending them a URL.  Unlike EDI, there’s no configuration, firewall modification, data conversion or even client software installation required.

It is available now as software for purchase or as a scalable SaaS solution. For a quick demo, click here.

*image courtesy of Tax Credits on Flickr.com

The post The Agility Tax: The Hidden Price of EDI appeared first on Data Portal.

The answer is yes, if you are:

• A Fortune 2000 organization that could better fill rush orders if it could bring new suppliers on board more quickly.
• A small, specialty supplier that could sell to more, and bigger, customers if it could easily access their production forecasts.
• A growing business in an emerging market that needs to avoid the complexity and expense of electronic data interchange just to share business data.
• A CFO who could understand his business better if his financial analysts could more easily access and drill into raw financial data.
• A Big Data service provider that could make more sales if it could more easily share its insights and data results with its customers, or
• Any organization that could cut costs or increase sales by doing a better job analyzing data.

Why “Relational” Matters

If you’re storing any substantial amount of information about customers, distributors, suppliers, raw materials, products, sales, costs or profits, it’s probably in a relational database.  This “relational” capability is critical because it allows you to explore the relationships among different subsets of the data in unpredictable ways to meet new challenges.

Let’s say, for example, you’re a sales manager for a retail chain trying to understand why sales fell so far in January. You suspect it’s due to a flu outbreak, and knowing the answer could help you better track future flu outbreaks and adjust stock and promotions accordingly. You have your business analysts compare county-by-county sales of specific products with state data on county-by-county instances of the flu.

This is the type of ad-hoc query that’s so important to the business, and is the core function of a relational database.  Even just sharing production forecasts between a customer and supplier require a relational format so the customer can compare suppliers on metrics such as price, on-time delivery and quality.

Yet it is exactly these business-critical relational capabilities that most current database sharing approaches strip away – or preserve only at a cost that is too high for most customers.

Key Requirements

Retaining table structures is important because database queries require them. Comparing specific product sales per store against county-level flu levels might require one table listing sales per store, another listing flu cases per county, and yet another table for product sales. The more tables you strip out to share the data with analysts, the harder is to perform queries. .

Table references – also known as primary and foreign keys — describe the relationship between data in various tables. Product codes and store IDs are examples of table references without which it is impossible to conduct meaningful analysis, or even assure a supplier is shipping the right products to a customer.

Complex data types refer to any data other than text or numbers within a traditional relational database. In this case, you might want to find, share and access bar charts showing flu levels per county to aid the analysis. Customers and suppliers might need to share anything from engineering diagrams to marketing images searchable in a relational database.

The Dangers of Doing It Wrong

Many database sharing techniques are too expensive, too complicated, take too long or limit you to multiple instances of one vendor’s database platform. As a result, many customers strip the relational capabilities of databases before sharing them, reducing them to flat file databases before transmission and restoring them to their initial state at the receiving end.

At best, this takes far too much time and money. At worst, companies give up and lose customers or suppliers, or can’t do the analysis needed to boost sales or reduce costs. If you can’t afford that damage to your business, make sure you can share relational data without stripping out what makes it valuable.

Next Steps

One solution is our own DataPortal software that enables secure, instant and effortless sharing of relational databases from any supported database platform in their original, relational form across the Web. No programing, configuration, firewall modification, data conversion or even client software installation is required, which greatly streamlines the database sharing process. Available as software for purchase or a scalable SaaS solution, you can request a quick demo here.

*image courtesy of gl33p on Flickr.com

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