The right combination of a modern BI acceleration and consumption platform and a reliable BI tool enables business users to utilize a huge volume of data and derive insights out of it for making better-informed business decisions. A unified semantic layer can showcase the existing data in an understandable manner for business users. Before going into the benefits of a semantic layer, let’s first understand what it actually is.
What Is A Semantic Layer?
A semantic layer is a simpler representation of underlying corporate data which enables business users to understand and access it using common terminologies across the organization. It is a crucial part of data analysis as it removes the complexity of data and allows the business user to consume it in a simple and intuitive form.
Importance Of A Semantic Layer
A semantic layer gives business users the ability to attach meaning to the data. Today business users are facing challenges in making sense of their data as they have to deal with more complex data than ever. Data is organized in databases using technical terms which makes it hard for users to process as the context isn’t clear. Increasing data resources and volumes have added to this challenge further.
With a semantic layer in place, business users are able to access and use data in the form of familiar business terms. This ability enables them to perform self-service analysis and define relevant data which can be used to uncover hidden insights faster. It also allows them to get a consolidated view of data across the enterprise.
To sum up, a semantic layer:
- Allows business users to work interactively with data and create value out of it
- Simplifies query creation process, saves time, enhances accuracy, increases productivity and last but not the least, allows consistency between reports created by business users
- It provides the ability to turn complex technical data formats into easily understandable ones. This makes the process of report creation smoother.
- Removes the dependency between the data store and the queries fired by business users.
Semantic Layer For Instant Insights On Massive Volumes
Enterprises deal with massive volumes of data on a daily basis. By massive, we mean, billions or even trillions of rows of data with thousands of concurrent users and unimaginable transactions. And while there’s no end to this growing data, analyzing it through modern BI platforms that can handle its scale, is what enterprises need today.
Introduced in the BI ecosystem around 25 years ago, the semantic layer is not a new concept. In fact, different BI tools used to rely on their individual, separate semantic layers when data volumes weren’t exploding like today. Although organizations had their own versions of semantic layers, they failed to perform when the data exceeded in volumes. Moreover, achieving a single source of truth wasn’t possible in this scenario.
Today businesses need to create a single, reliable view of their data across departments and business teams to avoid different interpretations of the same data. This can be achieved by using a unified, high-performing semantic layer such as Kyvos which allows business users to gather instant insights on all their data.
Kyvos semantic layer allows you to handle constantly growing complex data. It also ensures the delivery of a single source of truth to all departments in your enterprise. By pre-aggregating all the combinations, it delivers sub-second query responses to even the most complex queries. Using Kyvos, your business users can slice-dice and drill down all their data to achieve instant insights on trillions of rows.
